Professorial Advancement Initiative: A Cross-Institutional Collaboration to Increase Faculty Diversity in STEM

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the model for faculty diversity developed as part of the Professorial Advancement Initiative (PAI) funded under the NSF AGEP program. The PAI, consisting of 12 of the 14 Big Ten Academic Alliance universities,1 had the goal of doubling the rate at which the universities hired tenure-track minoritized faculty, defined by National Science Foundation as African Americans, Hispanic/Latinx, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders. This paper reviews the key programmatic elements of the PAI and discusses lessons learned and the practices developed that helped the Alliance achieve its faculty diversity goal.

A national professional development program fills mentoring gaps for postdoctoral researchers

“…Hence Succeeding as a Postdoc provides some of the necessary professional development learning and practice to build skills and confidence, especially important for URM postdocs. We also found that postdocs were experiencing multiple negative emotions such as stress, anxiety, sadness and worry, which may be due to the nature of their positions (impermanence of their employment, heavy workload of current jobs, and insecurities of future career) and also the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic [41]. These negative emotions produced a sense of uncertainty, which were perceived as barriers to their cognitive or behavioral changes.…”