Joyce Yen honored with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring

On Feb. 8, President Joe Biden Joyce Yen and 14 other individuals and organizations as recipients of the (PAESMEM). is the director of the UW’s , a program that works to eliminate underrepresentation of women faculty in STEM at the 91Ě˝»¨and beyond.

Established in 1995, PAESMEM recognizes the critical roles mentors play outside the traditional classroom in the academic and professional development of the future STEM workforce.

“This award not only validates the importance of mentoring, but it also elevates the intersection of excellence and diversity and those pushing the STEM ecosystem to be better,” Yen said. “I truly love the work I do fostering communities and cultures in STEM that support and advance inclusion and belonging.”

In March, Yen was about the award, the work of the ADVANCE Center and the challenges of increasing women’s participation in STEM academic fields. Launched in 2001 with funding from the National Science Foundation, the center partners with faculty, chairs and leadership across campus to remove barriers for women faculty and develop accountability for institutional change.

Yen is following in the footsteps of two of her mentors, and , as PAESMEM awardees. Denton, the original principal investigator of the ADVANCE IT grant, was honored in 2003, and Riskin, the faculty director of the center, was honored in 2020.

Riskin nominated Yen for the award.

“Joyce’s impact on the careers of so many faculty in STEM at 91Ě˝»¨and across the country has been profound,” Riskin said. “So many people are in rewarding careers thanks to Joyce’s efforts and support. I am so thrilled she was selected for this honor.”

The National Science Foundation, which manages PAESMEM on behalf of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, provides each recipient $10,000.  Award recipients also receive a certificate signed by President Joe Biden.

The White House has invited the awardees from 2020 and 2021 to Washington, D.C. from May 24 to 26 for events that will include professional development activities as well as an awards ceremony and dinner. Both Yen and Riskin are planning to attend.

Professor Nathan Kutz elected SIAM fellow

, 91Ě˝»¨professor of applied mathematics, has been elected as a 2022 fellow of the (SIAM). Fellows are chosen for their exemplary and outstanding service to the community.

Kutz was recognized for his innovative contributions across many disciplines of applied mathematics. Most recently, he has pioneered contributions that integrate modern machine learning methods with traditional dynamical systems modeling. These innovations have paved the way for emerging methods to be applied to complex systems where many traditional applied mathematical methods have failed.

“I believe this award ultimately is a reflection of the exceptional graduate students and postdocs I have mentored in my time at the UW,” Kutz said. “They have been the driving force and inspiration behind all the years of progressive developments leading to new paradigms and innovations in applied mathematics. I am truly thankful for the time I have had with each one of them in my journey of exploration.”

Kutz joins the UW’s Anne Greenbaum, Randy LeVeque, Robert O’Malley and Fred Wan as SIAM fellows.

“The department is honored to welcome a fifth SIAM Fellow among its ranks with the recent recognition of Professor Nathan Kutz,” said , professor and chair of the Applied Math department. “Recognitions like these reflect the outstanding quality present in the department, in these and many other areas of research.”

Alexina Kublu wins 2022 Inuit Language Recognition Award

, an instructor in the 91Ě˝»¨, is one of three people to receive the 2022 . Kublu teaches Inuktitut, the Inuit language of Canada.

The award is given out by the Inuit Uqausinginnik Taiguusiliuqtiit board, the language authority created by the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut. Nunavut is a territory of northern Canada that stretches across 4 million square kilometers of the Canadian Arctic, and Inuktitut is one of its official languages.

Kublu, the former Languages Commissioner of Nunavut, teaches at the Nunavut Arctic College and the 91Ě˝»¨remotely from her home in Iqaluit, the capital of the territory. In December 2021, she taught classes to aspiring teachers as part of the Nunavut Arctic College’s teacher education program, which prepares students to become classroom teachers in the territory’s schools. The students in those classes nominated her for the award.

Kublu once lost her native language, so teaching it to others is personally meaningful for her.
Starting in the early 20th century, the Canadian government established racially segregated hospitals to treat Indigenous people for infections like tuberculosis. Children and adults received treatment, , for months or years at a time. Sent to one of these hospitals as a child, Kublu forgot how to speak Inuktitut while she was away.

But she learned her language again, thanks to her grandmother. That experience shaped how she teaches the language.

“I think I’m more able to see my language from an analytical point of view,” Kublu said, “rather than just something I speak.”

Kublu teaches Inuktitut for the 91Ě˝»¨as a part of the , offered through the Canadian Studies Center. The fellowship supports students as they acquire a foreign language and conduct research related to Canada. In 2004, the Canadian Studies Center got its first fellowship application to learn Inuktitut. Since then, they’ve awarded 38 of these fellowships to 17 students. Many of the students are conducting research in the Arctic, where the language is spoken.

The 91Ě˝»¨is the only institution in the U.S. offering students the chance to learn Canadian Inuit languages and the only institution in the U.S. awarding the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship in Indigenous languages.

Nadine Fabbi, managing director of the Canadian Studies Center, says that Kublu’s award shows the high caliber of training fellows are receiving.

“This award just proves that Kublu is not only one of the foremost linguists in Inuktitut in Canada, but she’s also a good teacher,” Fabbi said. “I’m just proud that this is a caliber of teaching that’s occurring for these fellowships. It’s a boon to the program to see that our language teachers are also the top of their field.”

In early March 2020, the 91Ě˝»¨ became the first four-year U.S. university to transition to online-only classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

severe consequences of these physical distancing measures. To understand how this change affected college students’ mental health, 91Ě˝»¨researchers surveyed 147 91Ě˝»¨students over the 2020 spring quarter, which began shortly after the university transitioned to online-only classes. The team compared the students’ responses to a previous survey of 253 students in spring quarter 2019.

The researchers didn’t see much change in average levels of students’ depressive symptoms, anxiety, stress or loneliness between 2019 and 2020 or between the beginning and the end of spring quarter 2020. But these average values were masking large differences in students’ individual pandemic experiences. In general, students who used more problem-focused forms of coping — creating plans, focusing on positive aspects, etc. — experienced fewer mental health symptoms than those who disengaged or ignored a situation that was bothering them.

The researchers June 28 in PLOS ONE.

“During the pandemic, the challenges of online learning were entwined with social isolation, family demands and socioeconomic pressures,” said lead author , an affiliate associate professor in the 91Ě˝»¨Information School. “There’s not a simple answer to the question of how students were affected: Some experienced intense distress while others were unscathed.”

For the past four years, this team has spent spring quarter studying what factors contribute to undergraduates’ overall mental health and well-being. Students are invited to continue participating in each spring quarter study, and the researchers also recruit new students each time. In a previous paper, the researchers found that experiencing discrimination events altered student behavior, such as the amount of sleep or exercise a student got following the event.

For the 2020 cohort, the team used three different survey methods to monitor student health. First, they sent large surveys at the beginning and end of spring quarter. Then participants received two shorter surveys each week that asked them to reflect on how they felt — in terms of stress, loneliness, depressive symptoms — in the moment.

In general, students who reported more mental health symptoms at the beginning of the pandemic continued to experience elevated symptoms during the pandemic.

“Problem-focused coping protected students from the harmful effects of stress (anxiety and depression, for example), even though students who used more problem-focused strategies reported more stress,” said co-author , a 91Ě˝»¨doctoral student in clinical psychology.

“What these findings suggest is that students who coped by actively confronting their challenges, rather than avoiding them, still experienced highly stressful events over the course of the pandemic. However, they were protected from the mental health consequences,” Kuehn said. “It may not always feel pleasant or easy to confront the challenges of daily life, particularly during a pandemic, but doing so is likely to be highly beneficial in terms of reducing anxiety and depressive symptoms.”

Finally, at the end of spring quarter, the team conducted 90-minute in-depth interviews over Zoom with a subset of participants to gain deeper insight into their experiences.

The students described a range of challenges that interfered with learning:

• Decreased interaction with faculty and peers — students mentioned that having fewer opportunities to interact with faculty and peers left them feeling less engaged. Some students said they felt like part-time students, even when they had full course loads
• No shared learning environments — students spoke longingly of a table in a dorm or a spot in the library where they used to gather with classmates for impromptu study sessions
• Family needs — family members’ requests or noise often interrupted studying and even test-taking. Family needs, such as caregiving, were a particular challenge to learning for first-generation college students
• Interrupted autonomy — some students felt “trapped” back at home and described difficult “power dynamics” with their parents
• Well-being and mental health — many students described disrupted sleep, decreased motivation, and said that they felt depressed or anxious for periods of time. Students’ feelings of detachment from school sometimes contributed to depression. Similarly, worry about grades sometimes cascaded into anxiety and insomnia that, in turn, made it harder to focus

Students also developed strategies to combat these challenges, including:

• Self-learning — students used independent online research to figure out answers to their questions and made up their own experiments to explore what they were learning in class
• Structuring routines and environments — many students created fixed schedules for studying or used physical calendars to mark timelines and assignments
• Learning with peers — students created remote study groups and held informal remote co-working sessions that combined homework with personal conversations, which helped keep them on task
• Participating more in online spaces — many students found it less daunting to ask questions in online classes than in large lecture halls, others found it easier to participate in online office hours and meetings with advisers
• Using communication platforms for emotional wellbeing — some students used telehealth or meditation apps, but almost all of them used video communication to check in with their friends. Students emphasized that these connections were critical for their mental health

“On an optimistic note, students are emerging with critical skills for learning and maintaining connectedness with peers over a distance,” Morris said. “These active coping skills, which include things such as initiating virtual co-working sessions, leveraging online functions to participate in class and checking in on friends in an emotionally sensitive way, will have continued value as we resume in-person and hybrid models of education.”

The team plans to follow students through all four years of their time at the UW. The first study cohort graduated this year, and the second cohort will graduate in spring 2022.

Additional co-authors are Jennifer Brown, an alumnus of the 91Ě˝»¨school of public health who is the research coordinator for this project; , a professor in the 91Ě˝»¨School of Social Work; and , 91Ě˝»¨doctoral students in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering; , a doctoral student in the Information School; , a 91Ě˝»¨professor of electrical and computer engineering; , professor and dean of the 91Ě˝»¨Information School; , a researcher at Google; and , a professor in the Allen School. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, Google, the Allen School, 91Ě˝»¨Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, the 91Ě˝»¨College of Engineering and the 91Ě˝»¨Population Health Initiative.

For more information, contact Morris at margiemm@uw.edu.

Grant numbers: EDA-2009977, CHS-2016365, CHS-1941537, F31MH117827

White House honors 91Ě˝»¨engineering professor, associate dean Eve Riskin

, professor and associate dean in the 91Ě˝»¨College of Engineering, has been named a recipient of a 2019 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring.

The White House in science, mathematics and engineering on Aug. 3. There were 15 recipients of the mentoring award — 12 individuals and three organizations, representing 13 states and the District of Columbia.

Riskin also is a professor of electrical and computer engineering and the College of Engineering’s . She is the faculty director of the UW’s , where she works on mentoring and leadership development programs for women faculty in STEM areas.

The White House established the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring, or PAESMEM, in 1995; the award is administered by the National Science Foundation on behalf of the White House Office of Science and Technology. Each recipient receives a $10,000 award and a commemorative presidential certificate.

Previous of this award include in 2016, in 2009, in 2004, in 2003, the Women in Engineering Initiative (WIE) in 1998 and the UW-based Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking and Technology (DO-IT) program in 1997.

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National Science Foundation renews grant for 91Ě˝»¨Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity

The National Science Foundation has renewed a three-year grant for the , totaling $376, 535. The grant is aimed at bringing change and greater inclusion to engineering and computer science.

, a research scientist in sociology, is principal investigator on the grant with , affiliate assistant professor of sociology. Litzler directs the center and Margherio is assistant director.

The 91Ě˝»¨Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity conducts its research in tandem with the Making Academic Change Happen team at the , in Terra Haute, Indiana, which received $243,560 from the NSF. The 91Ě˝»¨center works with recipients of NSF “ grants working to broaden participation in engineering, improve student outcomes and build more inclusive educational environments.

The project team is called Revolutionizing Engineering Departments Participatory Action Research, or REDPAR for short. Read a from the project that tells more about its research agenda, and a .

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Kenneth Mugwanya of global health and team awarded $3 million by National Institutes of Health to study HIV prevention in Kenya

, a 91Ě˝»¨assistant professor of global health and public health, and his team have been awarded a five-year, $3 million grant by the National Institutes of Health.

The grant is for Mugwanya and the team to study the effectiveness of integrating methods of HIV prevention into sexual and reproductive health services for women in Kenya.

“Ensuring that young women seeking access to effective contraceptive methods in Kenya specifically, and Africa in general, are also able to protect themselves from HIV is critical for women empowerment and ending the HIV epidemic,” said Mugwanya, who is a physician-epidemiologist by training.

“Our hope is that providing family planning and HIV prevention services in a one-stop location will minimize barriers that women face in accessing HIV prevention services, including lack of time, cost and potential stigma of visiting a facility solely for HIV prevention.”

Other members of Mugwanya’s research team are , , , , and , all of the Department of Global Health, which is part of the 91Ě˝»¨School of Medicine and the School of Public Health.

Read more at the School of Public Health .

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Doctoral student Vikram Iyer honored by Marconi Society

, a 91Ě˝»¨doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering, has been named one of three recipients of the by the Marconi Society.

The society is a nonprofit group named for Italian inventor and electrical engineer (1874-1937) and “celebrates, inspires and connects innovators building tomorrow’s technologies in service of a digitally inclusive world.” Iyer works in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering’s .

The society’s Paul Baran Young Scholar Awards, named for a computer engineer and developer, recognize young scientists and engineers who show great capability as well as the potential to bring about digital inclusivity.

The Marconi Society honored Iyer for “creativity in developing bio-inspired and bio-integrative wireless sensor systems.” Iyer’s contributions, the society writes, “enable traditionally stationary Internet of Things devices to move, putting a new and scalable category of data collectors into the world to help us understand our environment at scale and with a fine degree of detail.”

Discrimination — differential treatment based on an aspect of someone’s identity, such as nationality, race, sexual orientation or gender — is linked to lower success in careers and poorer health. But there is little information about how individual discrimination events affect people in the short term and then lead to these longer-term disparities.

91Ě˝»¨ researchers aimed to understand both the prevalence of discrimination events and how these events affect college students in their daily lives.

Over the course of two academic quarters, the team compared students’ self-reports of unfair treatment to passively tracked changes in daily activities, such as hours slept, steps taken or time spent on the phone. On average, students who encountered unfair treatment were more physically active, interacted with their phones more and spent less time in bed on the day of the event. The team will Nov. 12 at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work in Austin, Texas.

“We looked at objective measures of behavior to try to really understand how this experience changed students’ daily life,” said lead author, a doctoral student in the 91Ě˝»¨Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “The ultimate goal is to use this information to develop changes that we can make both in terms of the educational structure and individual support systems for students to help them succeed both during and after their time in college.”

The project started out as a way to monitor students’ mental health during college.

“I was struck by how many students suffered from mental health issues and depression, due in part to the increased stress of college and being away from home,” said co-author, professor and dean of the 91Ě˝»¨Information School. “Our approach in this paper, using passive sensing and data modeling, really lends itself to studying frequent events. Unfair treatment, or discrimination, might happen repeatedly in a quarter.”

The team recruited 209 first-year 91Ě˝»¨students from across campus for a study over the 2018 winter and spring academic quarters. Of the 176 students who completed the study, 41% were in the College of Engineering while the rest were spread between various academic colleges, 65% identified as women and 29% identified as first-generation college students.

Participants wore Fitbit Flex 2 devices to track daily activities like time asleep and physical activity. The students also had to track location, activity, screen unlocking events and phone call length.

The team sent the students a series of surveys throughout the six-month study, including short “check-in” surveys at least twice a week. During the weeks before midterm and final exams, the students got a variation of this survey four times every day. Among the survey questions: Had the student, in the past 24 hours, been unfairly treated because of “ancestry or national origin, gender, sexual orientation, intelligence, major, learning disability, education or income level, age, religion, physical disability, height, weight or other aspect of one’s physical appearance?”

“We had a very large table comparing everything, such as the number of steps that you’ve had for each day,” Sefidgar said. “We also marked the days for the reports when they exist. Then it’s a matter of determining for each individual whether there are changes for days with discrimination events compared to days with no events.”

Overall, the researchers collected around 450 discrimination events and about one terabyte of data. The team analyzed people’s actions on days when they were and weren’t experiencing discrimination. On average, when students reported an unfair event they walked 500 more steps, had one more phone call in the evening, interacted five more times with their phones in the morning and spent about 15 fewer minutes in bed compared to days when they didn’t experience discrimination.

“It’s so hard to summarize the impact of something like this in a few statistics,” said senior author, a professor in the Allen School. “Some people move more, sleep more or talk on the phone more, while some people do less. Maybe one student is reacting by playing games all day and another student put down their phone and went to hang out with a friend. It’s giving us a lot of questions to follow up on.”

Five years ago, Nature — one of the most prestigious research journals in science — published an pledging to improve on the low number of women editors and authors in its pages.

For many readers and scientists, that acknowledgement was a long time in coming. Yet with the hindsight of today’s re-examination of the treatment of women at all levels of society, the editorial could seem almost prescient.

In the time since that editorial, however, not much has changed, according to a new 91Ě˝»¨ study published and cited in a printed March 7 in Nature. The preliminary study, by 91Ě˝»¨psychology professor and doctoral student , finds that many high-profile neuroscience journals had a low representation of female authors. For example, fewer than 25 percent of Nature research articles listed women as the first author — usually the junior scientist who led the research. Among last authors — typically the senior laboratory leader — just over 15 percent were women. Nature’s top-tier competitor, Science, had similarly low numbers of women authors.

What most concerned the 91Ě˝»¨team was that over a 12-year period ending in 2017, the percentage of female authors across these journals showed little improvement: less than 1 percent annually, with many journals showing no increase at all.

For the sake of comparison, the 91Ě˝»¨team also looked at the number of women who received major National Institute of Health grants during the same time period. Those numbers were much higher, and increased slowly but steadily, with just under 30 percent of grants in 2017 awarded to women.

“These research grants are awarded based on significance, impact and productivity. We shouldn’t see this huge discrepancy between NIH funding and last authorship in high impact journals,” Fine said. It’s particularly troubling, the study’s authors say, given that publishing in high-profile journals is virtually imperative for winning academic awards or positions at top-ranked institutions.

Gender disparities in STEM fields has garnered more attention in recent years. While National Science Foundation-compiled data show that women make up a proportion of STEM faculty, their numbers remain significantly lower than those of men. A 2016 by the Society for Neuroscience showed that a little more than half of neuroscience doctorates are awarded to women, but women make up an average of only 30 percent of neuroscience faculty.

Other studies of gender and authorship have also pointed to the possible contribution of publication bias. A small-scale focusing on Nature Neuroscience, in 2016, showed similar results to the 91Ě˝»¨findings. And in 2013, a led by the UW’s Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom, though an analysis of publications in the JSTOR digital library, found that women also are much less likely to be featured in prominent first- or last-author positions.

The issue extends beyond science: In spring 2017, an at the University of Liverpool found that papers written by female economists took an average of six months longer to get published than those written by men.

For this study, Shen, Fine, and their psychology co-authors research associate Jason Webster and professor, turned to the MEDLINE database of articles, which is hosted by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. They focused on 15 journals that publish neuroscience research, accounting for nearly 167,000 research articles from 2005 to 2017, and analyzed the author bylines using another database that predicts gender based on more than 216,000 distinct first names.

Some journals did have a proportionate number of female authors. The journals with the highest percentage of first authors were Neuropsychology Review (53 percent) and Brain (43 percent); among last authors, numbers were highest in Neuropsychology Review (39 percent) and Current Opinion in Neurobiology (27 percent).

“From our analysis, it is not that women are not conducting research and publishing, they are just much less likely to get their work into the really high-profile journals,” Shen said.

Fine and Shen suggest several solutions for all journals: to record and report article authorship by gender; to train reviewers to avoid bias, provide reviewers with more specific review criteria, akin to those required for grant awards; to adopt double-blind reviewing; or to establish byline quotas.

“It’s ridiculous to think bias isn’t at play in these very elite journals,” Fine says. “There are glass ceilings in technology, in politics, in business. It’s very hard not to believe that this is not just another glass ceiling.”

Increasing the number of women faculty in STEM fields is the goal of the . But if publication presents a barrier, then some universities may be challenged to hire and promote women, said Eve Riskin, 91Ě˝»¨associate dean of engineering for diversity and access, professor of electrical engineering and faculty director of ADVANCE.

“Research shows that diverse teams lead to better solutions,” Riskin said. “Research also shows that female students in STEM do better when they have female faculty as instructors.  Holding women to higher standards for publication makes it harder for universities to increase their number of female faculty members in STEM and in leadership positions.”

The study’s authors have also made their code publicly available, with the hope that students or faculty in other fields will take on the same challenge, determine the gender breakdown of bylines in a given set of journals, and call for change.

“These journals make a lot of money and wield a huge amount of power. Finding a way to fix this problem is the least they can do,” Fine said. “They are under the same legal obligations to avoid discrimination as other businesses.”

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For more information, contact Shen at psy.alicia@gmail.com or Fine at ionefine@uw.edu or 206-685-6157.

Late last year, the 91Ě˝»¨’s quietly marked its 15th birthday. But now, with thriving programs for early-career faculty and record numbers of female faculty in STEM fields, the center is ready for a party.

On March 31, ADVANCE will hold a belated celebration of its work and achievements since it was founded in 2001. With workshops, new resources and mentoring services the center has strived to remake the faculty recruitment and retention process to emphasize diversity in the sciences and develop resources to support early-career faculty.

“Our work through ADVANCE is to build successful and productive faculty, because their success is the university’s success,” said , 91Ě˝»¨associate dean of engineering for diversity and access, professor of electrical engineering and faculty director of ADVANCE.

There’s a lot to celebrate. Since ADVANCE opened its doors, the 91Ě˝»¨has nearly doubled the number of female faculty in 19 STEM departments across three 91Ě˝»¨colleges, from 60 in 2000 to 112 in 2015. In addition to this 93 percent increase, more than half of the female faculty in those departments are now full professors with tenure, countering the stereotype that female faculty don’t achieve full professorship as often as their male colleagues.

The 91Ě˝»¨also boasts the among the top 50 engineering schools in the country.

ADVANCE has worked to both increase the number of female faculty members in the STEM fields where they are historically underrepresented and establish support networks for faculty in the early stages of their careers.

“At UW, the early-career stage for faculty is very different today than it was when ADVANCE started,” said center director . “Today in our STEM departments there is awareness of the critical importance of addressing faculty professional development, supporting faculty success at all levels and supporting our female faculty.”

The bulk of the center’s work currently focuses on three endeavors to promote faculty recruitment and retention:

• Career development workshops for pre-tenure faculty
• Workshops on effective leadership for department chairs and college deans
• A “Mentoring-for-Leadership” lunch and speaker series for female faculty

ADVANCE designed its workshops for early-career faculty to address subjects that are important for faculty success, but which are often lacking in traditional doctoral and postdoctoral training.

“Our workshops cover topics that faculty have asked for help with, such as time management, personnel management, student mentoring and work-life balance,” said Yen. “Faculty want and need professional development. They know they can come to ADVANCE with questions and for help and resources. You don’t have to make it up as you go along or reinvent the wheel.”

Nine universities were in the first cohort of National Science Foundation ADVANCE grantees in 2001, each of whom was awarded a five-year grant. Each university’s ADVANCE program piloted a different approach. The 91Ě˝»¨center’s flagship innovation was to focus on leadership development at the university, particularly of department chairs and deans.

“A huge part of our success has been engagement with department chairs, because they have a significant impact on the success of early-career faculty,” said Riskin. “And since ADVANCE started working with chairs and deans back in 2002, we’ve found them terrific partners for recruiting and retaining diverse faculty, providing resources and addressing the problems and concerns of early-career faculty.”

Another endeavor is to help female faculty across the 91Ě˝»¨consider leadership opportunities as part of their career plans, such as becoming department chairs. This led to the “Mentoring-for-Leadership” lunch and speaker series, which is the only ADVANCE program open only to female faculty. One past speaker at this event was 91Ě˝»¨President , who was principal investigator for ADVANCE during much of its tenure.

Looking forward, Yen and Riskin said they want ADVANCE to continue these current projects, but also expand the center’s focus to include increasing female faculty from underrepresented minority groups and creating new programs to support mid-career faculty.

For its first six years, 91Ě˝»¨ADVANCE was supported by the National Science Foundation. The 91Ě˝»¨center continued thanks to additional grants and support from the UW, NSF and the National Institutes of Health.

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For more information, contact Yen at 206-543-4605 or joyceyen@uw.edu and Riskin at 206-685-2313 or riskin@uw.edu.

The College of Engineering’s program is one of three university initiatives across the state to receive funding from the Opportunity Expansion Fund, established by the legislature to help Washington universities fund programming that helps students earn high-demand bachelor’s degrees in science, engineering, computer science or STEM education.

The statute, which passed in 2011 along with the (WSOS) fund, allowed companies until 2015 to donate high-tech research and development tax credits to the expansion fund account. Microsoft, the only company to contribute to the expansion fund, donated a total of $6 million.

STARS offers eligible students an additional year of academic support, mentoring and funding to build learning skills and help them “catch up” before applying to engineering departments. Historically, only 33 percent of 91Ě˝»¨students who hold Pell grants and intend to become engineers successfully complete those degrees — typically because of inadequate high school preparation.

“We’re providing extra support to help students who come from less privileged backgrounds learn some of the skills and prepare for the rigor in the curriculum that more affluent students get in high school,” said , the 91Ě˝»¨College of Engineering’s Associate Dean for Diversity and Access.

“We really want students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds to become engineers because they bring a different perspective to problem-solving,” Riskin said.  “STARS students work hard and are really persistent in getting through college, which gives them the grit and determination you want on your team.”

STARS currently serves 32 incoming students each year, who spend an extra “redshirt” year at the 91Ě˝»¨taking from basic algebra to calculus to chemistry and building learning and career skills.

The Opportunity Expansion funding will allow the College of Engineering to establish an expanded support program serving up to 125 additional students each year from economically disadvantaged backgrounds — including community college transfer students — throughout their tenure at the UW.

The expanded STARS initiative will offer supplemental instruction in the math, chemistry and physics courses that are part of the standard engineering curriculum, as well as culturally-aware advising, professional development and career services. With the one-time Opportunity Expansion funding, the College of Engineering estimates that more than 180 additional students from low-income backgrounds will successfully complete engineering degrees over the three-year period.

Marie Arnold, a rising STARS sophomore, was just accepted into the Department of Computer Science & Engineering. Though she had excelled and taken the most advanced classes in her high school, her first year at the 91Ě˝»¨humbled her.

But the STARS program and support from peers and mentors built her back up, Arnold said, making her even stronger.

“I don’t think I would have been able to survive without STARS,” said Arnold.

“I came to college thinking I was a very smart person. I probably would have been too stubborn to ask for help, and too afraid to admit that I was lacking in certain areas. But STARS removes that stigma — you go to classes even if you think you already know it, you go to your tutoring just like everyone else and get the help you need,” Arnold said.

The path to becoming an engineer is challenging, and students need encouragement and support to succeed, said Mike Bragg, the Frank & Julie Jungers Dean of Engineering at the UW. STARS is just one of many designed to remove barriers that discourage women, underrepresented minorities and low-income students from pursuing engineering degrees and rewarding careers in the field.

“The 91Ě˝»¨College of Engineering is deeply committed to attracting and graduating a student population that reflects the diversity of our community,” Bragg said. “This one-time WSOS funding will help level the playing field and ensure all students have the opportunity to become successful engineers.”

For more information about STARS, contact Riskin at riskin@uw.edu.

LATTICE stands for Launching Academics on the Tenure-Track: An Intentional Community in Engineering. True to its name, the program focuses on forging connections and offering support to early-career women and underrepresented minority women in engineering who are interested in faculty careers.

LATTICE participants will gain a stronger sense of career self-efficacy and sense of belonging through a combination of symposia, networks and other support structures over a two-year-period.

The — to be held in Bainbridge Island, Washington, on May 18-21 — will focus on post-Ph.D., early-career women in electrical engineering and computer science, including postdoctoral researchers, assistant professors, assistant research professors and other pre-tenure level science positions. The for the first cohort is Jan. 16.

A second symposium to be held in 2019 will target women in all fields of engineering who are also members of racial or ethnic minorities or persons with disabilities. Each four-day retreat-like symposium will focus on early academic career skills such as teaching, proposal writing and funding, and tenure proposals – as well as offer time for self-reflection and discussions about identity and the academy.

In both cases, senior engineers and faculty will be available for mentoring and networking opportunities, as well as conversations about developing successful careers.

“LATTICE provides junior women support to become proactive and strategic about their careers,” said co-principal investigator , associate dean of diversity and access for the 91Ě˝»¨College of Engineering and faculty director for the . “I was hired in electrical engineering at the 91Ě˝»¨in 1990 and would have loved to have had such a program.”

The LATTICE communities forged at the national symposiums will be extended through peer mentoring circles and online connections. The circles are designed to offer frequent and safe forums to discuss concerns, receive constructive feedback and group wisdom, and set realistic personal goals. Discussions may include topics such as time management, navigating institutional culture, stress and conflict, writing and productivity, and self care.

Funded by a five-year National Science Foundation grant, LATTICE combines these professional development interventions with an ethnographic research study to understand which components are most effective. The project hopes to identify successful strategies and develop a replicable “recipe” for success for change agents looking to broaden participation in STEM fields.

For more information, contact lattice@uw.edu.

Pursuing scientific or engineering careers in industry, government or private research after getting a Ph.D. used to be considered a one-way ticket out of academia.

But new 91Ě˝»¨ research finds numerous benefits — to students, researchers and academic institutions looking to diversify their faculty — in making that return trip easier.

Authors of a recently published in the Journal of Technology Transfer interviewed 10 women who successfully transitioned into university faculty or instructor positions after working as corporate scientists or industry or government researchers. Those conversations explored the challenges and rewards in making that leap, the support and tools that made it easier and how the skills women acquired in industry helped or hindered them.

All of the interviewees participated in “” workshops, which were held from 2009 to 2012 by UW’s and offered a new approach to increase women faculty in science, technology, engineering and math departments.

“We saw that there were some really good women out there who just needed some encouragement and a road map on how to translate their skills from industry into academia,” said , electrical engineering professor and associate dean for diversity and access at the 91Ě˝»¨College of Engineering.

“A big part of it was helping them understand that maybe what they thought was a bug was actually a feature,” Riskin said.

One common strategy for increasing women faculty in STEM departments is to hire from other universities. But this approach fails to increase the number of female STEM faculty nationally.

The 91Ě˝»¨On-Ramps workshops aimed to broaden the universe of women from which universities can hire — and ultimately to change the culture of STEM departments and make them more welcoming to underrepresented groups — by helping highly qualified women with nonacademic career trajectories navigate the transition to academic employment.

Many aspiring “on-rampers” had impressive research accomplishments, experience in rapid innovation and insider knowledge to prepare students for real-world jobs. But despite desirable skills, the pathway from industry or government back into academia or how they would fit in was far from clear.

Some had spent the bulk of their time developing products rather than publishing papers. Others who had worked in corporate settings were prevented from speaking in detail about their accomplishments because of intellectual property concerns. Many had been outnumbered by men when they were getting their doctorate degrees and questioned whether the academic culture in STEM departments had improved.

Ultimately, though, they found other dimensions of an academic career attractive enough to want to return.

“They wanted to do more than make a profit for their corporation, and they overcame their reticence with a passionate thirst for two things — having more intellectual freedom and feeling like they were doing good in the world through working with students,” said lead author , assistant professor of anthropology and science, technology and society at Cal Poly, who was previously a 91Ě˝»¨ADVANCE postdoctoral scholar.

The 91Ě˝»¨workshops offered professional development advice, in-depth discussions that included personal issues and life stories, interactions with other potential on-rampers and exploration of strategies for becoming the academics they wanted to be.

For some of the women scientists and engineers, simply finding mentors who were willing to connect them with jobs, who could assure them that having their name on patents would count in the academic evaluation process and who offered advice on resumes or salary negotiations was a key motivator.

Those mentors also helped craft strategies to remedy gaps in credentials, which led some interviewees to take teaching jobs or apply for postdoctoral research positions before putting themselves on the academic job market.

Once the women landed faculty positions, they expressed high levels of confidence in their abilities, value and contributions — especially in educating the next generation of scientists and engineers. They felt insights into what knowledge and skill sets are valued in the workplace and how utilitarian innovation happens added valuable dimensions to their research and teaching.

“They haven’t just been in an ivory tower,” said Riskin. “If you look at the percentage of engineering students graduating with bachelor’s degrees and going straight to industry jobs, it’s nearly 80 percent. So they’re bringing a real-world perspective that is really useful to the bulk of our students.”

Many of the on-rampers also expressed high degrees of personal satisfaction in their new positions, which offered levels of autonomy and creativity that few had experienced in their previous jobs.

“The one thing with academia is that you’re your own boss,” one interviewee said. “The intellectual freedom that you have in academia you have nowhere else … You can set your own agenda.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Co-authors include 91Ě˝»¨Information School doctoral student Katie O’Leary, ADVANCE director and professor of bioengineering .

For more information contact Carrigan at cmcarrig@calpoly.edu or Riskin at riskin@u.washington.edu.

Grant number: NSF: HRD -0819407.

Among the nation’s top 50 engineering schools, the 91Ě˝»¨ has the highest percentage of women in tenure-track engineering faculty positions: 22.4 percent.

Nationally, the figure is 14.5 percent, and that gap didn’t grow by accident.

Over the past 14 years, 91Ě˝»¨has worked on everything from highlighting how unconscious bias can affect hiring practices to ensuring junior faculty feel comfortable extending tenure clocks to have children to providing leadership support.

The 91Ě˝»¨chose early on to focus on one thing that can have an outsized influence on faculty members’ well-being — especially for women and other underrepresented groups in science, math and engineering. They created to help department chairs acquire skills to create equitable and inclusive environments that work well for all faculty members.

Now, the 91Ě˝»¨is developing an online toolkit — called — that other universities can use to design and host their own department-focused workshops to advance STEM faculty diversity at their home institutions.

The 91Ě˝»¨is hosting a special train-the-trainer workshop in Seattle in October 2015 that will give participants an early look at the coming online toolkit and the opportunity to get help planning a workshop on faculty recruitment for their own department chairs. until June 22.

“The departmental culture is the front line of how people experience a university — it’s where evaluations take place, where people are assigned to teaching, where decisions about salaries are made,” said , program and research manager for the that developed the LEAD workshops.

“Department chairs really influence that microclimate. But often they move into these positions after having been research superstars or individual investigators, and then they become managers of people. And they maybe have no formal education around how to do that well,” Yen said.

The full version of the open-source toolkit — which will allow users to share, upload, add to and rate materials — will be available in 2016. The online resources will include everything from sample budgets and invitational emails that are helpful in planning a workshop to content such as case studies, handouts and sample presentations.

The LEAD materials cover a wide range of topics, including how to effectively communicate, recruit faculty from nontraditional sources, recognize how unconscious biases perpetuate the status quo, manage up and down, effectively mentor a faculty member whose background may be different than one’s own and be cognizant of data that show, for instance, that women aren’t likely to negotiate as hard as men.

“We tell the chairs that if they’re hiring a man and a woman at the same time, make sure that when she says ‘thank you’ and he says ‘is that all?’ that she gets an equal amount,” said , an electrical engineering professor and associate dean of diversity and access for the 91Ě˝»¨College of Engineering. “On the other hand, sometimes the woman may be offered a higher salary, and we tell the chair to make sure the man gets the higher salary, too.”

The UW’s original campus workshops grew out of an NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Grant in 2001 to advance women faculty in science, engineering and mathematics and help create a diverse climate where all faculty in these disciplines receive support and recognition. These workshops continue today on the 91Ě˝»¨campus. Additionally, three national LEAD workshops hosted by the 91Ě˝»¨in 2007, 2008 and 2009 and the online toolkit have been funded by follow-up .

Since the first grant, the 91Ě˝»¨has seen a 78 percent increase in the number of tenured or tenure-track women faculty in all ADVANCE departments, including an 100 percent increase in engineering departments and a 59 percent increase in science and math departments.

“One of the big reasons we’ve been doing so well with our women faculty hires is our history with this program and these workshops,” said Riskin. “Our chairs have really signed on and have worked hard to recruit women and do the right thing. And once you have a critical mass of female faculty in a department, it makes it so much easier to attract more.”

For more information, contact Yen at joyceyen@uw.edu or 206-543-4605 or Riskin at riskin@uw.edu or 206-685-2313.