With support from the Henry Luce Foundation, UC Santa Cruz will host an HSRU Alliance conference August 6 – 8, 2024. This conference aims to bring together a cohort of faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and allies to collaboratively define and develop a framework to support advancement of Hispanic women in their academic and professional STEM careers.
All individuals who support the advancement of tenure/tenure track Hispanic women faculty in the physical sciences (astronomy/astrophysics, chemistry, earth science, math, physics, statistics) and engineering and computer science departments/programs at Alliance institutions will be invited to participate in the conference. Each faculty member attending will be able to bring with them up to two doctoral students or postdocs from their laboratory or program who share this support. UC Santa Cruz will cover all the local expenses for participant housing, dining and parking. The participant’s home university will be asked to cover travel expenses so that travel funds are not a barrier to participation.
The goals for the conference include:
- Build and deepen relationships within the scholarly community of HSRU Alliance STEM faculty, postdocs, and doctoral students.
- Spark cross-institutional and cross-regional programming and research.
- Empower participants to collectively shape and determine next steps for both group collaborations and Alliance-driven programmatic efforts.
- Enhance understanding and awareness of the HSRU Alliance as a professional network and as a pathway to doctoral education and academic employment.
- Build capacity among the cohort in grant development and management by hosting panels with a variety of funders and faculty who have managed large grants.
The convening will be led by a facilitator with the objective of guiding the cohort to identify opportunities and collaboratively develop a framework with the goal of supporting Hispanic women faculty, postdocs, and doctoral students in the physical science and engineering disciplines as they advance in their academic and professional careers. The program will include keynote speakers, panel discussions, and breakout sessions, with opportunities to gather both according to role (faculty, postdoc, or doctoral student) and according to discipline. The convening will also facilitate discussion about grant development and management through a panel discussion with funders from foundations and government agencies, as well as with faculty who have had particular success in securing and managing large grants. The program will be interspersed with outdoor, on-campus activities to generate innovative ideas, conversation and connections stimulated by the extraordinary natural beauty of the UC Santa Cruz campus.
In conducting and evaluating this collaborative and participatory approach, we will develop a working model, and translatable tools (e.g. process documentation, learning objectives, training materials), for how to effectively engage and support cohorts of faculty, postdocs, and graduate students in the STEM fields in building and strengthening sustainable pathways in academia. Such a model not only allows for the development of diverse research scientists but also for initiating research-based action to improve the servingness of minoritized groups.
Additional Information:
HSRU Alliance members include every Hispanic-Serving Research-1 university in the U.S. and seven of the Alliance universities are AAU members. Among all the Alliance universities, at least 25% of their undergraduate enrollment self-identify as Hispanic or Latinx. Our work is focused on achieving two important and ambitious goals by 2030:
- Having double the number of Hispanic doctoral students enrolled at our universities
- An increase by 20% of the Hispanic professoriate in our universities
Both goals will require intentional work and collaboration among the Alliance universities, partnership with other like-minded institutions and the support of public and private partners. Though the Alliance’s goal of increasing the number of Hispanic faculty is neutral to disciplines. Because of their historically low participation rates, an area of particular opportunity is to develop support mechanisms that will yield an increase in the number of women Hispanic/Latina doctoral students and faculty in the physical sciences and engineering. The undergraduate students at the HSRU Alliance universities already experience a more supportive and equitable environment than the typical research university, and we benefit from strong regional partnerships with four-year and R2 universities that can be gateways to our graduate programs.
Data collected from 20 HSRU universities in the late summer of 2022 identified as a snapshot 91 Hispanic women tenure/tenure track faculty, 457 doctoral students and 31 postdoctoral researchers in physical science (astronomy/astrophysics, chemistry, earth science, math, physics and statistics) and engineering and computer science departments/programs. These numbers demonstrate that though the numbers of Hispanic women in these disciplines may be small in any one department or program, through the power of the HSRU Alliance we have a substantial cohort of Hispanic women and allies at various career stages. Scaling the participation of women Hispanic students in graduate programs in the physical sciences and engineering and supporting their transition to faculty positions would be transformative, yet from our current national position, it is a significant challenge.