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1. Learning from Hidden Realities of Latinx Contingent STEM Faculty at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs): Policies to Support Latinx Contingent STEM Faculty.

   Berdie, L.; Downey, R.J.; Muñoz, J.; Villanueva Alarcón, I. (January 2023, Journal of higher education policy and management)

   The Conference for Latinx Contingent Faculty Members convened a group of faculty members in STEM fields at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) in the California State University System. The two-day event explored the often hidden, or unacknowledged realities of contingent faculty participants, with the purpose of gathering information about barriers and trade-offs these faculty experience professionally and personally that impact their work. This report provides an overview of barriers and challenges that were raised in the conference, and a brief review of the literature of strategies that could address these experiences, and better support Latinx contingent faculty in STEM. 

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2. Work-in-Progress: The Design and Implementation of EFRI-Research Experience in Mentoring Catalyst Initiative Paper

   Qaqish, O. B. (July 2021, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   null (Ed.)

   The National Science Foundation (NSF) Emerging Frontiers and Innovation (EFRI) Research Experience and Mentoring (REM) program nationally supports hands-on research and ongoing mentorship in STEM fields at various universities and colleges. The NSF EFRI-REM Mentoring Catalyst initiative was designed to build and train these robust, interactive research mentoring communities that are composed of faculty, postdoctoral associates and graduate student mentors, to broaden participation of underrepresented groups in STEM research who are funded through NSF EFRI-REM. This work-in-progress paper describes the first five years of this initiative, where interactive training programs were implemented from multiple frameworks of effective mentoring. Principal investigators, postdoctoral associates and graduate students are often expected to develop and establish mentoring plans without any formal training in how to be effective mentors. Since the start of this initiative, over 300 faculty, postdoctoral associates and graduate students have been trained on promising practices, strategies, and tools to enhance their research mentoring experiences. In addition to formal mentor training, opportunities to foster a community of practice with current mentors and past mentor training participants (sage mentors) were provided. During these interactions, promising mentoring practices were shared to benefit the mentors and the different mentoring populations that the EFRI-REMs serve. The community of practice connected a diverse group of institutions and faculty to help the EFRI-REM community in its goal of broadening participation across a range of STEM disciplines. Those institutions are then able to discuss, distill and disseminate best practices around the mentoring of participants through targeted mentored training beyond the EFRI-REM at their home institutions. Not only does the EFRI-REM Catalyst initiative focus on broadening participation via strategic training of research mentors, it also empowers mentees, including undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral associates, in their research experiences through an entering research undergraduate course and formal mentoring training workshops. Future expansion to other academic units (e.g., colleges, universities) builds on the research collaborations and the initiatives developed and presented in this work-in-progress paper. A long-term goal is to provide insights via collaborative meetings (e.g., webinars, presentations) for STEM and related faculty who are assembling an infrastructure (e.g., proposals for the ERFI-REM program) across a range of research structures. In summary, this work-in-progress paper provides a description of the design and implementation of this initiative, preliminary findings, expanding interactions to other NSF supported Engineering Research Centers, and the future directions of the EFRI-REM Mentoring Catalyst initiative. 

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3. Notes on Being a Black Woman in STEM: A Review of Existing Research Concerning the Experiences of Black Women Pursuing Undergraduate STEM Degrees

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32186-3_3-1  

   Williams, Krystal L (January 2023, Springer Nature Switzerland)

   This chapter focuses on the experiences of Black undergraduate women, with an emphasis on factors that hinder and help to promote their successful progression to STEM degrees. In doing so, the chapter explores existing research concerning how their experiences may be shaped by their gender and race, as well as the combination thereof. The chapter begins with some important contextual information to frame the discussion of literature that follows. This entails defining STEM as a concept, as well as a discussion of the national STEM policy agenda. The second section of the chapter provides a thematic review of current higher education literature concerning Black women’s experiences in STEM, detailing frameworks that are common in the literature and covering issues such as the complexities of race-gendered stereotypes in STEM, along with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Black women’s STEM experiences. The third section of the chapter proposes a conceptual framework that combines the literature concerning Black women’s challenges pursuing STEM degrees and their sources of support to better understand how both can ultimately impact their STEM success. The chapter closes by highlighting important limitations in existing research and offering suggestions for future work. 

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4. [Full Research Paper, Ethical Engineering in Industry and Applied Contexts] Responsibility and Accountability: Faculty Leaders, Ethics Frameworks, and Disciplinary Enculturation

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--42341  

   Pinkert, Laurie; Beever, Jonathan; Kuebler, Steven; Taylor, Lakelyn; Vazquez, Eve; Milanes, Victor (June 2023, ASEE Conferences)

   In this paper, we explore faculty-leader perspectives on “standards,” established statements of expected ethical behavior at disciplinary levels (see page 5), through the analysis of interviews with faculty from the engineering-adjacent disciplines of computer science and biology as an important mechanism to understand the larger ecology of STEM ethics enculturation in which engineers often find themselves. To situate these interviews, we first discuss the existing landscape of literature around faculty roles in shaping the normative values. Then, we report on a set of faculty interviews that investigate the ethics frameworks (and their underlying values) at work in their departments and programs. Specifically, this paper reports a subset of data that is part of a larger NSF-funded research project (award #2024296) exploring the interplay among individual value foundations and disciplinary ethics frameworks in engineering and STEM education. We conclude by analyzing the conceptual and practical distinctions between responsibility and accountability as they relate to the standards identified by the disciplinary faculty we interviewed. 

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5. Research at Predominately Undergraduate Institutions Published Recently in The Journal of Physical Chemistry A, B, and C

   https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpca.5c00977  

   Shields, George C (March 2025, The Journal of Physical Chemistry A)

   The United States has a wide range of institutions of higher education, from two-year community colleges that focus primarily on job training to the research universities that train the next generation of Ph.D. scientists and produce a large share of knowledge. Some research universities are private, and others are public. Most states have a public flagship university or two, along with many more regional colleges where research has less emphasis and a slew of two-year community or technical colleges as well. The U.S. is also home to liberal arts colleges, which have no Ph.D. programs but where under- graduates benefit from small classes and intensive hands-on research experiences with the faculty. Most liberal arts colleges in the United States are private, although some states support a public liberal arts college as well. The nonflagship state and other private universities that do not have Ph.D. programs in chemistry and liberal arts colleges are collectively known as predominately undergraduate institutions or PUIs. PUIs play an important part in the United States scientific infrastructure, as they excel at providing the initial training of undergraduates, who learn the scientific method by hands-on research with their faculty mentors. 

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