This content will become publicly available on September 25, 2025
- Award ID(s):
- 2017054
- PAR ID:
- 10558879
- Publisher / Repository:
- Feminist Pedagogy
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Feminist Pedagogy
- Volume:
- 5
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- xxxx-xxxx
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
Predominantly STEM campuses tend to have a much lower representation of individuals with non-majority identities and lower inclusion of these individuals within organizational processes. To address these issues, an Advocates and Allies (A&A) program developed by another university that engages majority (on the basis of race and gender identities) individuals in institutional change [1] was vetted for an NSF ADVANCE Adaptation Grant. We, as members of the ADVANCE PI team, share our challenges and strategies as we established the program on our campus. We intend our discussion to be useful for other STEM-intensive institutions as they engage majority individuals in institutional change. The A&A program centers around workshops that discuss how discrimination manifests in universities and include the institution’s own data. We highlight adaptations we made specific to our institution in order to encourage other institutions to be responsive to the contexts that impact DEIS work on their campuses. For instance, our initial adaptation of the Advocates and Allies program sought to be more inclusive by including LGBTQIA+ and staff on the Advocates team and A&A Advisory Board (A3B). Our adaptations have also reflected an ongoing commitment to present race and ethnicity data in addition to gender data. Other adaptations we discuss concern developing the credibility of the team presenting the workshops and incorporating an ongoing Journal Club to discuss the relevant literature. This paper also shares reflections on the best strategies to direct the Advocate’s growth in DEIS knowledge and confidence, as well as the development of collaborative relationships between the two groups and A3B’s comfort level guiding and directing the Advocates. We reflect upon sustaining the A&A teams through the COVID pandemic, including cultivating online engagement and rebuilding post-COVID team dynamics. This work describes one team’s journey in navigating an adaptation of a well-known Advocates and Allies program onto a STEM-intensive campus. We include some assessment results from the workshops and close with recommendations for establishing and maintaining an A&A program.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Background Significant uncertainty has existed about the safety of reopening college and university campuses before the COVID-19 pandemic is better controlled. Moreover, little is known about the effects that on-campus students may have on local higher-risk communities. Objective We aimed to estimate the range of potential community and campus COVID-19 exposures, infections, and mortality under various university reopening plans and uncertainties. Methods We developed campus-only, community-only, and campus × community epidemic differential equations and agent-based models, with inputs estimated via published and grey literature, expert opinion, and parameter search algorithms. Campus opening plans (spanning fully open, hybrid, and fully virtual approaches) were identified from websites and publications. Additional student and community exposures, infections, and mortality over 16-week semesters were estimated under each scenario, with 10% trimmed medians, standard deviations, and probability intervals computed to omit extreme outliers. Sensitivity analyses were conducted to inform potential effective interventions. Results Predicted 16-week campus and additional community exposures, infections, and mortality for the base case with no precautions (or negligible compliance) varied significantly from their medians (4- to 10-fold). Over 5% of on-campus students were infected after a mean of 76 (SD 17) days, with the greatest increase (first inflection point) occurring on average on day 84 (SD 10.2 days) of the semester and with total additional community exposures, infections, and mortality ranging from 1-187, 13-820, and 1-21 per 10,000 residents, respectively. Reopening precautions reduced infections by 24%-26% and mortality by 36%-50% in both populations. Beyond campus and community reproductive numbers, sensitivity analysis indicated no dominant factors that interventions could primarily target to reduce the magnitude and variability in outcomes, suggesting the importance of comprehensive public health measures and surveillance. Conclusions Community and campus COVID-19 exposures, infections, and mortality resulting from reopening campuses are highly unpredictable regardless of precautions. Public health implications include the need for effective surveillance and flexible campus operations.more » « less
-
Abstract In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many higher educational institutions moved their courses on-line in hopes of slowing disease spread. The advent of multiple highly-effective vaccines offers the promise of a return to “normal” in-person operations, but it is not clear if—or for how long—campuses should employ non-pharmaceutical interventions such as requiring masks or capping the size of in-person courses. In this study, we develop and fine-tune a model of COVID-19 spread to UC Merced’s student and faculty population. We perform a global sensitivity analysis to consider how both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions impact disease spread. Our work reveals that vaccines alone may not be sufficient to eradicate disease dynamics and that significant contact with an infectious surrounding community will maintain infections on-campus. Our work provides a foundation for higher-education planning allowing campuses to balance the benefits of in-person instruction with the ability to quarantine/isolate infectious individuals.
-
Launched three years ago, the Urban STEM Collaboratory is a an NSF-funded S-STEM program at three public urban research universities. With the first student scholarships awarded in Fall 2019, each campus has observed positive student outcomes even despite the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. The goals of the program include: to award scholarships to academically talented and financially needy undergraduate mathematical science and engineering majors; to implement student activities and supports designed to increase student success, attitudes, workforce readiness, and STEM self-efficacy; and to ensure substantial student participation in project activities through a special Badge system incentivizing participation. While the three campuses shared some aspects of the program, each campus also had unique aspects. Among the more notable campus-specific aspects of the Urban STEM Collaboratory are the use of peer-led team learning (PLTL) at one campus, a STEM ambassador program at another campus, and a robust layered peer mentorship program at the other campus. Additionally, each campus funds students for different periods of time (2 years, 3 years, or 4 years), resulting in varying student cohort sizes among campuses. Despite these unique aspects, each campus has experienced program success as measured through quantitative and qualitative student outcomes. Further, program participants (both students and faculty) from across all three campuses engage with each other regularly using virtual online platforms, creating a unique cross-campus community. This poster will report on the current state of the Urban STEM Collaboratory, including findings from all three campuses from the first three years of the S-STEM grant.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Many promising networking research ideas in programmable networks never see the light of day. Yet, deploying research prototypes in production networks can help validate research ideas, improve them with faster feedback, uncover new research questions, and also ease the subsequent transition to practice. In this paper, we show how researchers can run and validate their research ideas in their own backyards---on their production campus networks---and we have seen that such a demonstrator can expedite the deployment of a research idea in practice to solve real network operation problems. We present P4Campus , a proof-of-concept that encompasses tools, an infrastructure design, strategies, and best practices---both technical and non-technical---that can help researchers run experiments against their programmable network idea in their own network. We use network tapping devices, packet brokers, and commodity programmable switches to enable running experiments to evaluate research ideas on a production campus network. We present several compelling data-plane applications as use cases that run on our campus and solve production network problems. By sharing our experiences and open-sourcing our P4 apps [28], we hope to encourage similar efforts on other campuses.more » « less