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The Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI) engages physics faculty in professional development centered around improving change efforts within physics programs. As a part of the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) Initiative, DALI participants participate in a year-long cohort typically made up of two physics faculty representatives from five physics departments. The first cohort of DALI began in the Spring of 2021. Since then, there have been four complete cohorts of DALI with a fifth cohort currently underway. In this paper, we investigate who has participated in DALI as well as the participant outcomes of DALI. The physics programs that participated in DALI often serve small student populations and are primarily undergraduate-focused physics programs. We also find that at the end of DALI, participants feel well prepared to take on many aspects of change work, but report less experience with later stages of the process. 

The Communities of Transformation (CoT) framework is a variation on Communities of Practice that models groups aimed at changing existing institutional practices by challenging underlying value systems. The CoT framework has the potential to provide insight into STEM initiatives designed to promote institutional change. We share results from applying this framework to the Effective Practices for Physics Programs' (EP3) Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI). DALI supports cohorts of physics faculty (change leaders) in leading change efforts in their departments. Change leaders apprentice into effective change strategies though sustained programming while enacting these strategies within their own Departmental Action Team (DAT). Through analysis of interviews with change leaders, we identify ways in which DALI aligns with, and departs from, the CoT framework. We present the results of this initial study to showcase which aspects of STEM change initiatives can be highlighted, and what may not be captured, by a CoT lens. 

This study aims to understand how physics faculty seeking guidance in making departmental changes related to recruitment and retention frame the challenges in their program. We focus our analysis on one set of applications submitted to the Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI) in its first year of operation. DALI is the community engagement activity of the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) initiative. It brings together a cohort of physics faculty to apprentice into strategies for sustainable institutional change and facilitation practices associated with leading change teams. Through analysis of DALI applications, we find that many applicants attribute their enrollment challenges to sources outside of their immediate control, while those that do propose solutions to these challenges primarily focus on curriculum change. By understanding how DALI applicants frame their enrollment challenges, developers of departmental change resources can better mold their recommendations and community engagement activities to what is needed, whether that be meeting faculty and departments where they are at or pushing departments to explore new strategies and frameworks for evaluating their challenges. 

The Arecibo Pisces-Perseus Supercluster Survey (APPSS) attempts to detect the infall of galaxies onto the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster (PPS). The ALFALFA survey has greatly augmented the known redshifts across the region. APPSS sources will complement the ALFALFA sources, with the goal of building a large enough sample to make a high confidence measurement of infall and backflow onto the PSS filament via peculiar velocity estimates from the Tully-Fisher (TFR) and Baryonic Tully-Fisher (BTFR) relations. APPSS galaxies are selected using photometric data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), aimed to detect low-mass, nearby gas-rich objects below the ALFALFA detection limit. The L-band wide receiver at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico is used to obtain a five-minute ON-OFF measurement for each galaxy. Since the candidate galaxy redshifts are unknown, the receiver and spectrograph system are used in a search mode that spans the expected frequencies of HI emission from PPS galaxies. We will describe the goals, target selection, and data reduction process for the survey. Our collaboration has divided the PPS into two-degree wide declination strips for data reduction; we report preliminary results for strips 23 and 33. We have made the initial data reduction on more than 200 targets, and determined the systemic velocity, line width, integrated flux density, and HI mass for each candidate detection. We will compare results on our two declination strips, and point out interesting detections found along the way as examples of the data reduction process. This work has been supported by NSF grants AST-1211005 and AST-1637339. Publication: American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #233, id.356.07 Pub Date: January 2019 Bibcode: 2019AAS...23335607L 

The Arecibo Pisces-Perseus Supercluster Survey (APPSS) attempts to detect the infall of galaxies onto the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster (PPS). The ALFALFA survey has greatly augmented the known redshifts across the region. APPSS sources will complement the ALFALFA sources, with the goal of building a large enough sample to make a high confidence measurement of infall and backflow onto the PSS filament via peculiar velocity estimates from the Tully-Fisher (TFR) and Baryonic Tully-Fisher (BTFR) relations. APPSS galaxies are selected using photometric data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), aimed to detect low-mass, nearby gas-rich objects below the ALFALFA detection limit. The L-band wide receiver at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico is used to obtain a five-minute ON-OFF measurement for each galaxy. Since the candidate galaxy redshifts are unknown, the receiver and spectrograph system are used in a search mode that spans the expected frequencies of HI emission from PPS galaxies. We will describe the goals, target selection, and data reduction process for the survey. Our collaboration has divided the PPS into two-degree wide declination strips for data reduction; we report preliminary results for strips 23 and 33. We have made the initial data reduction on more than 200 targets, and determined the systemic velocity, line width, integrated flux density, and HI mass for each candidate detection. We will compare results on our two declination strips, and point out interesting detections found along the way as examples of the data reduction process. This work has been supported by NSF grants AST-1211005 and AST-1637339. 

We present results from a highly successful model of faculty development and undergraduate research and education, the Undergraduate ALFALFA Team (UAT), an NSF-sponsored 23-institution collaboration. We recommend that granting agencies identify funding resources to support similar efforts for other large-scale scientific projects. 

We report on results of the Arecibo Pisces-Perseus Supercluster Survey (APPSS) along and near declination 23 degrees. APPSS is a targeted HI survey using the L-band wide receiever at the NAIC Arecibo observatory. It is designed to detect infall onto the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster (PPS) using a statistical comparison to models of the peculiar velocity flow field. We have investigated a subset of 67 galaxies in the PPS sky region along declination 23 degrees. For detected galaxies we have determined their systemic velocity, line width, integrated flux density, and HI mass. We will illustrate HI spectral properties of interesting detections in our region and will compare them with available optical and UV data from SDSS and the GALEX archives. We will also describe the data reduction process and the ongoing collaboration among faculty and undergraduate students of the Undergraduate ALFALFA Team. 

The Undergraduate ALFALFA team is currently focusing on the analysis of the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster to test current supercluster formation models. The primary goal of our research is to reduce L-band HI data from the Arecibo telescope. To reduce the data we use IDL programs written by our collaborators to reduce the data and find potential sources whose mass can be estimated by the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation, which relates the luminosity to the rotational velocity profile of spiral galaxies. Thus far we have reduced data and estimated HI masses for several galaxies in the supercluster region.We will give examples of data reduction and preliminary results for both the fall 2015 and 2016 observing seasons. We will also describe the data reduction process and the process of learning the associated software, and the use of virtual observatory tools such as the SDSS databases, Aladin, TOPCAT and others.This research was supported by the NSF grant AST-1211005.