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Abstract It is important for funding agencies to evaluate if scientists accomplish their research goals. By comparing a representative sample of National Science Foundation abstracts and project outcome reports (PORs) from 2014 to 2017, this article investigates whether scientists attain the broader impacts they propose. We find that the number of broader impacts proposed in the abstracts is significantly higher than the number of broader impacts reported in the PORs. The trend is common across directorates and type of impact, except when impacts serve advantaged groups. Only the number of broader impacts for advantaged groups increases from the abstract to the POR. Despite the difference between proposed impact and reported impact, our study does not conclude that scientists are delinquent or disingenuous when they propose their research. Rather, we question the capacity of current frameworks to capture the quality of impacts and to weigh the relative importance of impacts that serve marginalized groups versus those that sustain the status quo. 

Community college transfer students face unique hurdles when they attend a 4-year university. Universities usually cost more than community colleges, 4-year colleges are often located in a different community from where the transfer student lives, and academic expectations are different from community colleges to universities. To help fix the academic achievement gap between students entering as freshman and transfer students, Stony Brook University started the Academic and Social STEM Excellence for Transfer Students (ASSETS) program. ASSETS recruits community college transfer students from low income, marginalized communities and provides them with a scholarship, a 2-week math bootcamp, career counseling, and gives them a natural cohort of students to have a community on campus. Our initial findings show that ASSETS helps the students afford college and relieve a major stress of attending university. After the bootcamp, the students had a group of friends and mentors to advise them on academic and career decisions, help them navigate SBU, and support them during challenges. 

A major goal of government and non-profit scientific funding agencies is to support research and development (R&D) that has broad impacts. This study proposes a new framework, called the Inclusion-Immediacy Criterion (IIC), to determine whether research benefits marginalized communities, reduces inequality, and encourages inclusive innovation. To test the framework, the study analyzes NSF sponsored nanotechnology grant abstracts from 2013 to 2017. We find that 109 out of the 300 grants feature research and grant activities that are inclusive, while 235 out of the 300 grants have research and grant activities that either maintain the status quo or predominately target advantaged groups. Of the 109 grants with inclusive broader impacts, 9 of them involve inclusive research that is intrinsic to the underlying work. In comparison there are 102 grants that feature inclusive research that is directly related to the research. Of those 102 direct-inclusive grants, 99 of them relate to broadening participation of women and underrepresented minority populations is science fields. 

Science, Technology & Society (STS) graduate programs primarily train graduate students to work in tenure track academic jobs. However, there are not enough tenure track academic jobs to match the supply of STS graduate students, nor does every STS graduate student want to become an academic. As a start to addressing these challenges, we hosted workshops before the 2017 Society for the Annual Meeting of the Society Studies of Science and the 2018 ST Global conference. In those workshops, panelists with PhDs in STS and related fields and working in non-academic faculty careers such as government agencies, non-profit foundations, and industry emphasized that students must showcase how their skills are useful to non-academic organizations. The panelists offered a wealth of stories on how their STS perspective supported their careers, yet most had faced implicit and explicit mentoring from STS faculty that ran counter to their career aspirations. The conversations centered on reframing research and conveying to potential employers how their STS training would support their future careers. A takeaway point that resonated with many participants was the need for STS graduate programs to rethink how they market themselves, recruit students, and critically reflect upon the measures of success. By implicitly steering graduate students solely towards an academic career, STS graduate training will miss an opportunity to make a positive impact on society