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This practice brief offers a guide to organizations and projects that want to better align their cultures with values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Rooted in the intuitive, theoretically grounded view of culture as a tool kit that people use to solve various problems, the authors offer examples of cultural change work emerging from the National Science Foundation-funded Inclusive Graduate Education Network. We present lessons learned that may be instructive for other efforts, as well as recommended actions and specific questions for collective reflection and discussion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved) 

Joining a research group is one of the most important events on a graduate student’s path to becoming an independent physics researcher and earning a Ph.D. However, graduate students’ perspectives on the experience of finding a research group are not well documented in the literature. Understanding these perspectives is crucial for evaluating whether departments are providing students with adequate support while they search for a research group, and how difficulties during this process contribute to attrition. Semistructured interviews with $N=20$first and second year physics Ph.D. students reveal that incoming graduate students see joining a research group as a significant decision, and recognize that it may impact whether they will be able to complete the program. We found that students who struggled to find a group felt isolated and worried about falling behind their peers, whereas students who were able to immerse themselves in a positive group environment reported increased sense of belonging in their programs. The process of finding a research group often held differential importance for students identifying as women and nonbinary, who at times reported having to deprioritize their preferred research topic in order to be part of a more inclusive working environment. Although incoming graduate students characterized joining a research group as a significant decision, they often felt unprepared to make it. Moreover, they perceived an overall lack of guidance and structure from their departments, and characterized coursework as a barrier to searching for a group. Our findings suggest that providing students with better support during their group search process could help improve retention, particularly for traditionally underrepresented students, and improve students’ overall satisfaction in their graduate programs. Published by the American Physical Society2024 

Using analysis of variance on a sample consisting of 1,499 US students across 21 US PhD programs, we show that there is no significant difference in the time it takes US male and female physics PhD students to complete their degree programs. This result comes in spite of a statistically significant 18 percentile point gap in median GRE-P scores between genders. Additional analyses reveal that there is no statistical difference between US students reported as White, Black/Hispanic/Multiracial/Native American, and Asian. Expanding our sample to also include 1,143 Non-US students, we find a small but significant effect of citizenship status on time to PhD completion where the average time for Non-US students to complete a physics PhD is about two months less than their US student counterparts. These results show that in spite of known gaps in standardized admissions exams between genders, these differences are not reflected in subsequent graduate school performance. Our findings reinforce the need for graduate admissions committees to go beyond quantitative metrics and conduct a holistic assessment of an applicant's potential to perform research effectively and to earn a PhD. 

Maintaining your research team’s productivity during the COVID-19 era can be a challenge. Developing new strategies to mentor your research trainees in remote work environments will not only support research productivity and progress toward degree, but also help to keep your mentees’ academic and research careers on track. We describe a three-step process grounded in reflective practice that research mentors and mentees can use together to reassess, realign, and reimagine their mentoring relationships to enhance their effectiveness, both in the current circumstances and for the future. Drawing on evidence-based approaches, a series of questions for mentees around documented mentoring competencies provide structure for remote mentoring plans. Special consideration is given to how these plans must address the psychosocial needs and diverse backgrounds of mentors and mentees in the unique conditions that require remote interactions.