Gabriela Chavira
Tissyana Camacho
Dimpal Jain
Crist S Khachikian
Bocanegra, Melanie C
Ricardo Medina
Natalie Schaal
HSI Institutional Transformation Project: Creating Opportunities for Minoritized Students to Participate in Faculty Mentored Research
Project Type:
Project
Project Sponsors:
- National Science Foundation - NSF
Project Award:
- $2,300,000
Project Timeline:
2022-10-01 – 2027-10-30
Lead Principal Investigator:
Project Team:
Senior/Key Personnel w-effort |
Senior/Key Personnel w-effort |
Principal Investigator |
Senior/Key Personnel w-effort |
Senior/Key Personnel w-effort |
Senior/Key Personnel w-effort |
With our five-year Track 3 Institutional Transformation Project (ITP) at the California State University Northridge (CSUN), we propose to transform how we and other HSIs bolster and scale research as a high-impact practice for all STEM students and faculty mentors. With this ITP grant, we will continue to build institutional capacity to serve our 10,000 STEM undergraduates and ~500 STEM faculty, concentrating on outcomes for our 6,000 minoritized STEM undergraduates. We will intentionally expand our focus from supporting participants to also identifying and dismantling structural barriers that often thwart institutionalization efforts.To accomplish this, we aim to build an evidence- and equity-based research training hub called ESTUDIO (Spanish for ?study? or ?research?): Excellence in Student Training for Undergraduates, Diversity Initiative Office. We will build on the thoroughly tested and efficacious synchronous undergraduate training modules developed under the NIH BUILD grant. The proposed project uses the framework of research as a high-impact practice (Kuh and Schneider, 2008), and builds on substantial evidenced-based work by the PIs (e.g., Camacho, et al., 2021; Fernandez, et al., in press; Villaseñor, et al., 2021) and in the literature, to establish ESTUDIO to: 1) Scale the high impact practice of research for all 10,000 undergraduate STEM students; 2) Create opportunities for all STEM students, including freshman and transfers, to engage in high-impact research or research training activities; 3) Center mentoring as part of faculty life (including in tenure requirements) and bolstering capacity and professional development opportunities for faculty; and 4) Create knowledge in a flexible construct that can be adopted by HSIs of varying sizes and means. These activities are designed to increase the retention and graduation rates of all STEM students, decrease the equity gaps and to enhance the quality of education for all STEM undergraduates.