AGEP FC-PAM: Alliance for Relevant and Inclusive Sponsorship of Engineering Researchers (ARISE) to Increase the Diversity of the Biomedical Engineering Faculty

The AGEP Faculty Career Pathways Alliance Model (FC-PAM) “Alliance for Relevant and Inclusive Sponsorship of Engineers” (ARISE) promotes equity and inclusion in engineering higher education. The goal of the AGEP ARISE Alliance is to apply discipline-relevant, inclusive, and intersectional sponsorship and systemic change in hiring practices to increase the visibility, networks, collaborations, and professional success of Black and African American, Latine and Hispanic American, Native American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and Native Pacific Islander biomedical engineering doctoral candidates, postdoctoral research scholars, and early career faculty members at Brown University, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and Yale University. This AGEP FC-PAM is building effective and professional sponsorship relationships outside the home institutions of the AGEP ARISE Alliance’s doctoral candidates, postdoctoral research scholars, and early career faculty members. Sponsorship is differentiated from mentorship as it is concerned less with the transfer of knowledge between individuals and more with the transfer of power through the promotion of the AGEP ARISE Alliance’s doctoral candidates, postdoctoral research scholars, and early career faculty members within professional networks. The doctoral candidates’, postdoctoral research scholars’, and early career faculty members’ intersecting identities around race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and caregiver status informs pairings with sponsors, who are participating in training on the importance of intersectionality in sponsorship. The AGEP ARISE Alliance is also adapting faculty hiring best practices from the University of Michigan’s ADVANCE program to both postdoctoral research scholar and early career faculty hiring policies and practices. Improving equity and inclusion is critical to advancing STEM faculty members, educating America’s future STEM workforce, fostering individual opportunity, and contributing to a thriving U.S. economy. The NSF AGEP program, therefore, funds grants that advance and enhance the systemic factors that support equity and inclusion and, consequently, mitigate the systemic inequities in the academic profession and workplace. FC-PAM awards are intended to support the development, implementation, evaluation, and institutionalization of Alliance models that will advance AGEP populations, within similar institutions of higher education. FC-PAM collaborators also study how socio-cultural, economic, structural, leadership and institutional variables affect the formation of the FC-PAM, and the strategies or interventions the collaborators implement to advance AGEP populations. The intermediate outcomes of the project are increases in the visibility, networks, opportunities, and collaborations of AGEP ARISE Alliance doctoral candidates, postdoctoral research scholars, and early career faculty members and improved cultural and diversity awareness among sponsors. Longer term these advances translate into more diverse faculty in the AGEP ARISE Alliance academic departments. Internal and external advisory boards routinely review the AGEP ARISE Alliance’s progress, strategize on future steps, and engage with sponsors and sponsees. An internal evaluator is leading the project’s self-study and formative assessment of implementation, changes in hiring practices, and changes in doctoral candidates’, postdoctoral research scholars’ and early career faculty members’ knowledge, aspirations, values, and professional activities resulting from Alliance activities. An external evaluator is providing summative assessment using a theory-based framework to assess the effectiveness of the AGEP ARISE Alliance in developing inclusive, nurturing networks of diverse doctoral candidates, postdoctoral research scholars, and early career faculty members in biomedical engineering; the ways those individuals have increased their visibility, networks, collaborations, and professional success; the impact of the project on fostering institutional climates that promote equity and inclusion; and the advancement of AGEP populations pursuing faculty positions in biomedical engineering. The AGEP ARISE Alliance team is developing and disseminating sponsorship and hiring guides, and project results, that are shared through peer-reviewed and general publications, an AGEP ASPIRE Alliance website, and presentations at scientific and professional meetings. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.