FAST 4ward: Faculty and Student Teams in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-V

The Faculty and Student Teams (FAST) initiative in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has sought to attract and retain talented and historically marginalized undergraduate students and faculty within the SDSS collaboration since 2015. With FAST 4ward, managed by Colorado College, the team will build on their existing framework of successful partnerships, where faculty and students at Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) are partnered with SDSS Ambassadors at well-resourced R1 universities and Research Institutes to engage directly with proprietary SDSS-V observations and benefit from long-lasting, sustainable collaborations. FAST 4ward will directly support the formation of between two and four new partnerships between MSIs and R1s, including financial and scientific support of faculty and the development of a peer-mentoring program within the SDSS collaboration for FAST undergraduate students. Partnerships will support three historically marginalized undergraduate research students each summer and during the academic year. Through a new peer mentoring program, up to 10 mentors will be trained and paired with FAST undergraduates. FAST Partner faculty will be encouraged to share how MSIs support and retain historically marginalized students in STEM fields with the intention of building similar support structures for historically marginalized students at predominantly white institutions. They will also focus on developing geographically sustainable partnerships and encourage large institutions within the SDSS collaboration to sponsor “Sibling Institutions.” FAST Partners will gain access to state-of-the-art observations from SDSS-V with a range of science questions that can be addressed using the surveys three main “mappers”: the Milky Way Mapper, the Black Hole Mapper, and the Local Volume Mapper. These data will enable research projects of varying scope and size addressing stellar nucleosynthesis and chemistry, active galactic nuclei and supermassive black holes, and the interstellar medium. 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.