The PROMISE Engineering Institute

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The PROMISE Engineering Institute is a diversity and inclusion effort for the State of Maryland that brings together the state's largest engineering entities to collaborate for the purpose of actively increasing engineering faculty diversity within Maryland. The effort's uniqueness lies with its plan to facilitate faculty diversity by actively leveraging partnerships to provide underrepresented early-career and future engineering professors with intentional professional national and international networks. These networks are designed to increase participants exposure within the engineering community, retain them in the academy, and propel research collaborations particularly related to the National Academy of Engineering's Grand Challenges, and strengthen engineering identity and cultural competencies within engineering's national landscape. The project involves advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, visiting professors, and assistant professors from each of Maryland's engineering schools and colleges: The College of Engineering & IT at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), The Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP), The Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, and the Clarence M. Mitchell School of Engineering at Morgan State University. The PROMISE Engineering Institute will be established with support from the University System of Maryland (12 institutions) and the Maryland Independent College and University Association (15 member institutions). Further, participating scholars will have the opportunity to develop national and international networks to facilitate their interest and engagement in collaborative research and attention to global problems through the PROMISE Engineering Institute's committed partnerships with the Southern Regional Educational Board's Doctoral Scholars Program and Institute for Teaching and Mentoring (SREB), the William Averette Anderson Fund (Bill Anderson Fund , BAF), the Latin and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions (LACCEI), the Global Engineering Deans Council (GEDC), the World Engineering Education Forum (WEEF), the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies (IFEES), and the international Center for the Integration of Teaching, Research, and Learning (CIRTL). The PROMISE Engineering Institute effort is designed to unify the faculty diversity commitment of the engineering schools within the state, by adding support and commitment from the University System of Maryland (USM) and the Maryland Independent College and University Association (MICUA). The statewide collaborative will address faculty diversity on a broad scale, with shared responsibility across the state's engineering programs. The project will engage in four activities: 1) Portal: There will be a statewide online portal that will showcase engineering advanced graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who are available for faculty positions. 2) Training: Participants will receive professional development and training for collaboration through participation in national and international efforts that will assist with providing them with a global network, key for the engineering disciplines. Further, the training portion will provide scholars with comprehensive research and pedagogical skills. 3) Placement: Campuses in the State of Maryland will collaborate to develop new opportunities to attract diverse scholars such as post-doc to tenure-track conversion models, and collaborative industry-based visiting professorships. These are targeted faculty placement initiatives, supplemented by "toward tenure" activities. 4) Support: The project will facilitate transitional support for new postdocs and assistant professors by bringing together current engineering faculty mentors within departments where scholars are placed, to discuss and develop strong support mechanisms that will facilitate retention. The project will also build communities of practice among the participating scholars that will assist with preparing for roles as engineering faculty. This portion of the project is designed to facilitate collaborative networks of engineering faculty from all races and ranks that connect within and across engineering departments in Maryland The project will be evaluated by Westat, which has developed a logic model that shows the objective as facilitating faculty appointments among scholars who are underrepresented minority (URM) group members in engineering.