Building Capacity: Institute for Interdisciplinary Science: Preparing Students for the 4th Industrial Revolution

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The Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program (HSI Program) aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and build capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI program will also generate new knowledge about how to achieve these aims. This project at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas aims to create the Institute for Interdisciplinary Science. The Institute will support student workforce training, cross-sector cooperation, and interdisciplinary activities that can prepare faculty and students for opportunities in the 4th Industrial Revolution. This revolution is predicted to produce a virtually-connected world in which digital, physical, and biological domains are intertwined. It is a world of smart homes, cloud computing, big data analytics, e-commerce, robotics, and artificial intelligence. As the 4th Industrial Revolution unfolds, collaborations between industry and higher education become critical to ensure that graduates have the knowledge and skills to be successful in the new workplace. The Institute will facilitate these collaborations by developing mutually beneficial industry-academia partnerships, providing professional development and research opportunities, and facilitating networking for exchange of new directions and ideas. The Institute's partnerships with companies will offer summer internships, which can provide economic support and encouragement to students pursuing STEM degrees, and support eventual entry into STEM careers. In turn, students will contribute to research and development in the digital era, furthering the objectives of the companies where they work. This project has the potential to serve as a model for other institutions, especially HSIs and other Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs), to develop programs with similar goals, thus broadening participation and increasing diversity in the STEM workforce.This project will support efforts of the School of Natural Sciences at St. Edward's University to build capacity in interdisciplinary sciences, informatics, and emerging technologies and to increase students' readiness for the 4th Industrial Revolution. The Institute aims to establish an educational and professional framework that will facilitate cross-sector partnerships and interdisciplinary collaborations. The Institute will: (i) coordinate on-campus interdisciplinary seminars and experiential learning events that will challenge faculty and students to explore complicated problems with cross-disciplinary approaches; (ii) organize cross-sector cooperative agreements with public and private entities around the Austin, Texas area and beyond; (iii) expose STEM majors to postgraduate opportunities by connecting them with employers and graduate programs through guaranteed internships; (iv) finance faculty and student professional development by offering awards to faculty and micro-credentialing scholarships to students; and (v) catalyze faculty advancement, interdisciplinary collaborations, and innovative research by offering research opportunity awards. The project's research questions will focus on effects of the interventions on student persistence and on whether faculty professional development grants and research opportunity awards are a means to enhance student success. Together, these activities are designed to improve student access and success in the emerging 4th Industrial Revolution.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.