RCN-UBE: Inclusive Environments and Metrics in Biology Education and Research (iEMBER): Novel Networking Fostering Interdisciplinary Communities and New Research Collaborations

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The RCN-UBE: Inclusive Environments and Metrics in Biology Education and Research (iEMBER) Network aims to improve the inclusion and retention of students in STEM fields. Barriers to increasing diversity and retention are multifactorial, with academic, cultural, economic, curricular, affective, and social forces contributing to student attrition, particularly among those from underrepresented groups. Thus, it is imperative that research attempting to address these issues incorporates knowledge from multiple fields. To that end, the iEMBER Network aims to create a framework that will provide opportunities for researchers from different fields including biology, education, and the social sciences to work together. This will be done through networking workshops, conferences, and the development of community resources and an online collaboration platform. As a part of their work, the network's research teams will examine educational environments to determine how they impact inclusion and retention. The goals of the network include creating a robust community of practice and hubs of research innovation and finding partners who share our vision of expanding the reach of diverse and effective STEM environments. The intellectual merits of the project lie in 1) employing a novel startup pitch networking strategy to foster new cross-disciplinary research collaborations; 2) having researchers attend conferences outside of their areas of expertise, thus promoting cross-disciplinary research; 3) developing an online platform that supports ongoing collaborations, fosters new ones, and functions as a reservoir of pedagogical, theoretical, and practical resources on inclusion and diversity in STEM. Members of the network will use these resources to develop new knowledge, theories, and practices around issues of inclusion in STEM that would not have been possible without them. Furthermore, iEMBER will promote the training of a new generation of researchers that has the broad expertise needed to continue to tackle problems in STEM Education.Co-funding for this project is being provided by the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE: EHR) program in recognition of the project's alignment with the overarching goals of the IUSE: EHR program.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.