Engineering Fellows Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

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This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2)The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has propelled a technological revolution that is radically transforming the way in which we live and work, including a significant disruption in the higher education ecosystem. While the ultimate impact of the pandemic is still unknown, the U.S. academic sector continues to face hiring freezes, lost jobs, and general job market uncertainty. These negative consequences are disproportionately impacting women and other underrepresented groups as well as low-resourced institutions. This perfect storm occurs at a time when the primacy of U.S. innovation and research is facing unprecedented competitive pressure and providing pathways to retain highly talented researchers in their fields is crucial. As a country, we cannot afford to lose an entire cohort of highly educated research engineers, but we are in danger of doing just that as doctoral engineering students graduate into an extremely challenging job market that could force them to abandon their advanced research career ambitions. To address this need, the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) will launch the Engineering Fellows (E-Fellows) program, enabling recent engineering doctoral graduates to obtain two-year postdoctoral positions at U.S. academic institutions despite the current economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The E-Fellows program will provide rich postdoctoral experiences that will prepare participants for successful research careers in academia or industry while also serving as an employment bridge during a time of hiring freezes and job market uncertainty, helping to retain fellows who might otherwise leave the engineering research career pathway. The E-Fellows program will support a total of sixty fellows from diverse backgrounds, for two years in two cohorts, starting in fall 2021.The E-Fellows program will scaffold and prepare these two cohorts of engineering researchers and serve as a pilot to validate program design tenets that will enable the engineering community to prepare the engineering workforce that industry and society will need in coming years. Based on the successful Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) program, the E-Fellows program will bridge the gap to provide hands-on experience in academic research, attract and retain new doctoral students into academic pathways, boost connections to our nation's best scholars, prepare new doctoral students to navigate the challenging job market, and retain them in technical research fields. Application and selection to the E-Fellows program will follow a comprehensive evaluation of merit and diversity indicators (along individual and institutional dimensions), with emphasis on intellectual merit and broader impacts in applicant materials. This unique new fellowship program will be supported by research-based, high-impact educational methods such as the application of a cohort model, implementation of first-year and culminating experiences, enactment of networking and mentoring experiences, and fulfillment of andragogical just-in-time professional development, within an intentionally designed outcome-based experiential learning theoretical framework. A five-year longitudinal evaluation will be completed for each cohort to evaluate the effectiveness of the fellowship in (1) preparing E-Fellows to be job market savvy and (2) retaining E-Fellows as researchers in their fields. The outputs of the fellowship’s longitudinal evaluation will inform future engineering fellowship design necessary to maintain U.S. technological leadership.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.