Collaborative Research: BPC-A: LEAP Alliance: Diversifying Future Leadership in the Professoriate

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Only 5.3% of the faculty at PhD-granting universities are from the following underrepresented communities: Black or African-American, Hispanic, or American Indian/Alaska Native. Diversifying the computing professoriate is critical for providing excellent role models, shaping departmental programs and policies, and bringing diverse perspectives into research projects and programs. The LEAP Alliance aims to increase the diversity of leadership in the computing professoriate by intentionally bringing together four cohorts of universities, each with common strengths and a common agenda. This work builds upon the lessons learned from a first cohort comprised of institutions producing a large percentage of computing faculty and adds three additional cohorts to further strengthen the pipeline to the computing professoriate.The goal of the LEAP Alliance is to address the broadening participation challenge of increasing the diversity of the future leadership in the computing professoriate at research universities as a way to increase diversity across the field. Key national leadership roles, such as serving on national committees that impact the field of computing, often come from research universities, making these institutions a critical point of focus. The Alliance has previously piloted this effort in an initial cohort of 11 research universities who were found to produce over 50% of the faculty at the top 55 research institutions. They will continue to bring together similar institutions in a second cohort, as well as cohorts that focus on institutions graduate a large percentage of computing PhDs and computing undergraduates, respectively. Ultimately, the Alliance aims to increase the diversity of PhD graduates from the institutions that are the top producers of computing faculty, increase the exposure of academic careers at the institutions that already have good diversity in their PhD graduates, and increase the retention of diverse undergraduate students at the institutions who send students to graduate school that go on to be faculty.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.