Collaborative Research: Increasing Minority Presence within Academia through Continuous Training (IMPACT)

这一扩大参与的项目利用荣誉教师为来自代表人数不足的人群的早期职业工程教师提供指导。这些导师是著名的工程学教师，他们在佐治亚理工学院的学术生涯中取得了成功，最近退休了。他们与来自不同机构的早期职业教师根据他们的技术专长领域进行匹配。据信，导师可以在三个特定领域为初级教员提供宣传，这些领域对教师在STEM领域的成功至关重要：在技术社区内建立网络，突出和宣传初级教员的学术研究贡献，以及指导如何成功地驾驭他们的学术生涯。这个项目的独特之处在于，它超越了传统的指导，纳入了一篇专业倡导文章，利用了Emeriti教员作为其专业社区领导人所取得的高级地位。这项工作的智力价值在于，它旨在提供对使用Emeriti教员的有效性的深入理解，这些教员有能力为代表不足的群体中的早期职业教员服务。尽管人数仍然很少，但代表不足的群体(妇女和少数族裔)在教员队伍中的人数正在缓慢增长，几乎没有人获得高级教职。更传统的辅导项目根据种族或性别创建辅导对，认为共同的少数族裔经历是成功的辅导关系的关键。取而代之的是，这个项目将调查使用以白人和男性为主的Emeriti教员的有效性，他们已经被培训为早期职业生涯中代表性不足的教员的战略倡导者。该项目更广泛的影响是，它能够积极影响一群不同的早期职业教师的职业发展轨迹和未来的成功，目标是增加工程学院的多样性。该项目有能力大规模复制，利用越来越多的退休教师的专业知识，使他们能够继续为他们的机构和工程学学术界做出有价值的贡献。

This broadening participation project utilizes emeriti faculty to provide mentoring to early career engineering faculty who are from underrepresented populations. The mentors are renowned engineering faculty who are recently retired following successful careers in academia at the Georgia Institute of Technology. They are matched with early career faculty from various institutions based on their areas of technical expertise. It is believed that the mentors can provide advocacy for the junior faculty in three specific areas critical to the success of faculty in STEM fields: networking within the technical community, highlighting and advertising the junior faculty members' scholarly research contributions, and coaching on how to successfully navigate their academic career. This project is unique in that it goes beyond traditional mentoring, incorporating a professional advocacy piece that capitalizes on the senior standing the emeriti faculty have achieved as leaders in their professional communities.The intellectual merit of this work is in its intent to provide an in-depth understanding of the effectiveness of utilizing emeriti faculty who are equipped to serve as advocates for early career faculty who are members of underrepresented groups. While still small in numbers, members of underrepresented groups (women and ethnic/racial minorities) are slowly growing in the faculty ranks with few having attained senior faculty status. More traditional mentoring programs create mentoring pairs based on ethnicity or gender, with the thought that the shared experiences of being in the minority are essential to a successful mentoring relationship. Instead, this project will investigate the effectiveness of using emeriti faculty who are predominantly Caucasian and male, and have been trained to be strategic advocates for the early career underrepresented faculty. The broader impact of this project is in its ability to positively affect the career trajectories and future success of a diverse group of early career faculty members with the goal of increasing the diversity of engineering faculties. This project has the ability to be replicated on a large scale, utilizing the expertise of a growing population of retired faculty and enabling them to continue making valuable contributions to their institution and the engineering academic community.