UMBC will expand its work boosting diversity in academia from Maryland to the national level through a new NSF INCLUDES Alliance: Re-Imagining STEM Equity Utilizing Postdoc Pathways. The Alliance, anticipated to launch this fall, is modeled after the AGEP PROMISE Academy, an initiative co-led by UMBC that supports faculty diversification in the biomedical sciences across University System of Maryland institutions.
The UMBC-led RISE UPP Alliance will assist the University of Texas System, Texas A&M University System and University of North Carolina System in creating programs similar to the AGEP PROMISE Academy, but tailored to meet the needs of their specific institutions and systems.
The AGEP PROMISE Academy focuses on recruiting diverse Ph.D. recipients and helping them develop their careers from the postdoc to tenure-track faculty stage. UMBC has received a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation to replicate this national model.
“The underrepresentation of minoritized scholars in universities has been a stagnant problem for a really long time and decades of effort have not yet yielded much change,” said Robin Cresiski, assistant vice provost for graduate student development and postdoctoral affairs. “There is an appetite for trying something different.”