NASA SMD Bridge Program: Funding Opportunities for non-R1 Institutions

By Padi Boyd, NASA Headquarters

Learn about the NASA SMD Bridge Program at the Summer AAS meeting in Wisconsin!

The Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Bridge Program’s primary goal is to develop sustainable partnerships between NASA science and engineering researchers and faculty and students at institutions historically under-resourced by NASA. These institutions include Minority-serving Institutions (MSIs) such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), Primarily Black Institutions (PBIs), and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), and also Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs) and community colleges. These research collaborations include faculty and NASA researchers and paid student research opportunities, with the goal of transitioning the students from undergraduate studies into graduate schools and/or employment by NASA or other STEM employment.

A unique element of the program is that it is being co-created with the community it seeks to serve. A community workshop in October 2022 gathered together hundreds of community members to understand the current landscape at a variety of under-resourced institutions (URIs), as identified above. Themes and perspectives from the workshop have provided a foundation for establishing funding opportunities in the Bridge Program. Importantly, the key takeaways from the workshop were

• To build research capacity, the ideal NASA Bridge Program would center the needs of students, faculty, and institutions that have been historically and systematically marginalized.

• The ideal NASA Bridge Program would lead a paradigm shift by assuming primary responsibility for building impactful relationships/partnerships with marginalized and underserved communities  to diversify its workforce and the STEM community.

Common themes from the workshop include

• the need for NASA to help facilitate new partnerships where no NASA collaboration currently exists. 

• the importance of strong positive mentorship in developing students into STEM professionals, as well as the impacts of poor mentorship on retention of STEM students. 

A report from the workshop is public and available on the SMD Bridge website. Workshop content, including agenda, and recordings are available on the workshop website. 

Members of the SMD Bridge Program team have organized a special session for the Summer AAS meeting in Madison at

10 am - 11:30 am on Tuesday, June 11

Ballroom C

We’re looking forward to sharing an overview of the program, presenting some examples of newly selected teams who have received seed funding to initiate research partnerships between a wide variety of URIs across seven NASA Centers, and providing updates on current and future funding opportunities through NASA SMD’s Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science (ROSES) omnibus solicitation. Everyone is welcome to attend!

A list of other DEIA and Education activities at the AAS meeting can be found here.

DEIA and Education Activities at the Summer 244th AAS Meeting

By Alessandra Aloisi, Member of the CSWA

This summer’s 244th AAS meeting in Madison, Wisconsin will be held on June 9-13, 2024 jointly with the Laboratory Astrophysics Division. The meeting is promised to be jam-packed with a lot of great scientific talks, as well as opportunities for networking with colleagues and learning more about the state of our profession, equity, inclusion, education, and outreach.

The meeting showcases strong representation of women speakers in the plenary sessions, including:

• Rachel Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh) - Lives of massive galaxies through cosmic times
• Cecilia Garraffo (SAO/CfA) - AI models for astrophysics and atmospheric sciences
• Erika Kohler (NASA Goddard) - Chemical and spectral properties of exoplanetary clouds and atmospheres
• Judith Lean (Lab. for Atmospheric and Space Physics, Boulder) - Variations in the Sun’s radiative output and effects of this variability on Earth 
• Kerstin Perez (Columbia University) - Detection of high-energy cosmic particles as evidence of dark matter interactions
• Noemi Pinilla-Alonso (Florida Space Institute) - Surface compositions of minor bodies to understand formation and evolution of the solar system
• Teznie Pugh (University of Texas Austin) & Aparna Venkatesan (University of San Francisco) - Protection of the dark skies and the space environment

First Timer’s and Opening Receptions are on Sunday, June 9. Astronomy educators and undergraduate student receptions are on Monday, June 10.  We strongly encourage you to participate in other sessions sponsored by the AAS’s committees working with the AAS Board of Trustees to promote diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in Astronomy. These events include the following:

Monday:

• 2 pm – 12:30 pm CT: Exhibition Theater Session AAS Committee on Employment
• 7 pm – 8:30 pm CT: Splinter Session Sexual-Orientation & Gender Minorities (SGMA) Meet and Greet for LGBTIA Members and Students

Tuesday:

• 1 pm – 1:30 pm CT: Exhibitor Theater Session Q&A with the AAS Education Committee

There are a lot of additional opportunities to learn more about the state of the profession, education, outreach, and diversity activities at this AAS meeting, including:

Sunday:

• 9 am – 5 pm CT: Workshop Designing, Implementing, and Refining Equitable Evaluation Rubrics

Monday:

• 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm CT: iPoster Session Community and Profession

Tuesday:

• 9 am – 10 am CT: iPoster Session Astronomy Education and Multicultural Outreach
• 10 am – 11:30 am CT: Splinter Session Early Career Opportunities to Learn Science Mission Design
• 10 am – 11:30 am CT: Special Session NASA’s SMD Bridge Program: Funding Faculty and Students at Under-resourced Emerging Research Institutions
• 10 am – 11:30 am CT: Meeting-in-a-Meeting Community Based Astronomy around the World: Case Studies and Discussion
• 2 pm – 3:30 pm CT: Splinter Session Academic Portfolio Review and Astronomy: Potential Impacts to the Future of Astronomy and STEM Education
• 2 pm – 3:30 pm CT: Oral Session Outreach and Education
• 2 pm – 3:30 pm CT: Meeting-in-a-Meeting Starting Inward: DEIA’s Essential Role in Healthy Community Models of Astronomy

Wednesday:

• 10 am – 11:30 am CT: Special Session Towards Equity in the Classroom: Implementing Progressive Pedagogical Practices
• 10 am – 10:30 am CT: Exhibitor Theater Presentation Broadening Participation at the National Science Foundation
• 12:30 pm – 1 pm CT: Exhibitor Theater Presentation Life in Hawai’i: Outreach, Education, and the Community Engagement Efforts of the Maunakea Observatories
• 2 pm – 3:30 pm CT: Meeting-in-a-Meeting Designing Community Engagement Programs from a Mutuality Worldview

The full block schedule can be found here. And please feel free to stop by and say hi in-person if you attend one of our events, or tag and tweet us.

AASWomen Newsletter for May 10, 2024

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of May 10, 2024
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, and Hannah Jang-Condell

[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]

This week's issues:

Gruber Prize Recipient Marcia Rieke.
Image Credit: NASA

1. Advocating to Change Academia for Mothers 
2. Marcia Rieke Receives $500,000 Gruber Cosmology Prize
3. AIP Launches the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging, & Accessibility Strategic Plan
4. 2024 Advancing IDEA in Planetary Science Conference: Save the Date  
5. 4 Amazing Women From History You’ve Probably Never Heard Of
6. Graphic novels can help boost diversity in STEM 
7. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter
8. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter
9. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

An online version of this newsletter will be available at http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/ at 3:00 PM ET every Friday.

DEIA Activism in Astronomy

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Astronomy: A Modern History by Jörg Matthias Determann

Brief Summary: Since the first half of the twentieth century, an increasing number of astronomers have pursued parallel careers as both academics and activists. Besides publishing peer-reviewed papers, they have promoted a great variety of underrepresented groups within their discipline. Through conferences, newsletters and social media, they have sought to advance the interests of women, members of racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+, and disabled people. While these activists have differed in the identities they focus on, they have come to share a conviction that diversity and inclusion are crucial for scientific excellence as well as social justice. This book covers the biographies and institutional contexts of key agents in the diversification of modern astronomy. Central to discussions about who has privileged access to the tools of astronomical inquiry, including powerful telescopes and extensive databases, they have also significantly shaped views of our universe.

The editors of the Women in Astronomy blog virtually sat down with author Jörg Matthias Determann to learn more about his scholarly work.

What was your motivation for writing this book?

I wanted to write a history of the broader movement for diversity, equity, and inclusion in astronomy. We have some excellent accounts of individual astronomers who advanced women and other marginalized groups in the discipline, including Vera Rubin, the subject of an outstanding biography by Jacqueline Mitton and Simon Mitton. However, we do not know as much about how activists organized and networked. In addition to the lives of specific astrophysicists, I wanted to cover the history of groups, committees and conferences. Since the 1990s, much of this networking has taken place in online spaces, facilitated by listservs, blogs and social media. Yet, many of these digital sources are at risk of disappearing or becoming inaccessible over time. Who knows about the future of X (formerly Twitter) as a platform for activism, for example? I wanted to preserve key developments and debates, before valuable information gets lost.

Why did you make the choices you did? For example, how did you decide whom to interview or whose story to record and tell?

I was especially interested in interviewing astronomers with a long history and memory of diversity activism and service. Examples include Meg Urry of Yale University and Gibor Basri of the University of California, Berkeley. People like them could look back over decades and trace important changes in the profession. I was also trying to complement the older with younger voices, like that of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, in order to uncover similarities and differences among different generations of activists. Some of my interviewees emerged organically, through recommendations by others. For instance, Prescod-Weinstein suggested that I contact Ashley Walker and Charee Peters. On the other hand, some astrophysicists on my list declined or never responded to my requests for interviews for various reasons.

Tell us about the geographical distribution of the people and topics you write about.

To a certain extent, the geographical distribution of my book’s protagonists reflects that of astrophysicists in general. You will find many people who have worked in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, South Africa and Australia. These countries have all had high numbers of astronomers per capita (that is, relative to the size of their populations). However, I have been limited in the languages I and my research assistants can speak. I wish I could have interviewed more astronomers in Japan or Korea, for example, and read more about them.

What do you hope people will take away from this book?

I hope that readers will take away that there are many ways to bring about revolutions in science other than publishing research papers. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, astronomers contributed to a social revolution that is perhaps of a magnitude similar to that of the Copernican Revolution. Like Nicolaus Copernicus promoted a new view of the natural world, his modern successors championed a different view of the social world, one with concepts like diversity, equity, inclusion and access at the center. Just as the Copernican paradigm shift went through different phases and involved different generations stretching over more than a hundred years, so does the diversity and access revolution. As regular readers of this blog know, this social revolution in science is still ongoing and unfinished. However, just as the centrality of the Sun had become widely accepted by the time of Isaac Newton, nowadays few would argue against the notion that “the sky is for everyone,” to quote the title of a recent book by Virginia Trimble and David A. Weintraub. Thanks to the work of numerous “astro-activists,” we have generally accepted the idea that people of all identities and backgrounds should be able to participate in the study of the universe. This is evident not only in the increasing number of women in academic leadership roles, but also in funding mandates for open access and public outreach as part of major research projects.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

I invite readers of this interview and of my book to get in touch with me. Historians of science like myself have only begun to write the history of the movement for diversity, equity, and inclusion in astronomy. I would greatly appreciate any suggestions or corrections, especially from people who have engaged in, or observed, activism and accessibility work. Please help me and other historians better understand what you have lived through and what you care about. Please also consider sharing any material you may have. Unfortunately, many of the sources on which I have drawn (including webpages, blog posts, newsletter items, emails, social media posts, et cetera) are not preserved in archives or databases like NASA’s Astrophysics Data System (ADS). However, this material is still very valuable for understanding the past and for shaping the future development of astronomy as a discipline and as a global community.

Eds note: In the near future, we will have a more in-depth interview with the author, in a forthcoming “Career Profile” post. Stay tuned!

Physics and Astronomy SEA Change Updates

By Alexis Knaub

Physics and Astronomy (P/A) SEA Change has been up to quite a bit since our initial AAS CSWA blog article and the cross-post from the SPS Radiations magazine. If you don’t remember, SEA = STEMM (two Ms- one is for “medicine”) Equity Achievement (SEA). 

The broader SEA Change goal is to support continual, data-informed systemic change regarding equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in postsecondary STEMM education acad The SEA Change process entails undergoing a comprehensive self-assessment for populations (i.e., students, faculty, staff) and disaggregating the data (when possible) especially for race, gender, and intersections of these identities, among other demographics. Topics include policies, procedures, recruiting strategies, culture, climate, and outcomes. Both qualitative and quantitative data are used to understand the context. After looking at the data and considering what is possible in one’s given context, a 5-year action plan is created. The action plan needs metrics to ensure specified actions are indeed improving some aspect of equity, diversity, and inclusion. The action plan, along with a narrative that describes what was learned, is reviewed. If awarded with a Bronze Award, the action plan is implemented. At the end of 5 years, the department can reapply for the award.

You may be familiar with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Institutional SEA Change. P/A SEA Change works in partnership with AAAS (and in collaboration with AAS) and has launched the first disciplinary award pilot.

Shirley Malcom (AAAS) and
Alexis Knaub (P/A SEA Change)
at the AAAS SEA Change
meeting in October

Milestones and developments

The SEA Change process, for institutions and disciplines, is not prescriptive. There are not any specific actions to take, metrics to meet, etc. Context matters, and what is possible for one place may not be for another due to resources available. The intent is to examine where one is and make it better for those who are marginalized.

With this goal in mind, we have been working with two different cohorts to ensure this process is indeed viable and useful. Our first pilot cohort, consisting of 5 departments, began on 3 May 2021. Our second pilot cohort, consisting of 6 departments, began in winter/spring 2022. These departments vary in size, institution type, location, etc. There is one astronomy-only department participating in the pilot. The departments are working through the self-assessment and working on action plans. Despite the multiple challenges departments are facing within their institutions (e.g., leadership changes, enrollment declines) and in the broader context (e.g., Covid-19 pandemic, legal challenges to doing EDI work), the departments are persisting.

The P/A SEA Change Committee, with a lot of support from Shirley Malcom (Director of AAAS SEA Change) and Beth Ruedi (Associate Program Director of AAAS SEA Change), has been working to design the processes for application review and supporting departments in implementing their action plans once they receive a Bronze Award. We have learned a lot from AAAS SEA Change, but there are differences between institutional and departmental/disciplinary level endeavors. We want to ensure that the program is fair and does indeed support departments in making meaningful changes to be equitable and inclusive.

Community resources

P/A SEA Change offers webinars featuring promising practices one might implement in their department or classroom. These are free to anyone who registers; they are also on the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) YouTube channel playlist. For upcoming webinars and other info, we have a monthly mailing list that is free to sign-up for. There is also the AAAS SEA Change Port of Call, a message board for discussion and information sharing, which is free to use for most parts; we have our own section in the Port of Call.

Our first Bronze application!

We received our first Bronze application towards the end of May 2023. We anticipate more applications soon, given that the departments in the pilot cohorts are still working on this endeavor.

P/A SEA Change’s Future

We are exiting the pilot phase as I write. In September, AAAS SEA Change received an NSF Creativity Extension, and P/A SEA Change was included as a subawardee. As a a result, I was named the Director of P/A SEA Change and more importantly…

Seeking departments for cohort 3!

… We are recruiting for cohort 3. Interested postsecondary physics or astronomy departments should fill out this form by 22 November 2023. 

If you have questions, please email me at aknaub_at_aapt.org (replacing _at_ with @).

P/A SEA Change has been generously funded by the AIP Venture Partnership Fund. 

AASWomen Newsletter for June 2, 2023

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of June 2, 2023
eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, and Hannah Jang-Condell

[We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.]

This week's issues:

Image credit: ceoworld.biz

1. DEIA Activities at the Summer AAS Meeting
2. Ten Ways to Improve Support Resources for Workplace Incivility in Astronomy    
3. The glass ceiling in the ivory tower: A century of gender gaps in academia across the globe
4. Theano of Thuria: The Female Astronomer of Antiquity
5. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter
6. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter
7. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

An online version of this newsletter will be available at http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/ at 3:00 PM ET every Friday.

DEIA Activities at the Summer AAS Meeting

By Karly Pitman, Chair of the CSWA

This summer’s AAS 242 in Albuquerque (4-8 June 2023) promises to be a good one!  This meeting features a strong plenary slate of women speakers, including:

Julia Blue Bird

Kathryne Daniel

Jeyhan Kartaltepe

Linda Shore

Meenakshi (Mini) Wadhwa

Katarina Yocum

In addition to the great science and education talks, other sessions you might be interested in related to state of the profession, inclusion, equity, and DEI are happening on Monday, June 5.

9:00 AM – 10:00 AM MDT
102 - Community & Profession
Albuquerque Convention Center, Exhibit Hall 3
9 Presentations

9:00 AM – 10:30 AM MDT
Making DEI Work: Current Issues In DEI Change Management
Albuquerque Convention Center, Meeting Room 110

10:00 AM – 11:30 AM MDT
106 - Engaging Audiences through Effective Engagement Strategies and Inclusion
Albuquerque Convention Center, Meeting Rooms 18/30
6 Presentations

1:00 PM – 3:00 PM MDT
Introduction to Equity-Minded Mentoring
Albuquerque Convention Center, Meeting Room 120

And as always, please take advantage of the many networking opportunities during the conference.  Receptions and the grad student fair happen on Sunday & Monday June 4-5. The Committee for Sexual-Orientation & Gender Minorities in Astronomy (SGMA) is hoting a meet & greet on Tuesday, June 6:

7:00 PM – 8:30 PM MDT
SGMA Meet and Greet for LGBTIA Members and Students
Albuquerque Convention Center, Meeting Rooms 15/16/32

Cross-post: ‘It’s a constant hum’: a planetary geologist calls out racism in academia

[Eds. note: As part of its commitment to becoming an agent of change and helping to end discriminatory practices and systemic racism, Nature has published a special issue focused on science as “a shared experience" and published several editorials by scientists in various fields. One of them, by planetary geologist Dr. Martha Gilmore, is cross-posted here.]

Photo from The Middletown Press

In March, Martha Gilmore delivered an unusually moving keynote lecture at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Woodlands, Texas. Woven into a talk about the geology of Venus was a challenge for the mostly white, mostly male audience to think deeply about who is — or rather, who is not — doing research in this field.

According to data from the American Geosciences Institute, people from under-represented minority groups — including Black people — made up less than 6.7% of those awarded geoscience doctorates in 2019. And the proportion of those who continue in geoscience in some capacity shrank from 23% in 2010 to 19% in 2017.

“If I’m under-represented, then white folks are over-represented by definition,” said Gilmore, who is Black and a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. “So what I’m going to ask you to do is think about, scientifically, why that’s an issue.”

Read more about Dr. Gilmore's experiences here.

More on Dr. Gilmore's research and achievements can be found at:
Mazursky Lecture (2022)
Claudia J. Alexander Prize (2022)
Persistence Pays Off (2022)
Bromery Award (2020)

IDEA Actions for Our Science Communities

By Nicolle Zellner and Karly Pitman, CSWA co-Chairs

In the past few years, there has been a noticeable shift in how organizations, institutions, and professional societies (among others) are integrating inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility (IDEA), justice, and/or belonging into their daily practices. The Women in Astronomy blog has published numerous posts on this topic while highlighting IDEA advocates and allies. In a recent post, Joan Schmelz, director of the Science and Technology Institute and the NASA Postdoctoral Program at Universities Space Research Association, wrote about her approach for intentionally infusing IDEA culture throughout Astronomy.

There are plenty of resources out there and multiple ways to become educated about best practices, lessons learned, and practical applications. This week, Advancing IDEA in Planetary Science is taking place. The goal of this virtual conference is to “ensure that the planetary science community can take giant leaps in advancing IDEA principles in the workforce over the next decade.” The conference is free and registration is open. Whether a planetary scientist or not, the talks and workshops are sure to be engaging, informative, and inspiring. There will also be two working sessions (Apr. 28 3:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. CDT and Apr. 29 from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. CDT) to develop detailed and tangible recommendations for the community.

NASA’s DEIA Strategic Plan (2022-2026) includes multiple key performance goals. For example, one aims to ensure that recruitment plans focus on underrepresented individuals and members of underserved communities and individuals with disabilities. Others aim to build a diverse future science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workforce by engaging students in authentic learning experiences; implement a continuous pay equity assessment process; and develop and implement automated, analytic products centered around measuring demographic representation and trends (among others). NASA’s Equity Action Plan will focus on increasing integration and utilization of contractors and businesses from underserved communities; enhancing grants and cooperative agreements to advance opportunities, access, and representation for underserved communities; leveraging Earth Science and socioeconomic data to help mitigate environmental challenges in underserved communities; and advancing external civil rights compliance. The National Science Foundation has also recently updated its Strategic Plan (NSF 2022-2026) and diversity is mentioned in several places, drawing from the National Science Board's Vision 2030 recommendations. While many diversity working groups and institutions don't necessarily have the budgets to execute to the scale of the funding agencies, actions at the federal level should serve to inspire individuals and institutions that are funded by NASA in developing their IDEA goals.

The American Astronomical Society itself has also infused IDEA into its own Strategic Plan (2021-2026), with the goal of implementing recommendations made by recent IDEA task forces and consortia. Members of its inclusion committees, CSWA, SGMA, WGAD, and CSMA, meet regularly and collect and publish resources to help advance careers of AAS members in general.

But perhaps the biggest sea change in encouraging the implementation of IDEA practices occurred when the National Academies required that both the Astrophysics and Planetary Science and Astrobiology decadal surveys include a study of the state of the profession. The Astro2020 decadal report, Pathways to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 2020s, urges federal agencies to ensure that their scientific integrity policies address harassment and discrimination by individuals as forms of scientific misconduct. The report also encourages federal funding agencies to establish a consistent format and policy for regularly collecting, evaluating, and publicly reporting demographic data and indicators and then consider using that information in the evaluation of funding awards (e.g.,  individual investigators, project and mission teams, third-party organizations that manage facilities). In a similar vein the just-released Planetary Science and Astrobiology (PS&AB) Decadal Survey, Origins, Worlds, and Life, also recommends collecting data concerning workplace climate, as well as data on the size, identity, and demographics of the PS&AB community; broadening opportunities to advance the state of the profession; and recognizing the need for an inclusive and inviting community free of hostility and harassment. That the decadal reports of both of these closely related scientific communities make similar recommendations means that the importance of a diverse and healthy workforce is finally being acknowledged. Now it’s up to us - members of these communities - to capitalize on this momentum and take action to bring these recommendations to life.

Here are some ways that you can take action in the short term: 

• Participate in upcoming events at the 240th AAS meeting in Pasadena, CA

• CSWA splinter session, June 13, 5:30 - 7 pm PT

• Other sessions TBD, so check the schedule when it’s published

• Volunteer to be a part of the AAS inclusion committees

• CSWA, SGMA, CSMA, WGAD

• Be a mentor on AAS’s new mentoring platform, Mentoring365

Resources:

WGAD, AAS Working Group on Accessibility and Disability 

SGMA, AAS Committee for Sexual-Orientation & Gender Minorities in Astronomy 

CSMA, AAS Committee on the Status of Minorities in Astronomy

CSWA, AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the American Geophysical Union

International Astronomical Union, Astronomy for Equity and Inclusion

Statement by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific