Sara Wadia-Fascetti |
Rachelle Reisberg |
Northeastern’s efforts to promote women in the sciences got a boost recently when the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded the university two new grants.
The first, a $3.7 million award, seeks methods of overcoming institutional barriers to women’s advancement in the sciences, engineering, and social sciences. The second, for nearly $500,000, will examine how co-op and other job experiences affect undergraduate women engineering students.
Under the $3.7 million grant, called the ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Award for Advancing Women in Interdisciplinary and International Networks, Northeastern will implement a five-year program aimed at increasing recruitment of women, providing networking opportunities to help women faculty advance in their fields, and fostering leadership development across the university to ensure the strong cultivation of women’s careers.
The grant builds on current university efforts to boost the advancement of women in scientific fields. “Northeastern University is committed to diversity in all its forms, and the award is certainly a recognition of our leadership in this area,” says President Aoun. “It presents us with the opportunity to transform our university and shape a model that could be emulated by other institutions of higher learning.”
The ADVANCE project will be led by a team of faculty and administrators. Sara Wadia-Fascetti, special assistant to the provost for faculty advancement and an associate professor of civil engineering, is the director. Co-principal investigators include vice provost Luis Falcon, chemistry department chair Graham Jones, and professors Jackie Isaacs (mechanical and industrial engineering) and Kathrin Zippel (sociology and anthropology).
Northeastern is one of nine institutions awarded an ADVANCE grant this year. These institutions join the twenty-eight other NSF-funded Institutional Transformation sites around the country, all established since 2003.
Under the second grant, researchers will investigate the hypothesis that engineering students who participate in work related to their studies display higher self-efficacy and are more likely to graduate with a degree in their chosen field.
The grant funds a collaboration of Northeastern, Rochester Institute of Technology, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and the University of Wyoming, led by principal investigator Rachelle Reisberg, director of Northeastern’s Women in Engineering program, and co-principal investigator Joseph Raelin, the Asa Knowles Chair in the College of Business Administration. Wadia-Fascetti is also a member of the project team.
The study, called Pathways to Work Self-Efficacy and Retention of Women in Undergraduate Engineering, will also examine the effects of mentoring, advising, and academic living communities