Abstract
Diversity-focused committees continue to play essential roles in the efforts of professional scientific societies to foster inclusion and facilitate the professional development of underrepresented minority (URM) young scientists in their respective scientific disciplines. Until recently, the efforts of these committees have remained independent and disconnected from one another. Funding from the National Science Foundation has allowed several of these committees to come together and form the Alliance to Catalyze Change for Equity in STEM Success, herein referred to as ACCESS. The overall goal of this meta-organization is to create a community in which diversity-focused committees can interact, synergize, share their collective experiences, and have a unified voice on behalf of URM trainees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. In this Essay, we compare and contrast the broad approaches that scientific societies in ACCESS use to implement and assess their travel award programs for URM trainees. We also report a set of recom-mendations, including both short-and long-term outcomes assessment in populations of interest and specialized programmatic activities coupled to travel award programs.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | es3 |
| Journal | CBE life sciences education |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 1 2020 |
Funding
By definition, travel awards motivate awardees in part by financially sponsoring (partially or completely) their meeting attendance. Attendance at scientific society meetings is often discretionary rather than mandatory, and high or prohibitive cost has been identified as one of the strongest deterrents of conference attendance (Mair et al., 2018). Although the costs associated with attending annual meetings vary by society and by training level, the total membership, abstract, and registration fees for ACCESS societies average ∼$700 for regular members, ∼$500 for postdoctoral/early-career trainees, ∼$235 for graduate students, and ∼$115 for undergraduate students, not including travel, meals, or accommodations. Federal support for individuals to attend scientific society meetings is often not available, except for trainees and faculty working on federally supported projects or fellowships. Lack of funding for this type of expense may be a particularly strong determinant of participation for attendees from non–research intensive or minority-serving institutions (MSIs). This gap in opportunity might disproportionally affect young URM scientists, as students from URM backgrounds are more likely to come from low-income families (Kuh et al., 2006; Cullinane and Leewater, 2009; National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine [NASEM], 2011). Consistent with this idea, ASCB travel awardee data from 2008 to 2013 indicate that at least 30% of each of these cohorts reported receiving at least 51% or more needs-based financial aid for their undergraduate education (see Supplemental Table S3). We thank the past and current members of ACCESS. We also thank Joy Quill (www.quillassociates.com), Deborah McCall, Fabiola Chacon, Desiree Salazar, Sydella Blatch, Jim Vigoreaux, and Erika Shugart for their key roles in the implementation of ASCB programs for which data are presented and discussed in this publication (supported by the National Institutes of Health grants T36-GM008622 and R25GM116707). We are thankful to Amanda Schut from Kate Winter Evaluation for assistance in identifying relevant social science literature relevant to our study. ACCESS work is supported by the NSF, grant number 1744098 to M.R.-A. and V.A.S. The use of data from past aggre-gate assessment reports in this Essay was approved by the Institutional Review Board at High Point University, approval no. 201910-858. The first in-person convening of ACCESS was supported by the HHMI.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Education
- General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology