 This panel session will focus specifically on established programs that work to enhance DEI in the talent pool. We will hear from foreign by the speakers, each of whom will speak for approximately 20 minutes. Again, there will be time for one or two clarifying questions at the end of each presentation if any are submitted. Otherwise, all questions and discussions will be held for the panel discussion at 430 after all of the speakers have presented. As a reminder, please submit your questions for the speakers via the Q&A feature on Zoom. With that, I would like to introduce our first speaker, Dr. Lorna Eshagoyan. Dr. Eshagoyan is the Director of the Campus Office of Undergraduate Research Initiatives and Research Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is also the lead principal investigator and director of the Building Scholars Center at UTEP. Her research interests focus on the impact that participation in undergraduate research has on student success, particularly for students from underrepresented groups. Dr. Eshagoyan. Thank you, Malika. Can everyone hear me well? I hope so. Yes. Okay, good. So, well, good afternoon, everyone. And thank you to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable for the invitation. I'm truly honored to be in such prestigious company to discuss diversity, equity and inclusion in the talent pool. We're to my heart because it's what I live and do every day as part of my position at my job at UTEP. And I have to add that I felt very proud when Freeman Grabowski, the opening speaker today, praised the work that UTEP has done to contribute to the increase in diversity as the top institution of origin in the continental U.S. For Hispanic doctoral recipients across the U.S. Today, as part of this panel, I will tell you a bit about results from our Building Scholars Program at UTEP in which we truly tap into student talent using what we call an asset bundles approach. Let me see if I can advance my slides. Okay, I'll do this. Somehow I'm not able to advance the slides. There we go. So in order for me to discuss this program, I need to put it into context, both at the institutional and national level. So I'll first provide you with the demographics of the student body at UTEP. And then I will provide you with additional information about UTEP and its recently launched strategic plan. I will then attempt to mesh the information I give you with recent social sciences literature that provided a solid foundation for building our future direction along the lines of DEI. I will then proceed to tell you about the Building Scholars Program as an exemplar for tapping our Hispanic student talent through undergraduate research and also about why and how we decided to use the asset bundles approach framework to develop our programmatic activities. I'll discuss how we are evaluating the program using NIH's Hallmarks of Student Success at the basis. And I will tell you a bit about our partner institutions and provide you with some results at the end that serve as evidence that what we're doing is working. Remember, data is key. Yes. So part of the UTEP context has to do with its location and demographics. So for those of you that are not familiar with El Paso or UTEP, we're located on the very western most tip of Texas, which is right on the border with Mexico and the state of New Mexico in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert. The second shows our beautiful campus and its Bhutanese architecture, but more relevant here is the fact that the picture was taken facing south. And what you see in the background is the city of Juarez, Mexico. So as you can see, we are only a stone throw away from the border fence, which is only about a quarter of a mile from the edge of campus. And the third picture I put in there to show you are magnificent blue skies, which looked like that about 330 days of the year. So very proud of where we are. So about demographics, UTEP enrolls about 25,000 students per year, and about 21,000 of them are undergraduates. We are 83% Hispanic overall and 86% at the undergraduate level. So high number of Hispanic students in our institution. About half of the students are first generation college goers and 60% of them are Pell Grant recipients. That speaks to the financial disadvantage of our student population. We are a computer school with 83% of the students being from El Paso County. So this is an institution that serves the region we are in. In terms of degrees, we offer 73 bachelors, 71 masters and 22 doctoral programs. And since the program I will be discussing in detail later is funded by NIH. I added the numbers that have a biomedical research workforce relevance. And those are 26 bachelors 25 masters and 16 doctoral programs, of course, they include chemistry and biochemistry. So one important thing to remember about UTEP is that for the last 30 plus years, our mission has been one of access and excellence. Meaning we do not require a minimum SAT or ACT score for students to be accepted. Anyone with a high school degree who applies is accepted. And because that brings students with a large range of talent, we pride ourselves in saying that we serve students with intentionality. Last April, as part of the goals of our new president who started in fall of 2019, we launched our new 10 years of strategic plan. And the most beautiful thing about this new plan is that it's an excellence in its mission statement. As part of the context to discuss the building scholars program, I wanted to provide a presentation that go over the four goals of the strategic plan, but I want to go over them backwards starting with goal four, because that way we can go from broad university level to narrow student level. And I also want to mention that the four goals are based on four strategic advantages that we are blessed to have our location, the diversity of our people, our culture of care, and the partnerships that we have with regional school system the community college industries employers, other institutions, etc. The fourth goal deals with utip as a Hispanic serving institution, and the goal is to positively impact higher education as the exemplary Hispanic serving research university. Now this goal was based on two simple but quite relevant facts. There are only 18 Hispanic serving institutions that are also research one institutions by the Carnegie classification, yet utip is the only one, the only one that achieve that designation while maintaining open access. The important fact is that utip was an HSI before we became an R1 institution. So we did it with the engagement of students we serve and despite predictions from many who believe it was an impossible goal. We did it. And we're very proud of that. Now the third goal is about our community and the role that utip will play in ensuring a healthy, more prosperous and culturally enriched life for everyone in the community. So utip has and intends to continue to play a major role in the city of El Paso so that what is the surrounding region. But in addition to this goal being all about inclusion, I wanted to call your attention to the words community and culturally enriched that are embedded in this goal, because those words are weaved into the fabric of Hispanic servingness, and I will elaborate on that on the on the next slide. So, here I'm showing an excerpt of a framework of Hispanic servingness that was published originally by Gina Garcia and Marie Nunez and Vanessa Sunstone in 2019 and republished in 2020 in a book edited by Gina Garcia. And the book is titled Hispanic servingness in practice. Gina Garcia is a sociologist at Penn State, and she has dedicated her career to the study of Hispanic serving institutions. The framework is based on the idea that in order to truly serve and educate Latinx students, institutions must demonstrate their servingness through structures that include the institutional mission, engagement with the community programs and services for minority students, and a culturally relevant curriculum and this is something that Travis mentioned in his presentation a little while ago. The point is that through these structures exercise provide relevant services and activities that resulting three independent but interconnected outcomes. These are outcomes that combined lead to overall success of Hispanic students. The set of outcomes are validating experiences that is experiences that validate who the students are and where they come from, such as cultural validation, family engagement I will talk a little bit about that later, and mentoring and support groups. Non-academic outcomes include things like student academic self-concept, their sense of belonging to the institution and the community of practice, their science identity very relevant to what we're talking about today, etc. Non-academic outcomes are the traditional metrics of success that we know about GPA, degree completion, graduate school enrollment, but circling back to the strategic goal that I mentioned number three, it is clear that YouTube is well grounded in the sociology literature as an inclusive Hispanic serving institution. So, goal number two is common to many research intensive institutions because it talks about advancing research and scholarship. But what's different for us is that there is intentionality to include undergraduate students as part of that goal, which leads me to my goal number one or the institutional goal number one. And that has to do with students. And in this goal, we see the phrases engaged education, culture of care, and the word inclusive. When we talk about an engaged education, we're talking about a student success framework that was launched during our last SAAC accreditation about four years ago. And that framework which we call the UTEP EDGE is based on the premise that students succeed when they are included in high impact practices. At UTEP we call those high impact practices EDGE experiences. And for those of you who are not familiar or may not be familiar with the term high impact practices, it refers to those educational practices that result in student success. George Kuo, a professor of education policy from Indiana University coined the term in 2008. So in the figure on the right, which I'm going to show right here, I show all 10 high impact practices. But I have gone a step further. Instead of simply listing them, I have made a point to demonstrate that all nine high impact practices are connected to the undergraduate research practice. For example, all students conducting undergraduate research in the science and in projects that are common to that research group. All students in the research group, including the undergraduate students, share common intellectual experience. Typically undergraduate research experience is writing intensive if we ask students to write reports or participating in the preparation of manuscripts. So, in addition, many first year experiences nowadays involve participation in freshman course based research, and so on. And you may be wondering why am I talking about I'll be clear as I present to you details of the building scholars program. So, when I first arrived at UTEP I need to tell you the story because it changed my mindset. When I first arrived here as director of undergraduate research, I came with multiple ideas that came from the white institutions where I had studied and worked before. I knew about the UTEP demographics but reality had not sinked in until I was here and realized that a very large proportion of our students are financially disadvantaged. And they must work part time or full time to help support themselves and their families. In addition, the majority of the students live with their families and they commute to campus. So the consequences of that is that those students must prioritize their financial survivor. They take longer to graduate. They are not as involved in their major or with the university and they are unable to fully engage with a professional development associate with their major. So after thinking about this issue and talking to many colleagues on campus and, you know, mixing it with what I was supposed to be doing in my position as director of undergraduate research. I decided that the solution was to engage students in programs that pay them a stipend that that stipend that they would otherwise earn by flipping burgers off campus. That way they would reap the well known benefits of participation in on the graduate research which I listed the bottom of the slide. My reasoning was that such an approach would bring some sense of equity between students who were able to afford all the opportunities the university had to offer, and who were not first generation students with the students who were equally talented but had all the possible disadvantages that put them at risk of dropping out or even failing. With all the intentionality I was capable of I decided to see grants that would allow my office to offer those opportunities. So I was able to secure a few of those from federal agencies and was able to negotiate with the student employment office at UTEP to redirect some funds to offer about 40 positions a year for undergraduate researchers. I became the building initiative in initially a pilot in 2013 and then in 2014 we got the grant. So, Bill stands for Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity and there are 10 Bill sites across the US and UTEP is one of them. Bill is a core component of the so called diversity program consortium at NIH and the central goal that you can read in this slide is to implement and evaluate approaches to training and mentoring undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds to increase their participation and persistent in biomedical research pipeline. The program required PIs to propose activities that will result in institutional faculty and student development. I will only talk about the student development part here. And I will present to you how we mixed it in with the asset bundles framework that everything that encompasses everything that I have talked about before. So let me elaborate on that. Yeah, three minutes, Lardes. So the model is based on the premise that in order to support an advanced minority students in the scientific path, they need to develop a series of assets that take advantage of the talents of culture, they already bring with them. So in addition to needing materials resources to mitigate the financial burden of going to college individuals need to receive educational endowments. They need science socialization, they need to develop networks, and they also need to align themselves with family expectations. When we talk about educational endowments, it's very clear we're talking about courses and resources that support and strengthen their existing talents. But when we talk about science socialization, we're talking about activities that allows to be compatible with careers in STEM. When we talk about science of efficacy and science identity, that's what we mean by science socialization. We talk about network development, you all know what exactly what that means. We talk about family expectations and that means the fact that in some cases, there are interpersonal dynamics in families that either encourage or discourage their children from pursuing higher education and careers in STEM. So moving on. We have all of these student development opportunities listed on this slide. I'm not going to go into all of the details because I want to make them in with what we have in the asset bundles. So I'm going to move on here and show it. Whoops. Can I go back. There we go. So here I'm showing the connecting the building activities and the asset models, and you can see highlighted in different colors how some of the initiatives cross asset models, for example, a mentor research experience at a research partner institution is a materials resource and an educational endowment that also contributes to science socialization and network development. So it crosses all four boundaries. We currently have 10 partner institutions where we send students in the summer, and they are listed here for them are in Texas to in Arizona for our extra regional. And students go to those partner institutions to do research in the summer they do research on campus at YouTube during the academic year. And, but the students do it depending on their entry point so for freshmen students, they go for three summers so sophomore students go for two summers junior students go for one summer. How do we measure student success we use the hallmarks of success that was established by the NIH diversity program consortium executive steering committee. So the hallmarks not just for students but also for faculty and meeting here, the ones that I will talk about in the next couple of slides. Which are relevant. So, in terms of academic outcomes circling back to what we talked about related to Hispanic serving this are outcomes that where we use two cohorts of students, our full 2015 and 2016 entering cohorts, and by 2019, most of them would have graduated. So unless they entered in 2016 as freshmen this data is revised as we speak to include the 2020 graduation. But in terms of persistence, one of the hallmarks you see that first and second year retention was higher for buildings for build students, both in the first and second year of the university. In comparison with our comparison group, which were students who are at the top 25% of cumulative GPA in their first year. First time students at the same time that our bill students were first time students and students in the different colleges that the building scholars program serves. So bill students graduated with an average GPA of 3.66, which ensures competitiveness into graduate programs and medical school, as opposed to 31% of the comparison group. I want to make a parenthesis here to let you know that several of the students who in 2019 had decided not to go to graduate school have now applied and been accepted. But for consistency, I did not include those numbers here, because we will have to also update the comparison group. In terms of evidence of excelling in research and scholarship, our bill students from those two cohorts were co-authors 32 year reviewed publications. 23 of those publications were with their UTEP mentors and nine with their summer mentors. In terms of non-academic outcomes, I wanted to tell you about results about science, self efficacy and science identity development. And so students were asked to complete a survey that identified growth in those two areas. These were a positive and statistically significant. Well, I think I'm going to be booted out. So I'm going to skip this part and go to my last slide. I'm sorry about that. I want to say that Verna Myers quote says, diversity is being invited to the party and inclusion is being asked to dance. And I want to elaborate on that and say that inclusion requires dancing with different partners. And that has been shown by our program. So thank you very much for your attention and I look forward to the questions during the panel. Thank you, Lordess. It's evident that you've gotten so much great work done 15 minutes wasn't 20 minutes wasn't enough time. So in the essence of time, we won't have any questions right now, but we can get to questions for Lordess at the during the panel discussion. So our next speaker will be Dr Ellen Wang Autos, who is the director of the Sloan University Center of Exemplary Mentoring or USEM at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. We've got a long standing passion for broadening the participation of and fostering the personal, academic and professional development of underrepresented graduate students in STEM. Thank you Malika. And I'm just honored to be here to be among such amazing leaders in the critical work of enhancing diversity and inclusion. I'm excited to share about my perspective and experience in cultivating DEI both within the graduate college and within an academic unit so outside an academic unit inside. So I will brief overview of what we'll cover is top top really the context and the challenge of DEI work at Illinois. The structure of building the USEM, the University Center of Exemplary Mentoring is we, the acronym is UCEM and we use the term USEM. The talent at our USEM and the progress and DEI work that we've made both within the chemistry and chemical engineering departments and the impact that has made in the College of Liberal Arts and Science. Here in this next picture, it's an aerial view of the University of Illinois main quad. And so if you look at the terrain, it's very flat, and if you look far south is the south farms. And so during my first recruiting visit to Illinois 25 years ago. Several TV ads in the middle winter were focused on tractors seed and lawnmower and they were plentiful. And so this image burned in my mind of tractors. And it hasn't really changed but yet we have a thriving community of scholarship and research. But in terms of DEI you'll talk to any faculty member that that Illinois is geographically challenged. So it's hard to attract and retain faculty color in our campus and community. In 2015, we were offered amazing opportunity by the Sloan Foundation to become a university center of exemplary mentoring and we are one of eight USEMs supported by the Sloan Foundation, which is an initiative to diversify the US PhD degree holding workforce by increasing the recruitment, retention, and graduation of underrepresented doctoral students and STEM. So along the east coast going from northeast to southeast there's Cornell, MIT, Penn State, Duke, Georgia Tech and University of South Florida. And then there is the University of California San Diego, which is 75 and sunny and on the ocean, and then there's Illinois in the heart of the Midwest, and not a vacation destination spot and nobody water no hills no metropolis so that alone is a really big challenge. So when we launched the USEM in 2015 our aim was to recruit 50 doctoral scholars in 50 years. I mean sorry sorry not 50 years, 50 doctoral scholars in three years, and then the grant renewal to recruit another $50 the next year or a total of $100. The question remained was, who will come get to start the challenges that we face even just one factor, you know, in terms of the geographic. I'm looking at the infrastructure at the USEM and I've been sitting in many of the panels so I won't go too much into that but it does require commitment from the upper administration working with committed leaders at multiple levels, both at the campus, college and units, and also collaborating with allies and diversity advocates and champions within the department so that comes. That's the faculty directors of graduate studies, even the graduate admission coordinators. Also, in terms of our role is also to provide resources to increase understanding of implicit bias holistic review and best practices. And also, that the units at the buy in and commit to financial support and mentoring of our scholars. I started with 19 departments in two colleges in the College of Engineering and College of Liberal Arts and Science, and chemistry and chemical engineering happened to be in the College of Liberal Sciences under the School of Chemical Sciences and I'm going to share some more specifics on the gains that they've made because of their ability to improve and recruit some scholars. One thing that we learned as we launch the USEM is that the 19 departments have different cultures, different processes, different challenges in terms of recruiting in that as the USEM that we had to differentiate from other markets based on the department challenges so that could be some have challenges application yield others with the selection process and some with enrollment you know closing the deal of the students that they have admitted to make sure that they enroll in that they choose Illinois. Others is with retention and then inclusion is really not just the last stage but actually something that we are mindful of to try to promote and facilitate. So in selecting our Sloan scholars, we like many fellowship programs looked at academic achievement and research experience of the PhD is a research degree. But then we found really during this process because the students were already admitted, and then the department self select whom they want to nominate competition that the students were all nominated for academically excellent and they had research experience. And so we started looking more closely and taken a holistic report approach as a scholarship board into other aspects such as potential persistence and passion for scientific research. And really in the second third year we also were looking at sustained personal engagement with communities that are underrepresented in the academy and commitment to bringing that supporting those communities and to basically align what we want to be with our processes and so we wanted to select scholars who wanted to be part of the community and and build our community so that if you know a take home message is to align your process with with the mission or the values that of the community you want to create. So, to look at, excuse me. So we restart target actually exceeded it when you include the affiliates that are not official Sloan scholars that we recruited to Illinois and we brought in new talent to the University of Illinois and not just students who were already in the system. So, as we look at supporting the scholars, imagine yourself, what would you need. If you were the first in your family to embark on this new experience and assuming that many of you haven't jumped out of a plane, you know how do you know what equipment is needed in the air and on the ground, where are you landing in the jungle or the form field. And is there a guide to pick you up or is it something that you need water and food for multiple days. I think I use this example to kind of highlight the importance of equipping the students with assets and Lord said a wonderful job about talking about these assets and we're talking about just knowledge, navigational assets and social, you know, social capital. That is, that is an essential to graduate student success, a typical mode in which many universities use to recruit scholars to their from diverse populations to the campus, our recruitment fellowships. We've had those recruitment fellowships for many years and some data that I'm going to show later, they've kind of flat line but in our new USM program that launched in 2015. We offered scholarship supplements so they actually weren't stipends but the departments had to commit to supporting the students so long before their graduate career mentoring networking profession development and community. Our mentoring team comprises really a team approach where there's a research faculty mentor, a second at a faculty mentor who advises more on the academic requirements of the program, and it cannot be the same person as the research faculty mentor, a peer mentor or near peer mentor who has to help the student navigate and acclimate to graduate school, the department expectations and department culture, and then I consider myself part of the mentoring team as well. So any equipping talent, very common that we see in a lot of these cohort based programs is we have a summer on early affirmation program transition program to doctoral study. The first year onboarding for is not just a one off but actually a whole year process where first year scholars have to attend monthly meetings, individual development plan, regular check ins with the members of the mentoring team. We actually use the learning management system to have the scholars kind of self self guide and remember that they have to check in and also share of the resource that we have. To graduate student success skills, we're thinking about career success to so the students beyond the first year have to continue ongoing professional development. We've offered career coaching tips on managing up strategies for PhD completion and job searching. This is just example of how we set up the learning management system every scholar basically is part of my course for the duration in which they are a Sloan scholar so that's the entire time they're in the PhD program. And then engaging talent, very common to that I see commonalities with Lordess's program as well engaging talent in terms of networking, community building, we hold an annual conference every January to not only have professional networking, but the development and also it gives the scholars the opportunity to present their research in the poster session or lightning talk. Also, our scholars, some of them serve on an advisory board to really shape what the use them is it's not just what I think or even what the steering committee, many steering committee things but what the scholars want, we have a slack channel that we stay in contact with each other. Those two are 100 plus scholars 83% retention 19 have been selected for NSF graduate research fellowships to were selected for four of our new graduates 100 pushes to date but for but we have another three who are all graduating soon. And this is what I'm really especially proud of is that 35 of them are have made the list of teachers rank excellent collectively 79 times so the impact they make not only in research but in teaching is just tremendous. I want to share right here the percentage of US racial ethnic minority PhD student enrollment and chemistry at Illinois since it will actually before the launch of the USM and since then so looking to show you that a reference line is the dash line is actually the average of doctors awarded to underrepresented groups, and this is for the total graduate students degrees awarded so this is both domestic and international students so that is in chemistry about from 2014 2018 average about 7.7%. And so in 2011, the chemistry is pretty much level through 2014. It launched in the soft launch in 2015 and since then, up to our last academic year, the percent of underrepresented graduate students of the total student body and chemistry is now 14.7%. Some key on having served as director graduate diversity inside the chemistry department department, some key things that the department was working on were to climate surveys prior to that. Changing the chemistry GRE to be optional, participating USM in 2018 they hired a full time DEI director, I was previously part time, and then more recently that they dropped the entire GRE requirement. Five minute warning. Okay, all right and, and then looking at the percentage of US racial ethnic minority PhD student enrollment in chemical engineering. The dash line is the reference line of the national percent average of doctors award to underrepresented groups in chemical engineering which is around 5%. Just as a reminder, the denominator is all graduate students both domestic and international. And so this department was pretty much level or actually decreasing from 2.9% to 1.1% in 2015. And they didn't launch in the pilot case but in the first year where they recruited cohort, they exceeded the national average and increased their underrepresented student population by to 6.4%. And since then has actually continued to increase to now in 2021 where underrepresented students represent 16.4% of the student population. Some of the key features is that amazing faculty member and director of graduate study who was engaged and actively outreaching to students from underrepresented populations. Also, being responsive to some of the academic needs where the students who participate in the summer production Institute. And actually, she conducted some calls overview with the students just to not it's not a crash course but to give him his heads up in terms of the format, and the content that would be covered in their first stage of their qualifying exams. And then, finally, actually in about 2020. We eliminated the first quantitative calls exam requirement altogether. So it's a great success story and just really excited about what's happening in both the chemistry and chemical engineering departments. So to give you a picture of the impact of how these two units actually changed the demographics in the College of Liberal Arts and Science. So this is actually total enrollment so we're looking at total enrollment not percent enrollment and fall 2014, then total number of underrepresented students in the College of LES Sloan partying departments was around 32, and from by fall 2014, that number increase more than doubled actually is two and a half times increased to about 82 or 83. And so the orange represents the chemistry share of the students and the blue is the chemical engineering share of underrepresented students so how two programs can actually help change the composition of this physical science. The LES is really exciting. So I wanted to quickly mention in my work in the chemistry department and for 11 years that I had done a study in 2017 and wanted to emphasize how important it is to actually track program outcomes. We want to recruit them but we want to make sure that they graduate to and, and this is actually a graph, a bar graph of degree status of students who participated in what we started in 2007 the retreat for graduate women in chemistry, which happened the weekend before first day of classes. Now the reference line here is from the ACS Presidential Commission on Graduate Education, where the degree attainment in chemistry PhD programs back then was reported at 62%. So this is the blue line right here. And for students who actually did not attend the retreat. They actually had. I'm sorry, let me back up so the bars that represent that are represented in black and gray. Then our is attrition those who receive no degree or MS, or what we call MS my masters in science and teaching. So those combined would be counted as attrition and so what we found is students who did not attend this one retreat actually had about 33% attrition. But then if you look at the students who attended just the first retreat attrition rate decreased to 22%. And what this really the telling story is it wasn't because the first retreat was so fabulous that this is the silver bullet. But I think in working with in collecting this data over 10 years, what it offered is that the students had early access to building an early opportunity to build a cohort right at the beginning of graduate school, and that one event offer really helped reduce attrition in our chemistry program so that that is just an example of how it's important to track what is going on in the ground to be responsive and use data informed decisions to guide your programming in your program planning. I want to close with a quote from Kofi Annan, the seventh secretary general of the United Nations, and that young people should be at the forefront of global change and innovation empowered, they can be key agents for development and peace. However, they are left in society's margins. All of us will be impoverished. Let us ensure that all young people have every opportunity to participate fully in the lives of their societies. Thank you. Thank you, Ellen for that excellent talk. We do have time for one question. So I'm going to ask from the chat from the Q&A. Is there any difference in the attrition rates based on the retreat for domestic versus international students. I don't think there was actually a big difference in the participation of international domestic students we actually found curious enough high attrition among Asian American women that were US citizens that for some reason they chose not to engage and it was to the point where I could say, oh, they didn't show up and so I was mindful of I'm wondering why they didn't show up so actually most of the international students were actually pretty eager to participate in something like this. They're new, they're in a new country and they saw this as an opportunity to connect and make friends so I think among the students is really mostly the students who chose not to attend. Excellent. Okay, we can squeeze in one more from Theodore Kwaku Dai wants to know what does the disaggregated data on US racial ethnic minority enrollment at Illinois look like domestic black Latinx American natives etc. I do have the data I don't have it here but I did want to mention though, in terms of the international student population so national averages show like for example chemistry is about 40% international at Illinois it's actually about more around 33% international national data for the percent of international students in chemical engineering is about 53% and I think it's actually 50 is close to national average, but in terms of specific specific data I don't have it right right now. And part of it is when we talk about you know specifics of small numbers in especially early on in 2015 where we had one or two black students, we have to be careful in terms of finding any trends of that until we have a large enough data. Excellent. Thank you for that talk Ellen we enjoy we look forward to getting additional remarks from you during the panel. I have a few more questions queued up. So our next speaker will be Dr. Hobie Wheatler, who is co founder and CEO of Hobie's Dr Wheatler is a scientist and entrepreneur, a sensory expert, having been blind since birth he is committed to making the world and inclusive, equitable and accessible place for everyone. Well thank you very much. Yeah, it's a real honor to be here and Lord us and Ellen really excellent presentations. Just one housekeeping item, I'm having trouble starting my videos that the case for everybody is everybody off camera. Hopi this is Cassiah here, your video is on and it looks great. Oh my video just came on. Okay, great because it was it was off before thank you very much. Yeah, thank you it's really an honor to spare to share this virtual day us with with all these amazing speakers and I want to start out by just making a special thank you to the unsung heroes of today. Folks like Jessica Wolfman and her colleagues at Cassiah Clement and Michelle Bailey. I know it's not easy hurting us cats and you guys do a really incredible job of it. So thank you. Thank you very much. Today I just want to talk a little bit about, you know, about my experiences as a totally blind chemist and now entrepreneur. And some of the work that I think is really important for for us to do as we as we go through our careers. And also some of the importance of involving diverse opinions in the conversation and how solving problems for one group may may actually solve a big problem for for many others. So thank you for the little bit of hope is background slide if you don't mind Jessica thank you. Um, so I was born totally blind. You know, that's being blind in a sighted world is a challenge for sure. But not certainly not one that's, that's not overcomable. And my parents had and still do have extremely high expectations of me which, which really pushed me to succeed. And who's two years older is cited and was held to the same very high expectations that I was held to. And what was nice about our parents is they expected a lot of us but they did a lot for us and expected us to have those same high expectations of them in return. And they taught us early on that there was really no substitute for extremely hard work. Not because they didn't like, you know, they're want to hire people but because they wanted to wanted to teach us everything they knew, you know, we did everything on our house ourselves, all the repairs all the plumbing work all the electrical any any carpentry. So it was not abnormal, and we basically rebuilt our house. So it was not abnormal for us to, you know, go to school for six or eight hours and then come home and spend three to four hours doing homework and then work on the house basically until dark. I can't thank them enough for instilling those, those values of extremely hard work. I much like a lot of a lot of people, I think in who I, who I might might follow. I fell in love with chemistry because of a high school instructor. I had an amazing high school chemistry teacher. She was so inspiring, such a such a passionate thinker about chemistry and an explorer. It was interesting though because she would, you know, we started out the year I was in honors chemistry is junior. We started out the year with her telling the class publicly chemistry is literally everything it's, it's what you eat drink it's it's what you breathe it's it's really, it's what makes up the world, and the physics professor across the hall often argued with her that you know it was physics but anyway, it was she just told us that we should study chemistry and do whatever it is that we that we want and but really make sure we pursue chemistry and I actually was maybe one of the only ones in the class who actually wanted to pursue a career in chemistry. So I would talk to her after school and say you know how do you think I should do this as a blind person and she's, you know, it's it's a very visual science and I just don't know how you're going to succeed I think that's not practical and it's a waste of time. Yeah, but this is, this is what I want to do, you know you've inspired me. And I eventually thought, I've got to convince her somehow that that it makes sense for a blind person to study chemistry. And I went into her class I still remember this like it was yesterday it was the second week of the second semester, and I went into her classroom and she was coming in early, early in the morning for any other students arrived. And you know, I understand that you think that, you know, chemistry is maybe difficult or impractical for me to study. But I got to tell you, nobody can see atoms. So there's no reason chemistry shouldn't be a cerebral science and isn't a cerebral science and in fact, yeah we might use our eyesight to understand, you know, color changes in a reaction flask or whether whether a reaction effort vests is or anything like that. So let's think about NMR. Let's think about IR. Let's think about all these techniques that we use to view an instruments we use to view the chemistry that we've done. They don't involve eyesight at all, that involve us using instruments that can see at either lower or higher frequencies than we're able to analyze what's going on. So that made her a complete ally of mine and she is to this day. I decided at that point and I've always had the heart of a teacher. And by that I mean, don't mean that I like to know more than other people and, you know, be the be the professor that explains everything to group of people that's not what I mean. I just like to get people excited about things that maybe they didn't have excitement about or they didn't know they were they were super interested in, you know, beforehand. That's always been my goal. And I decided I wanted to teach chemistry. I wanted to change lives like my high school instructor changed my life. You know, I went on to undergraduate school at UC Davis, great institution and just had an amazing time in the chemistry department there. I was a nerd and I knew that I wanted to teach at the college or in university level. But I didn't know how chemistry was going to work as a graduate student. So I also got a degree in the United States history. I was assigned to graduate departments in history around the state of California, near the end of my undergraduate tenure when I when I met my would become my graduate advisor, and then Professor Dean Tantillo, you probably know him. Dean studies computational chemistry. And I was introduced to Dean by a colleague of his professor chair and Shaw. He was in an advanced organic synthesis class. You can say hey you know you guys should come up with a with a great technique you know and whatever you can in order for hobby to study computational chemistry. You know thinking of ways of building molecular structures and you know robots to build molecular structures and that sort of things very complicated and Dean and I said hey let's let's do this but let's let's get a 3D printer. So I joined Dean's lab in 2009 as an undergraduate researcher had a very successful first summer there didn't necessarily think that I would be attending graduate school at UC Davis and Dean's group, but with a lot of encouragement from from Dean and an encouragement from other colleagues I applied and was accepted into graduate school like at the University of California Davis studying under Dean. And while I worked with Dean, you know, we are the great thing about about Dean is that he just has an open mind, and he wants to make anything work and make it all make as much sense as possible to, you know, to all of us, and he really believes that by by working with one student and creating, you know different ways of making chemistry accessible to me, it'll actually become accessible more accessible to his whole group and we'll talk about that in just a minute. So I would say that my dissertation all of my PhD work was probably about 65 to 70% you know doing actual hardcore chemistry research and maybe 35 to 40 or yeah 35 to 40, 30 to 35% pardon me. You know, studying ways of making chemistry more accessible to me, because when Dean would present me with a project I would often ask the question. Okay, how are we going to make this accessible if there's a project that I really wanted to do that Dean approved. Before I embarked on the work it was really about how are we going to make this doable and accessible to me with as little sighted assistance as possible. And the ways that we did that are we're using 3D printing so that I could actually feel what my sighted peers were viewing on the graphical user interface. And, you know, when we run in Dean's group we basically do applied computational chemistry to investigate reaction mechanisms. And, you know, when we run a run a minimization or optimization, where we can see energy data which I could easily access using a screen, a screen reader, which speaks aloud. But a lot of information that we need to focus on as well as structural, and you basically would my colleagues would view structures and how they, how they change from from one optimization to another, using the graphical user interface but I couldn't do that as easily so I used 3D printing. We wrote a wrote a script for the group out of the Netherlands that essentially applied Braille labels of long length and bond angle and dihedral etc to our molecular models directly applied directly using the 3D printer. So I could essentially, you know, extract a model from the printer and view that literally the same information that my sighted peers are seeing directly from the quantum mechanical calculation. Just, you know, by feeling it in my hands. And that was really incredible for me. We also wrote a lot of in house scripts and did whatever we could to make chemistry accessible to me. What was hardest and still remains hardest is getting information from the literature into my mind, and then getting information once I run the chemistry from my mind back out into the literature. You know for me studying organic chemistry is really a process of visualization, and I've been visualizing things. Since I learned to walk for my survival as a blind traveler. I learned a lot about the fact that, you know, the process the mental process for me, I'd be curious to verify this in an MRI sometime, but I feel like the process for instance of thinking how to get from my home to the local bus station, you know, traveling because I do visualize everything is not that different than thinking about, you know, performing a for the craft say salation on a on a on a benzene ring and how the mechanism works for that. You know, literally for me, if I think about towns and college campuses and whatnot using meters and kilometers there's no reason we can't reduce those distances down to actions and nanometers and use the exact same way of thinking to navigate molecular structures. I've got a couple of friends who are who are blind astronomers and astrophysicists, and I believe they operate under the same argument you know if I think about the spaces around me that I interact with on a day to day basis there's no reason to increase distances of kilometers to light years and then use the same thing to think about cosmology and astronomy. And there are multiple ways to do this, I've always had the heart of a teacher as I said and I got my PhD in organic chemistry in order to teach really I didn't have too much interest in being a researcher, a lifelong read a career long researcher. And I have the honor of teaching a couple of organic chemistry class actually, excuse me, general chemistry classes which has always been my goal is to teach general chemistry and influence students to just get really excited about chemistry. I had the honor of teaching several chemistry classes in college in a graduate school and realized that students don't necessarily like to speak chemistry. They, they like to see pretty pictures and have things pointed at and see video animations and oftentimes they didn't necessarily read the, read the textbook so it was kind of difficult to teach, I spent ended up spending most of my time working money, by the way of paying assistance to create beautiful pictures and graphics and animations for me to show. So I was able to memorize how to present those coherently to my students. So it was really that process that that inspired me, maybe, maybe to think about, you know, I'm definitely a chemist and I use my chemistry every day in my work, but rather than teaching to think about going into a field of entrepreneurship. And now, now I've been an entrepreneur for about five years and a few companies under me mostly focusing on basically translating science into language that sales and marketing teams can understand, as well as, you know, really, really focusing in on the food and drink industry. So we're very excited about that. If you don't mind going to the next slide here. Thank you. So when we think about problems that we solve for one group of people. I think it's really important to think about how those problems that were that we're thinking that we're solving for one group of people actually help so many other people. So when I was a student in the chemistry classroom. And I would think about, okay, how do we, you know, I would sit up front and I would, I would raise my hand a lot and say, okay, what did you just write on the board. You know, and really kind of slow the professor down a little bit. Like what we realized early on is that that didn't only help me that really helped all of the students alike in obtaining the information better. So my style of learning and need to slow things down every once in a while, actually really benefited the entire class. Let's take this method of thinking and extend it and think about the curb cut which we're showing here a wheelchair ramp, which we're showing here on this slide. In the 1960s, and by the name of Ed Roberts who was a wheelchair user at UC Berkeley. And he and about 10 friends of his also in wheelchairs called themselves the rolling squad, and they would go to the mayor's office every week and say you know this is really a hassle, having to get around town, and really having to ask people to lift us or lower us from the sidewalk to the street level. It would be amazing if you put in ramps and the city of Berkeley grumbled at them and said now we can't do that it's going to be too much money and it's not going to serve so many people. There's only 10 of you in the town of Berkeley is 100,000 people how's this going to be effective. And with much more convincing and talking Berkeley eventually agreed to put in wheelchair ramps and people in wheelchairs were extremely, extremely pleased with this the state of California realize this is a very important thing to do, and followed suit really wheelchair ramps were were mandated into law under the Americans disability Americans with disabilities act in 1990. And what's amazing when we think about the curb cut which at Robert start would would really help him and a few others. And how many of us use wheelchair ramps to get you know street access or sidewalk access. Think about if you're pushing a stroller, I don't know what stroller operators did before curb cuts but it's a little scary. Think about people riding bicycles, if you're riding rollerblades or wheeling a roller bag from the you know suitcase if you will. Or if you're pushing a cart of groceries, all of these instances and many more than I'm not even thinking of now are instances where we, those of us who are not in wheelchairs, use wheelchair ramps are so called wheelchair ramps all the time I think they should be called pavement access rants because we use them for so much more than than just moving wheelchairs onto and off of off of sidewalks. So we think about one problem here we think about the solution and how the solution to one seemingly, you know problem that might help only a few people help so many more. I just want to take that into practice in our careers and the work that we do in thinking about how can we, how can we use how can we solve one problem to help many, many other people. And in our, in our labs and our research labs as we as we go about the work that we do, you know maybe when we when we solve one problem that we think is a very small problem. What a ripple we might be making on on everybody else around us so just thinking about that when we're being as inclusive and thinking as diversely and inclusively as possible when it comes to problem solving. I think you have five minutes left. Thank you very much five minutes heard. Next slide. I'm going to just talk a little bit about case study. You know I was able to I felt very blessed and lucky to make chemistry accessible to me, but as I was finishing up my undergraduate tenure I thought you know, what is, what can we do for that for the community around us to make science in a particular more accessible and available. And I worked with with my graduate advisor Dean, and a few others to launch a nonprofit called accessible science, which was around from 2011 until 2016 now it's really on hiatus, because my other other work really is taking a lot of my time, but while in graduate school all the way through, I hosted annual chemistry camps, which basically brought anywhere from 10 to 20 blind students blind and visually impaired high school students to a beautiful camp for the blind, just outside of Napa, California to perform hands on chemistry experiments instructed by both blind and sighted graduate student and professor instructors from mostly from UC Davis. The main goal was to show students that not not to get students excited about chemistry. In fact, you know that be very excited if we got students excited about about chemistry and the chemical sciences but, and we did, but really to show them, the point was really to show students can do anything they want they want and following path they want no matter how visual those paths or careers or disciplines and study might seem. We plan, you know hoping to serve only students from Northern California but after our first camp we had students coming to us from all over the country, and we've served students from from all over the United States now and as well as Mexico and and I take it upon my myself as a as a duty, and you know and something that I love doing to give back to the community and help anyone wants to study chemistry blind sighted or anyone else really follow that path and pursue their dreams. I just want to show you a little quick video clip of of what we did some of the work that we did with accessible science so if we can go ahead and play that video, and we're only going to play the first approximately 6090 seconds of it. Yes, one second hobby we're trying to pull it up right now. Chemistry camp is located here in the map of California. They have a camp up here called Enchanted Hills camp for the blind, and they have allowed us to use this beautiful property for the past five years. My name is Hobie Wettler, and I am the co-founder and director of accessible science, which is a nonprofit that teaches students that they can do chemistry, excessively, basically without the use of eyesight. We're going to be doing some really exciting things today. So really fun chemistry. We use science as sort of a lens to show people they can do whatever it is they want and not be held back by the disability. This year we have 13 students, which is the most we've ever had. I don't like it to be more than 15 because I like the students to feel a sense of intimacy. So, what we're going to do is we're going to play with things called Polymer. Yeah, so just a little example of some of the fun work that we just had a great time doing. A lot of those students have actually gone on to receive master's degrees and PhDs and some bachelor's degrees in science, but I don't think any one of our students didn't go on to at least get their bachelor's degree, which just makes me so proud. Let's go to the next slide here just talking about diversity. You know, I think it's the point I want to make about diversity and then I'll close very quickly is that, and it's very simple. A more diverse team is going to approach a problem with more perspectives and come up with a more viable solution. So in academia, I like to think of, you know, a more diverse group is going to be a group that thinks about things differently people from different socioeconomic statuses different ability statuses different ethnicities. You know, we're all going to come to the table differently and as long as we all share the belief and desire to work extremely hard and not lower the bar for ourselves or each other. A more diverse team is going to solve more problems more eclectically and really just come up with smarter solutions, which in academia increases the, you know, that basically the work that a group might do and papers we might publish but in business and I like to say this whenever a more diverse team is a team that's better at solving problems and really will increase bottom line, you know, and increase those profit margins so diversity is a is something that we should embrace, not because it's the right thing to do right now in this room but because it actually creates a better, you know, we should embrace it because because it's, you know, it's important, first of all, but it creates more better ways of solving problems and the ability to arrive at more succinct and and clever solutions if you will. I'll go ahead and close. I just want to thank the everybody else who's on this panel, and a special thanks to the chemical sciences round table of National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine really appreciate you. If anybody wants to get in touch with me I'm very easy to find at hobi weddler.com never hesitate to reach out it's all about the abundance mindset and I want to talk. I want to hear from each and every one of you. Don't be a stranger. Thanks for your time. Thank you hobi for that great presentation. I think we have time for one question so I'll take one from Linda non and she asked what technologies, can you identify as being big enablers for generating greater access to the chemistry space. Yeah, that's a really good question. I think the more artificial intelligence that we put together the better for my PhD work and when I do chemistry now I use a screen reader, which basically reads what's what's printed on the screen in spoken voice allowed to me. I really think this idea of AI is is so important. I'm actually working with a group called alchemy out of out of Michigan out of your more Michigan. And with them, we just created a system for blind and visually impaired students as well as cited students alike to create their own Lewis dot structures using manipulative on a whiteboard and a webcam that's actually looking down at these at these pieces of manipulatives, basically manipulatives or atoms, nuclei, lone pairs and single or double or single double or triple bonds, and the system literally speaks back what what it sees and what's been formed. So cited students right alongside their blind or visually impaired peers are able to create these, these structures and basically submit the electronic file to their teacher, which just shows exactly how you would would draw a little structure. We have big plans to increase this to molecular modeling kits and and beyond as well in the future. But I think that what we can do with artificial intelligence and our ability to to build models molecular models is truly game changing and will be game changing for all of us. So that technology that I just described is very easy and feasible, you know, to allow blind students to build chemical models that they never were able to build before, but also think about cited students who and cited chemists who might have a difficult time drawing things and really work better by moving things around with their hands and tinkering is software also really helps them. So I'm really excited about about that and about the future of what technology is going to bring to the chemical sciences. Thank you, Hobie. We have time for we have time for some more questions during the panel. So our final speaker is Dr Christine Grant. Dr Grant is professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University, and president elect of the American Institute of chemical engineers. She is committed to improving diversity and equity in chemical engineering. Some of her many efforts include starting mentoring programs, overseeing initiatives, DI initiatives and founding stem resilience, an organization that seeks to support marginalized groups and science technology and engineering. Hello, how are you can you hear me. I can Christine. Thank you. Okay, great. So thank you so much for inviting me to present today. I'm excited to be a part of this important meeting. And as I reflect on the comments that were given earlier by Dr stallings and President Robowski. There were two points that actually really resonated with me. The fact that every level of leadership. Somebody needs to take action. And each one needs to take strategic improvements to help in this creating a culture of inclusion. So my talk is called creative cultures, creating cultures of inclusion in. Oh, not chemical sciences, chemical engineering specifically. I had a tremendous opportunity to work on elements of this as the inaugural associate dean of faculty advancement at North Carolina State University in the College of Engineering. In that role I'm responsible for faculty development, reappointment promotion and tenure and post tenure review. So I actually get to be in the room with the department heads, and the faculty and the folks who are making decisions, and work with the Provost office to make sure that we're moving in the right direction on these issues. And also the first African American woman faculty member in the College of Engineering and the only one for 16 years. So what you're going to hear today is a little bit about my experiences kind of woven in with what's going on in chemical engineering and a little bit about what's going on with this issue. So do you ever feel like you're going around in circles on this issue. Wait a minute, didn't I just hear that didn't we just talk about that wait a minute wasn't I just there. Well the interesting thing is that for myself. I was actually just at a meeting that was held by the board on chemical sciences and technology in March of 2021, and hope he was on the panel with me and I want to be on all my panels in the for the future. Because he inspires me to keep going so thank you so much for your talk. So it was about diversity equity inclusion justice and belonging in chemistry and chemical engineering. And we got to answer a series of questions and have a really nice interactive conversation. The interesting thing though is that when I was a new faculty member over 30 years ago in the 1990s. I actually started keeping a list of the African American women in chemistry and chemical engineering. Because I wanted to know who they were it was kind of history, but I also wanted to know who they were, because that was going to help and empower me. So, the interesting thing is that there were some unique things happening at the intersection of race and gender. And some people have talked about intersectionality here you're going to hear me talk about that a little bit through this presentation as well. Well in 2000, my chancellor, Mary Ann Fox the late Mary Ann Fox, who's a chemist, sent me to a conference called women in the chemical workforce and some of you may have been there. And it was sponsored by the chemical sciences roundtable right. And there was a talk by Margaret Rosseter that talked about 1970 through 2000, a lesson golden age for women in chemistry. And if you've ever googled yourself, I mean do it see what what's out there, because you don't know sometimes the things you say are recorded somewhere. And so I actually did a search on myself a few years ago and I found that my comments at that meeting had actually been transcribed and written. And so I want to share a little bit of that with you because I thought it was really interesting. So what I said in this session was, I said I wasn't going to say anything. But if you look around the room, you will find that I am the only African American person here. So I just wanted to put that statistic in your basket, and put another piece of information in there as well. I think at present there are probably about 2200 chemical engineering faculty in the country. And I'm not sure how many men women maybe about 200 or 300 225 women, there are 226 African American chemical engineering faculty in the country, and five are women. So the show can say me and my four friends, and I've been doing this for about five years for about 10 years that's what I said in the meeting. And the other four women include an associate professor at Northeastern and an assistant professor at MIT. And there's a woman at the University of Iowa and one at the University of Maryland, none of us are full professors. And these are the statistics I keep well some of you are probably figuring out who those women were. And I just wanted to show you whatever happened to them. This was 21 years ago. Yeah, I don't know if you can see them all. G. Can you see the bottom of my slide hopefully you can. Tonya peoples, who's at Penn State, Gilbert, there being a who's the president at Olin, and Paula Hammond who's at MIT department head, and then myself and the late Janice Lumpkin who was a mentor of mine. And I was early on my career. So those are the five women that I was talking about 21 years ago. So I just think that that's really cool that, you know, I'm here back at the chemical sciences round table talking about this. And I can kind of look back and see what has happened to the people. Actually, at the same time or a few years later there was a another round table workshop minorities in the chemical workforce, diversity models at work now while I wasn't able to attend that one that was there Joe Francis go and Isaiah Warner. It's really interesting look who's speaking there, beating the odds preparing minorities for research careers in the chemical sciences, Freeman Browsky, for Bowsky so it's kind of interesting we're still talking about this. It's still interesting and it's still important and there's still messages to be heard. There are lots of different ways to look at what's going on. One of them is to talk about intersectionality. So one of my mentors Shirley Malcolm wrote a, an article many years ago, called the double bind obstacles for issues about minority women and stem. And I actually made this slide a few years back and had to change it because now it's 46 years after the double bind, and the article that was written the follow up article that was written between Shirley and actually her daughter was a co author on this said that studies show that the emotional toll of negotiating a landscape of obstacles for minority women still exists and it's still significant. And when we talk about intersectionality of course we can talk about race and gender, we can talk about gender identity we can talk about social economics we can talk about ableness or persons with disabilities so there's a lot of things. Obviously, I'm going to talk about a lot about being a woman of color, because that's what I am and that's what I know the most about but I want to make sure that you all know that I understand that there are a lot of different identities. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk a little bit about my journey. I really wanted to talk about the places where chemists and chemical engineers are already working together. And I thought I would do that by talking about my journey and how chemists have influenced me and how actually I got to influence chemists in this space so it's really interesting so I wanted to intertwine my chemical sciences journey in the context of practical and experiential aspects of creating cultures of inclusion. If I look at my background, not unlike Hobie my high schools chemistry teacher was the one who was actually really important in terms of forming my, my thoughts on going into chemical engineering. When I moved on to graduate school and then the faculty as a faculty member there were several people that were influential in my career and influenced my decision to go into the chemical sciences. However, it was the G program to increase minorities in engineering that got me interested in going with engineering that was when I was in high school. There were also summer minority introduction engineering programs that I went to with northeastern and that you mess amherst that also were instrumental in helping me to decide to go into chemical engineering, not just the chemistry. However, there were people who influenced me along the way and you'll see some more information about them later in my talk. Also the gem fellowship program. The GE forgivable loan and different fellowships and scholarships that I got along the way were also very instrumental. So let's look at my family and we'll go back to my family building what so my mother grew up in a segregated south back in South Carolina. And this is a picture of her with her siblings. And the interesting thing is that her oldest brother, my uncle Edward who's now no longer with us actually was a chemist. So I grew up knowing that my mother, which you'll see here was actually a biologist she was a biology teacher and my uncle was a chemist. And so it wasn't like farfetched that I would go into those fields. In terms of being an educator my dad was a music teacher. He went to Ithaca college when they didn't allow black students to live on campus. So he actually had to live somewhere with an African American family in the town. So I heard these stories when I was growing up about really going against the grain really pushing it and really trying to be what you wanted to be. I also had this extended family you'll notice here. That's me that's me yes on the couch with a little white jacket, you know with the little cones in your hair, we flip their hair up, you know, really cool. So, my first exposure to working in a research lab was at General Electric and the Research and Development Center in Schenectady, New York, which is where I'm from. And my first boss actually was a chemist. Barbara Heath I worked in the micro electronics group so I worked with a chemist, although I was planning to go to school for chemical engineering, and the gentleman who actually founded or was over the program Frank Starkey was a chemist who graduated from Brown University in chemistry. And that is Howard Adams sitting next standing next to my colleague Frank Starkey. Then when I went to graduate school actually my advisor, Eric Clayfield was a chemist he did surface and interfacial science. And so I got to work with chemists and interface with chemists, all throughout the way but I knew that I wanted to be a chemical engineer and they encouraged me in that regard. So, the message here is that both of chemical scientists, both chemists and chemical engineers, oftentimes the lines are blurred. It's important to celebrate the stories. The chemical engineering education did a, they do a cover story every so often on a faculty member and I was delighted a few years back. I decided to do a cover story on me, which I have been reading cover stories about people who didn't look like me for years. And it gave me an opportunity to really tell my story from the perspective of, you know, my parents and that's me. I tell it say that that's my first engineering project. And then that literally that's me sitting on my dad's boat with my little microscope and I still have that microscope I don't use it but I still have it. And then fast forward many years later I'm getting to mentor a woman at North Carolina State University, who is a textile chemist, who is going up for tenure next year. And so you know it kind of comes full circle and and that's really exciting to me. Now let's look at the discipline, let's look at the number so American Society for Engineering Education indicates that the number of bachelor's degrees for those in chemical engineering are increasing significantly so if you look between 2009. It was 5100 and 2018 11,000. So that's the number of bachelor degrees by discipline. So, obviously, the numbers are going up our country is increasingly becoming more diverse. And we need to make sure that we're, we're working on this issue and that's why we're having this meeting. There was a report that was done by the Association of Public and Land Grant universities that was sponsored by the National Science Foundation that actually looked at the status of engineering education, and I pulled a couple tables out that I thought would be would be good and I really appreciate my colleague earlier talking about chemical engineering and chemistry and looking at the gaps in the where we lose people along the way. This actually talks about the number of bachelor's degrees conferred in chemical biochemical and bio molecular engineering put it all together to Hispanics by institution and you won't be surprised that the top institution is a university of Puerto Rico, my ways, and then Arizona State University and you see San Diego. And, and what we know is that as if we look at the top producers of students of color in this particular instance, we shouldn't be surprised that they are HBCUs. And also we should not be surprised that they provide the, I don't like the word pipeline now but they are a pipeline to the graduate degrees so the majority of the students who are getting graduate degrees or high percentage of them are coming from our minority serving institutions and that's something that we're going to talk about a little bit later, because that becomes relevant. The other thing though that's interesting is that the number and percentage of bachelor degrees conferred in engineering to black graduates by institution, we need to look at the numbers but we also need to look at the percentages. So what does that mean, North Carolina anti State University according to the same report had the highest number of degrees awarded to African Americans. So 61% of their total. Now Georgia Tech, my alma mater actually had the second number 124 in engineering awarded to African Americans. However, it was only 5.8% of their total engineering population. So I looking back on what my colleague was talking about earlier, these percentages and what it means and what is the institution doing and is it in parity with the percentage of students that are actually at the institutions that are in this case, African American is something that's important that we need to look at. So mentors mentors everywhere weaving informal and formal mentoring into a robust chemical sciences mentoring quote I've had an opportunity to give this talk a couple places. And the thing I wanted to bring to you is that need is great in mentoring messy is normal. So it's not easy to plan mentoring relationships. I'm a really big advocate of mentoring. And I think that that's a critical element in terms of working with the populations we're talking about. We also need to do institutional change we also need to change the culture we also need to work on the faculty and we've talked a lot about this in this meeting I've really enjoyed the comments from my colleagues. At the same time, mentoring is critical. And there's a great content to study report that came out I think it was last year on the science of effective mentorship and stem, and I would encourage you to to go look at that because, you know, we can all learn something from that. The thing though about mentoring is that the mentor doesn't have to look exactly like you right and you'll see in a minute that most of my mentors do not look like me. And they were chemists and chemical engineers and sometimes in engineering in general. So it's important to understand that your mentor does not have to be to look just like you for the relationship to work well. It's more important to find somebody compatible. So as you know going back to what my colleagues said earlier it's important for us to understand that we each can make a difference I think that that President Robowski said that, and some other folks said that as well what can you do in your own space, what can I do to make a difference where I sit with the people that I'm working with. So at NC State, I'm fortunate in my department we have actually five women chemical engineering faculty and we held a session. I think it was a couple years ago, talking about successful women in stem, who we are and how we got there and it was for women and men students, it was open to anyone to come. And we talked about our journeys and I learned a lot about my colleagues and it was really interesting. So actually talking about the journey is important as well. Five minute warning Christine. Thank you. These are just some of my mentors and some of my friends and mentors who are chemists and chemical engineers. These two time Mitchell and Ron Brooks, I used to see them on Sundays when I was a little girl at church. So we grew up in that GE bubble. And one who was a great mentor and advocate behind the scenes of mine was Mary and Fox, who we just lost Harold Freeman at was a text is a textile chemist and mentored me at NC State, and you'll see some other folks in here too that are chemists and chemical engineers. My first exposure to a chemical engineer was Dr. Morris Morgan who was finishing his PhD up at RPI and working at GE where I worked in the summers. And so you'll never know where your mentoring is going to come from. And of course, no bache I got to meet a lot of people at that organization as well. Some of you are familiar with this this just came out recently CNN's trailblazers are really great article by Paula Hammond that talked about chemists and chemical engineers that are blazing the trail, and I had an opportunity to be influenced by some of those people as well. And within the American Chemical Society, there is a group of women chemist of color. And there was a conference that was held ACS conference in Boston, and what came out of that was a book called growing diverse stem communities, in which we work together and I got to interview or have statements from women who are chemist and chemical engineers so this is again trying to let you know that we are working together this is another one I'll skip this one. And it's not just chemists and chemical engineers, it's chemical engineers and other engineers so this was an NSF advanced grant you heard some about that earlier that we had to actually have summits and things for women of color engineering faculty who were from a lot of kinds of lens so in this space because there's so few of us, we tend to coalesce and come together around these issues. So it's important to celebrate mentoring this young lady here, just told me that she was officially a PhD chemist candidate in chemistry at NC State and she attended one of our programs when she was a fifth grader. So, let me finish up by talking a little bit about ACHE sorry my slides are jumping around here. ACHE is looking at doing we have a campaign called all for good going from the classroom to the boardroom including increasing inclusion at every stage of the career continuum. We work from, we have a K12 STEM showcase, and then we have rising star workshops for women in in industry and who are moving into leadership, and then leadership equity and engineering. I'm not going to have time to go through all these but we try to work at all levels. I'm going to give you. Sorry, this thing is really popping around here. I wanted to point out that ACHE also has programs for LGBTQ plus and their allies that we focus on as well and want to point that out. This is from the rising star of the women's leadership forum session that we had a little while ago, but the big thing is this is the big thing. Our big thing is this thing called FASI the future of STEM scholars initiatives and I'll end with this. This program was launched is our biggest new initiative it was launched in November of 2020 in partnership with the American Chemical Council and Kimors and HPC week foundation. And we have scholarships $10,000 a year for students pursuing STEM careers at HPC use. And so we're creating opportunities and pathways for underrepresented groups to enter and succeed in chemical and related industries. And I know that the term underrepresented is something that we're having conversations about in terms of the appropriateness of the term and we just put that out there right now. But anyway, so this is something that we're doing and we have. I'm sorry, this thing is just popping around here. In the 1,200 scholarship applications, we have raised $7.2 million in funding, and we have 151 scholars that are going to be in the first class of getting four year scholarships. So we're really excited about that. And then the last thing we've done in ASCH is we actually redid our diversity statement, the board of directors went through and had a lot of conversations and we, we changed it just earlier this year. It's called ideal inclusion, diversity, equity, anti-racism and learning. And I must give credit where credit is due. This is something that came about from a contribution from ASCH director Kato Lorenzen. Number of you know, he's, he's an amazing scientist and just done a lot of really great things. So the idea is that we are making that part of all that we do at ASCH. And the, in the trenches work is done by the societal impact operating council, which has a lot of entities underneath it, which include the LGBTQ alliance, the minority affairs committee, women in engineering and then disabilities outreach and inclusion committee or Doric. So having said that, I'll just end by saying that we are creating cultures of inclusion in chemical engineering and chemistry together. So thank you so much for your time and for including me in this important conversation. Christine, thank you so much for your presentation. Before I begin, before I transition to the panel, I'll give you one specific question says from Alester Allen says hi professor grant mentorship is invaluable in supporting students through the academic pipeline. What advice would you give a black person of color graduate student who wants to become a professor from a PWI to get plugged into your network and other supportive networks. There are a lot of places that are set up for for activities. I just said you can send me an email grant at ncsu.edu. There are a lot of programs that are sponsored by the National Science Foundation and other entities that are set up for that. The main thing though is to get and find a mentor and people always say how do you get and find a mentor. You just call somebody to send them a note. What I've done in the past is I've sent somebody my resume and say I'd like to get some advice from you, have a short 15 minute conversation with you. And then from that you see if there's a match and then you perhaps you perhaps form a mentor relationship. I would not call somebody up and say I want you to be my mentor because people are busy, people who are going to do a good job are busy. So just have a short conversation initially, and then it might grow into a relationship naturally. But that's what I would do I would connect with somebody who's doing what you want to do, and then kind of follow them around to, to figure out what you want to do. So to speak home around. Thank you for that. We will now move on into the panel discussion with our four speakers, a reminder to the audience to continue to submit questions through the zoom Q&A, and I will present them to the speakers. I'll, I'll, can I, can I address Rigoberto had a question in there, do you want me to. Ah, sure, we do like to repeat. I'm, if you want to repeat the question that he has. Rigoberto said that is underrepresented minorities the issue in question we have gone for you are POC because we felt that the latter was the issue in other words minorities. You know, I have heard both Rigoberto I, I just told some colleagues about about what you all are using because one of the ones that people are using is BIPOC. There's just so many things out there and I what I tell people is, I don't want to get stuck on the term I want to acknowledge myself that I understand that there are issues around the term. And then kind of move on to do the work and respectfully learn as I'm going along, because the reason I use you are M is because that's what I was told to use a few years ago when I was doing some work related to NSF right so now all my slides have you are M so I'm not going to go back and change all my slides and all my literature. However, I can be enlightened and learn to so I'm really excited about learning about the you are POC, because that was a new term to me today. I think this be a good question for all of our all of our participants. In addition to faculty mentors, are there good models for peer mentoring, a small group of upper class students want to be mentors for sophomores but I worry about having them take on too much responsibility and burden. I'm excited to jump in here to get started this is hobby. You know when I was an undergraduate, I, I taught myself and kept myself fresh on both general and organic chemistry by tutoring students who were in, you know, coming after me. Yeah, I think it's very possible I think it's going to work the students have to be dedicated the upperclassmen who are the mentors have to be really dedicated and and care about the act of mentoring it kind of can't be sort of forced on them it has to be chosen. But I think it's totally doable and I think it's a great, a great practice. One other note quickly before I handed over to the other panelists on mentoring. Nothing's possible without great mentors and you know if we're underrepresented minorities or or not, we need those great mentors to be successful. And I think we would all agree with that. But especially when talking about diversity and inclusion, having those mentors that we can look up to is so incredibly important. And what I, I just like to remind people thank your mentors all the time, thank them now. Thanks and 20 years from now, and whenever you can. I'd like to add a note about mentors to for peer mentors when we set up the usm is that it was not a prerequisite that the peer mentor be the same gender or same of the student of color because we just didn't have enough and also just be mindful that the service tax that students and faculty of color already have for mentoring so many people and so our peer mentors some of our predominantly fight but we engaged them during orientation and then you know again and training in the spring and all of them really just to really want to participate in D I work and, and I think it's important to stress that D I work is everybody's responsibility. And so the more that we cultivate that in our units, then I think that people are willing to step up to being mentors and not leave it to just students of color to do the mentoring. Also like to add if possible that we do have a model with a building scholars program where we have not seniors but sophomore students mentoring the incoming freshman class. We go through a little bit of training on how to be mentors peer mentors, and then they take on their assign a particular student to help them simply navigate their freshman year navigate courses navigate the program, which is quite demanding. And even the sophomores advice students on how to pick a research mentor a faculty mentor so it encompasses everything and it works really well so we do have a model if you if you're interested just contact me private message me and I'll be happy to put you in touch with the person that runs that program for us. Yeah I was going to say that there was a slide I showed that for our advanced program we, the subtitle was a set of peer mentoring summits for women of color engineering faculty, because what we found was that a lot of these women had never met their peers. And so, you know it wasn't about bringing in some big high marketing up to come and talk to us about what we should do. It was really about trying to connect in our networks to, to figure it out with a little bit of guidance obviously, but to really have to have that peer mentoring and colleague colleague ship to develop that so I think it happens at all different levels. Excellent. This next question is from Shannon watt, and it was addressed to Dr long house house but I think this actually something everyone can comment on. Thank you for an exciting presentation, can you please comment on what the reaction has been from faculty in the department to have made the changes you described. For example, has there been comments about reducing student quality or relaxing standards. I think initially for a particular department where they went from having very few students of color to skyrocketing to many, many more students I think initially there was a little bit of skepticism, but our students that we recruited were just amazing out of the starting blocks like in the first cohort of Sloan scholars and chemical engineering, one of them had a nature publication from his sublet summer work, and then the students since then in the chemical engineering, nine of them are actually NSF graduate research fellows and this is actually in the chemical engineering department so if you want to recruit top faculty come to Illinois because they are amazing and so I think you can quickly silence the naysayers like, oh wow, you know that's pretty impressive and. But I think there is always, you know, a sense of this myth of meritocracy that somehow a few test well on the GRE that that's going to correlate but I think the work of Julie Passalt and Casey Miller have really built a compelling case where they don't necessarily correlate to PhD completion and so I think that's excellent work that is dispelling this myth, at least of standardized testing that at least that one. And then I think I'm compounded with COVID that I think GRE has really been eliminated and I think has opened up the door for many people not just some students of color. So the definition that I was had the opportunity to participate yesterday in a meeting that's being held at the National Academies again. Looking at admissions criteria for colleges of engineering and trying to broaden the definition of what it means to be admitted to a college of engineering. And just to look at the test scores and the grades and they had examples of people who had done something different and there's a basically a three day workshop they identified some schools that were exemplars in that space, and they're having a conversation about that so. So another question from from this is from Peter doorhub Professor Grant show the slide with mentoring throughout a person's career, including faculty to university leaders. Do you have any examples of leadership development strategies that have worked well. Well. Hmm. So the answer is yes. The answers yes. But there's several different types that I could go on and on so there's the individual one on one. So I had a lot of really good mentors in, you know, when I said David Torell and Matt Torell and folks like that. And these are people who were actually in leadership roles or leaders who when I was going into becoming an associate dean of faculty advancement that I could have conversations with them. So there's that one on one developing relationships with people and then there are established programs where people can go and it's, I think it's called elite, music late and land there's like all these different programs. has some programs where people can go and get specific leadership training. There are some that are specific to a system that are really focused on that. I think the ACE Fellows also has something when they focus on diversification. So it really just depends. I think the best thing is for societies and organizations to work on those things, to take somebody under their wing and to mentor them one-on-one. That's what happened to me. And I would encourage people who are looking to do that, to create your own mentoring program, to have a constellation of mentors around you. That's what I had. If you look at some of those people that were on my table, national academy people, you know, really amazing people that sewed something into my life. But I wasn't calling them every week, right? But they were part of my network. So hopefully there's so many different ways to do that. I think this is a good transition. This was more of a comment than a question, but something we're discussing with the rest of the panel. Paula Garcia Todd says, I work in industry, and I find that underrepresented students have a good concept of mentors when they work in industry, but they don't have an understanding of the importance of sponsors. Influential people who will vouch for them behind closed doors, not necessarily play a mentoring role, but supportive role to help with career progression. So maybe we can comment a little bit more about how we can get students to find mentors and sponsors, and Jerry Richmond's up deck tomorrow. I know she also speaks of coaches, but the whole mentor triad. It's a great question. It's a great comment. Yeah, I think that's very important. You know, a lot of the people with disabilities who I've worked with, you know, they have people who believe in them and who motivate them and push them along. They're not as strong at going out and showing other people what they can do and getting vouched for. And I think, you know, getting those sponsors, what it really comes down to, and I think we can as good mentors, I think we can induce, you know, students finding and mentees finding those sponsors, which is a great way to put it by the way. I love the word sponsor in that case. The way you have to do it is to just be as good or better than other people around you. So it is, I mean, it's not a competition, but in a way, it's like you have to be a strong enough candidate that people are going to remember you when you're not there and talk about you and remark on what you've done. So it's really about just being dedicated and being the best you can possibly be at what you do. I think that's the best way to get those who we mentor to, you know, to get sponsors. And I think it's very important. So I don't want to, because I love to talk, so I'm going to let one of my colleagues go with them. Anything to say? If not, I want to ask. Okay, I'll jump in. So I will say that one of the things that people don't know, some people know, but I will tell this little story, is that Mary Ann Fox, who was the President Chancellor of NC State, a world-renowned chemist who just passed away recently, was an advocate. So that's kind of another variation on that, right? The sponsor and advocate. For me at North Carolina State, when I had some issues having to do with my lab or lack thereof, right? And I went to her about it just at some social event that they had for women faculty in her house with her husband. And she said, do you want me to do anything about it? And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm good. Years later at a meeting that we held at Cal State, she was on the President of Cal and women's former President Brown, current President at Prairie View. They were talking and she told everybody in front of everybody that after that meeting, she actually behind the scenes started advocating for me. This was several years later. She wasn't even at the school anymore. And I had no idea that she started asking questions. So there's the sponsor, and then there's the advocate. People who don't need people to know that they're doing stuff on your behalf. And I was just really touched when I heard that. Kind of touched by an angel sort of a sort of effect. Let's see. This question is from Linda Nahn. And she asks, within academia, there is a balance between research discussion and DEI discussions, often more uncomfortable. What advice do you have for PIs and facilitating such discussions within their group? How and when? So I don't think it should necessarily be a question of, I mean, I think when is an important question, but I think it should be embedded into the overall landscape of what a group does and can be had concurrently. I think those deep diversity inclusion discussions can be held often concurrently with research and academic discussions. One thing my group did a little bit is find a paper that's buying underrepresented minority. And let's talk about it. Let's talk a little bit about their background. It worked well. And just any way that we can embed that sort of line of thinking in parallel with our day-to-day work. And I really think that's the best way, not the only way, but the best way to make diversity, equity and inclusion a part of our day-to-day lives, both personally and in our careers. I have to agree with you on that one 100 percent. And in a recent conversation that I had with a sociologist that is an advocate for Hispanic serving institutions, she gave a presentation where she talked about ensuring that you have an inclusive curriculum. And I asked the question, so how do you make an inclusive curriculum in the sciences, specifically in chemistry? And she talked about, well, use examples of, as you're talking about your particular topic of the day, include the names and pictures of individuals from these groups that contributed to the knowledge that you're presenting that day. And I asked her, well, but you know, I'm familiar more with people talking about individuals that existed 100 years ago or 50 years ago. And she said, the idea is to bring in individuals of today, individuals that are doing frontier work from these groups, and you talk about them in class. So I have to agree with you on that one. I also agree with Povey's point that it should be integrated in terms of inclusive excellence that is not like one or the other. I think though, you know, faculty, if they are researchers and they don't have the expertise, I think there's a way to set a tone for the lab and say, oh, this campus is allowing training for graduate students to expand your skillset and cultural humility, cultural competence to support attendance where people are experts and to have them bring that back, bring, you know, bring that to the lab. I think there's a way to set a tone of no tolerance of discrimination and, you know, sexist comments and harassment and all that. So I think the PI can do a lot without having the discussion, but to set the tone and encourage a culture of inclusion and diversity and respect. So Ellen, while you have the hot mic question from Sapina Serupia, can you talk a little bit more about the quantitative qual exam and why its removal helped with recruitment and retention? So I'll give you kind of background information because it was just recently just removed the chemical engineering department. In order to recruit more people, they saw that because chemical engineering draws from other disciplines, like sometimes from material science or even chemistry or applied mathematics, what they found was that everybody coming in to the chemical PhD program had to take this quantitative quals in their 11th month of graduate school. And so if you came from a crossover discipline and you didn't take all the courses, then you were not necessarily prepared. And the question was, because it's actually a chemical and bio molecular engineering department, not people who are more bio molecular engineering, why were they taking, you know, a bunch of courses on fluid mechanics and all these other things. And so they, it was an interesting discussion. But then finally the faculty decided, you know, is it essential for their research or at this specific time? And so I think the take home message is that units have to think about the structural pathways into the department, especially those that are interdisciplinary and not assume that we're only going to take chemical engineering majors, because then you're limiting your pool by that decision. Or you make a decision, we're only taking people who've taken the GRE, then you're limiting the pool of people who've taken the GRE. And so I think that it relieved a lot of pressure too from the students and who in the year that it was removed, I think the 2019 cohort was celebrating massively in the previous cohort were so envious that they, you know, they didn't have to take the quantitative exam. Oh, excuse me, actually the quantitative exam was taken in their fourth month in January, not in their 11th month. Yeah, I want to add to that in terms of chemical engineering, the culture is different really than chemistry, right? The way we qualify for PhD is quite different. And I know some institutions are actually putting in a kind of a transition course, a bridge course to go into the chemical engineering graduate program. So if you come from chemistry or material science or all these different things that Ellen talked about, that you will be able to take this course that will prepare you for that. And also, you know, there's this ongoing conversation, what does it mean to be a chemical engineer, right? When I came to my department, it was the Department of Chemical Engineering. Now we are the Department of Chemical and Bio Molecular Engineering. Some people are the Department of Chemical and Bio Chemical Engineering. You know, some people are still straight chemical engineering, but they have bio in it. So I think that I'm guessing that in chemistry because you have like, right, PCAM and you have organic CAM and you have that there are these places where people can kind of fit themselves into. Chemical engineering is learning to kind of embrace these other areas. And I think we're moving to the place where we know how to evaluate people to become PhDs in chemical engineering or undergrads with their degree in chemical engineering. But we're working on that. And that view does not represent AICHE. That was my view. Excellent. We have a question from Kiana Jimenez. She asks, regarding the skepticism of bringing more POC students into a PWI program, do you think that we will ever get to a point where the skepticism is no longer an issue and the students are given a chance first? If so, how long do you think it will take to get to this point? Also, how do we try to ensure that we get to this point without putting extra pressure on the POC students to do well? I think I want to address that based on experience from my own students. It's having conversations with the mentors at those institutions to ensure that they understand the culture the students come from and that they actually talk to the students in the research groups and the incoming class about being open to the different cultures of the students that are coming in. So it's all about mentoring. It's all about training in diversity, equity, and inclusion. So because many times people at those institutions may not truly understand what is a microaggression by these groups. I have had students that feel very uncomfortable when somebody asks them, where are you from? Where are you really, really from? They feel very, very uncomfortable and I have other students that don't care. So it's making the individuals in the primarily white institutions understand where these students come from and be sensitive to the way they address these students and the way they tell students. I have had students also being told, are you sure you're ready for this program? Are you sure you're prepared? And you come from where? From El Paso? That type of issue. So it's training on both ends that will lead to that. In terms of a timeline, if we proceed with workshops like this where everybody is involved and everybody is interested in learning, we should be there in five years or less. You know, I think it's also just to add a little bit to that. I think it's all about mindset and with the right mindset, you know, everybody can embrace everybody else regardless of what they look like or what they sound like or who they are. And that's one thing for me personally that's amazing about being blind. I'm color blind. I don't know who looks like who. It doesn't matter to me. And I think the more that we can just paint that picture of less separation and more just unity in a homogenous group, I think that's what we have to remember. You know, we're all people. We all have two legs. We all have two arms. Whatever the case may be, let's just have a positive mindset and embrace each other. And I think if we embody that as leaders, I think students sort of take that from us and we can lead by example. I think we just bottle up what Hobie said and just inject it into everybody. Hobie, while you've got the hot mic, a question for you from Anna Durand. Hobie, I'm curious if you've looked at accessibility in space environments, have you experienced a gravity-free environment and thought about adaptation in space? Many thanks for your wonderful insights. Anna, that's a great question. I am a total space nerd myself and I've thought a lot about interacting and making anti-gravity environments accessible. I've not done it or been in an anti-gravity environment myself, but I really am thinking about the future of space travel and what that means to be accessible. And I really think NASA is doing, you know, historically has done a very good job of embracing different groups of different disabilities here on Earth. But I think that it's time they start thinking about accessibility and bringing people with different abilities into the astronaut program. I would love, if you reach out to me offline, I'd love to talk to you more about this and about this whole thought of accessibility in space. Thanks for the great question. Okay, so we have one from Veronica Salazar. She says, the National Research Council has postdoctoral fellowships available at federal agencies. The criteria used to evaluate these candidates relies heavily on aspects that we've heard of in this session and might benefit from revision. She actually shared a link for our review and we'll actually move that over into the Slack channel so people can check it out and discuss further. To increase recruitment and ultimately funding of a more diverse pool of postdoctoral associates, would any of the panelists be willing to offer suggestions for change? And I'll just comment that Veronica, you've nailed an interesting point. Someone mentioned previously the false concept of a meritocracy and we're looking at the issue of students moving from undergrad into graduate, but the postdoctoral position network is so built on relationships and who you know, this is something that definitely needs a look that everyone needs to take a careful look at. So I'll open it up to the panelists for discussion. So I said I wasn't going to say anything. Is that what I said the other time? I said I wasn't going to say anything. So in my day job, I'm actually a program director at NSF. I'm not representing NSF here today. However, I will say that we just funded a grant. It hasn't been announced announced, but it is in the public domain to support postdocs for engineering engineering postdocs, a large grant to American Society for Engineering Education. And part of the thinking around that was that this pandemic has really changed the landscape for a lot of people. And we don't want people to leave the profession, right? We also don't want people to not be able to get a job because of the way things are going. So there are lots of conversations going on in different spaces about that. And this program, this new program, which I could have found just by Googling it, right? This program is something that just came out, and that's exciting. But I'll ask my colleague, because it does appear to be kind of random at times. So at least random in finding it, but also random in the support. So in this case, people will have the support and they'll be able to walk in with support, which will take a little bit of the edge off. But I'll defer to my colleagues to talk about other programs that are outside of engineering. I actually think the NSF does and other fellowship granting institutions do a really good job of looking at diverse groups and bringing more diverse groups to the forefront. I didn't pursue my postdoctoral fellowship, but several colleagues and friends of mine, either who are disabled or basically under represented minorities, that you have to prove they're strong workers and really good at getting things done. But places like the NSF and the NIH have been extremely supportive of them. So I'm actually very happy with what I've seen in the past. I'm curious to see what Veronica Zalai is talking about in terms of revision, because I just tried to open the link and it says file not found. But I would love to find out what this is all about and what may need revision. Without reading it, I cannot offer any suggestions. I think I had to look at it as well. I'm not able to open it. Well, I think that, yeah, Veronica, if you can give us an updated link in the Slack channel, I think we can definitely have some more discussion. I think everyone wants to take a look at what's going on. And that'd be a great conversation point around looking at issues about these reviewing of any types of applications across the board. So we can take advantage of our Slack channel. With that, as we approach the five o'clock hour, I will take this opportunity to thank all of our panelists today. And earlier today, all of our presenters for just a really amazing session. And I look forward to tomorrow's session. So please come back and join us again tomorrow for the second part of this workshop. We'll kick off with Jerry Richmond as a keynote speaker. And we have a bunch of more interesting panel conversations that will follow. So thank you all for your participation and lending your voice to this discussion. Okay, we will now turn over to Ian Henry, Director of Research and Development at Procter & Gamble for some brief closing remarks. Ian. Awesome. I was just talking away, everybody. Thank you, Malika. As I said, what I'd like to do is just simply start by sincerely thanking all of our speakers, moderators, and audience members for their participation in the workshop today. This has really been an amazing first day. My head, quite frankly, is spinning from all the content that's been shared. And there are a number of really salient points that really stick out for me. In particular, this notion of flipping the conversation from focusing on deficiencies to focusing on merits and unique benefits from the different demographic groups that we've talked about. Also, this idea may be in particular in the world of academia that policy of the past that led to successful scientists aren't guaranteed to produce successful scientists in the future, especially in light of our changing demographics. And then another one that hits particularly close to home for me, being in the consumer packaged goods world, is that you have to believe that the goal of achieving diversity, equity, and inclusion is simply good for business. And that's something that P&G firmly embraces as well. So I really thank President Robowski for framing the problem, Dr. B, for bringing the data, for allowing us to stay grounded in the data throughout the day as we march through really our established programs and talking through the two separate parts. We look forward to reconvening for day two of this workshop tomorrow at 11 a.m. Eastern time. Really tomorrow we'll begin with a keynote speech from Dr. Jerry Richmond of the University of Oregon. She will speak to us about equity for women and underrepresented graduate students in STEM. Then following her talk, we will move back into session two, which will be a community engagement session dedicated to having chat conversations on Slack. Topics to be discussed include developing mentoring and advocacy programs, overcoming institutionalized barriers to diverse talent, preparing young chemists and chemical engineers for success, and more. Later in the afternoon we will move into our final panel session featuring four invited speakers that will discuss emerging programs and needs for increasing DE&I in the chemical sciences. We hope to see many of the audience members back tomorrow to engage in a great discussion throughout the day. And with that, I would like to adjourn for day one. I hope you all have a good rest of your day. Thanks for joining us.