Scientific Societies Fostering Inclusive Scientific Environments through Travel Awards: Current Practices and Recommendations.

Scientific Societies Fostering Inclusive Scientific Environments through Travel Awards: Current Practices and Recommendations. CBE Life Sci Educ. 2020 Jun;19(2):es3 Authors: Segarra VA, Vega LR, Primus C, Etson C, Guillory AN, Edwards A, Flores SC, Fry C, Ingram SL, Lawson M, McGee R, Paxson S, Phelan L, Suggs K, Vuong E, Hammonds-Odie L, Leibowitz MJ, Zavala M, Lujan JL, Ramirez-Alvarado M Abstract Diversity-focused committees continue to play essential roles in the efforts of professional scientific societies to foster inclusion and facilitate the professional development of underrepresented minority (URM) young scientists in their respective scientific disciplines. Until recently, the efforts of these committees have remained independent and disconnected from one another. Funding from the National Science Foundation has allowed several of these committees to come together and form the Alliance to Catalyze Change for Equity in STEM Success, herein referred to as ACCESS. The overall goal of this meta-organization is to create a community in which diversity-focused committees can interact, synergize, share their collective experiences, and have a unified voice on behalf of URM trainees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. In this Essay, we compare and contrast the broad approaches that scientific societies in ACCESS use to implement and assess their travel award programs for URM trainees. We also report a...
Source: CBE Life Sciences Education - Category: Cytology Authors: Tags: CBE Life Sci Educ Source Type: research