Mentoring Program to Combat Isolation ISU ADVANCE Scholar Program

(formerly the ISU ADVANCE External Mentoring Program) ADVANCE Scholar Program

The ISU ADVANCE Scholar Program is intended to enhance the recruitment, retention and advancement of women faculty of color in STEM disciplines. The objective is to facilitate mentoring and collaborative relationships between ISU STEM women faculty of color and eminent scholars in their fields. In Year 4, we focused on recruiting four new

underrepresented minority women faculty to the program. The target audiences are ISU tenure-eligible faculty members as well as mid-career (tenured) faculty members who are nearing critical transition points in their careers. Reciprocal campus visits for the ISU Advance Scholars and Eminent Scholars are arranged and funded. Co-PI Dr. Flo Hamrick coordinated the program in Year 4.

Activities in Year 4

• Contacted all eligible faculty members (assistant and associate professors in STEM departments), met with current Scholars and six additional prospective Scholars to discuss program specifics and invite their participation.

• Confirmed participation of four returning and four new 2009-2010 ISU ADVANCE Scholars.

• Increased program participation to a total of eight ISU faculty members (including 1 African American, 3 Latina/Hispanic women)

• Collaborated with Graduate Assistant Ms. Trina Ramirez in updating website

resources and coordinating Dr. Caroline S.V. Turner’s ISU visit and guest lecture. Dr. Turner met with four ISU ADVANCE Scholars for dinner during her visit.

• Coordinated two luncheon gatherings of ISU ADVANCE Scholars to provide opportunities for peer mentoring.

Findings/Results

• Fivetrips to ISU by Eminent Scholars and seven trips by ISU ADVANCE Scholars to confer with Eminent Scholars and present their research. Three additional trips are scheduled for Summer 2010.

• ISU ADVANCE representatives attended the presentations at ISU to greet the Eminent Scholars and visit with ISU ADVANCE Scholars.

Evaluation

Five ADVANCE Scholar Program pairs (ISU ADVANCE Scholars and Eminent Scholars in their disciplines or specialty areas) participated in the ISU ADVANCE Scholar Program during 2008-2009, the inaugural year of the program. By the first week in June 2009, three Eminent Scholars had visited Iowa State University and three ISU ADVANCE Scholars had visited their Eminent Scholars’ institutions. During summer 2009, the five ISU ADVANCE Scholars described the nature of their

engagements in the ADVANCE Scholar Program. The ISU ADVANCE Scholar Program website maintains detailed information about presentations and visits sponsored by the ADVANCE Scholar Program. Summary highlights reported by ISU ADVANCE Scholars include:

• Receiving career advice, mentoring, encouragement, and funding source advice from Eminent Scholars.

• Engaging in reciprocal e-mail and/or phone contacts with Eminent Scholars. • Collaborating on funding proposals with Eminent Scholars and/or reviewing draft

funding proposals and manuscripts with Eminent Scholars. • Networking with Eminent Scholars’ colleagues.

• Collaborating in laboratory work and/or research-related interactions with Eminent Scholars’ postdocs, graduate students, and staff members.

• Hosting Eminent Scholars’ ISU visits as part of departmental seminar/colloquium series.

All five ISU ADVANCE Scholars asked to continue participation into 2009-2010. The detailed evaluation summary can be found in Appendix 4.

Working toward Sustainability

• Since the participating faculty members are active scholars and maintain busy schedules, submitting advance documentation of their plans for Scholar Program travel can be neglected in favor of addressing more immediate priorities. More frequent e-mail reminders of the necessity to provide the ISU ADVANCE Office with travel estimates and dates – along with electronic copies of the relevant forms – have increased overall responsiveness.

• International travel by some ADVANCE Scholars was supported yet also resulted in inequitable allocations among the ADVANCE Scholar pairs. Internal sources of matching or supplemental funding for faculty members’ travel have declined because of current resource constraints at ISU. In response, the Scholar Program has

established a set budget for ADVANCE Scholar travel (i.e., $3000 per year per Scholar pair). In order to provide a level of flexibility, allowable expenses that exceed this budget may be deducted from the pair’s allocation for the following year.

• With the increase in Scholar pairs from five to nine in 2009-2010 (i.e., from a total of 10 participants to 18), the ISU ADVANCE program assistant’s work coordinating travel arrangements and providing logistical support for trips has become unwieldy. Accordingly, staff members who coordinate faculty travel in academic departments (in collaboration with the ISU ADVANCE Scholars) will be responsible for these tasks. The ISU ADVANCE program assistant will process travel reimbursements as well as honoraria for Eminent Scholars, and she will monitor planned and actual expenditures.

• We discovered that one category of otherwise eligible Eminent Scholars – federal research lab or agency staff members – are prohibited from accepting honoraria and traveling on ISU ADVANCE grant funds. However, this did not pose an impediment to a current Eminent Scholar’s agreement to participate in the Program, and the paired ISU ADVANCE Scholar’s travel funds were not affected. Consequently, senior faculty members or senior research scientists may appreciate the honorarium and travel support, but these benefits may or may not play pivotal roles in their decision to participate in this sort of program.

• Finally, two of the five 2008-2009 ISU ADVANCE Scholars renewed their participation for the current year yet selected new Eminent Scholars after

determining that their initial Eminent Scholars were less suitable matches. All parties in this situation were able to bow out gracefully, and the stated one-year commitment for ADVANCE-Eminent Scholar matches may well have facilitated the ADVANCE Scholars’ ending the formal relationship. This one-year commitment with an option for renewal appears to be a desirable feature for a program centered on fostering mutually-beneficial collaborations, networking, and mentoring.

Eminent Scholar Lectures at Iowa State University during Year 4: Diophantine Equations and Periods

Delivered as an ISU Department of Mathematics Colloquium Address, April 2, 2009. Eminent Scholar: Dr. Henri Darmon, James Mc McGill Professor, Department of

Mathematics, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

(ISU ADVANCE Scholar: Dr. Ling Long, Assistant Professor of Mathematics) Omega 3 Fatty Acids in Neural Development and Function

Delivered as an ISU Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition Seminar May 13, 2009.

Eminent Scholar: Dr. Sheila Innis, Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics & Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, Foods, Nutrition and Health, Child and Family Research Institute, Univ. of British Columbia

(ISU ADVANCE Scholar: Dr. Manju Reddy, Associate Professor of Food Science and Human Nutrition)

Graduate Education: Preparing for a Successful Career

Delivered as an ISU Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition Seminar, September 2, 2009

Eminent Scholar: Dr. Faye Dong, Professor and Chair, Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

(ISU ADVANCE Scholar: Dr. Toni Wang, Associate Professor of Food Science and Human Nutrition)

The Secret Life of Inbreeders: How a Model Met Its Match

Delivered as a Department of Agronomy/Seed Science Center Guest Seminar, October 19, 2009

Eminent Scholar: Dr. Susan J. Lolle, Associate Professor, Department of Biology, University of Waterloo, Canada

(ISU ADVANCE Scholar: Dr. Susana Goggi, Associate Professor, Department of Agronomy/Seed Science Center)

Nu Frontiers in Particle Physics

Delivered as a Department of Physics and Astronomy Colloquium, March 22, 2010 Eminent Scholar: Dr. Bonnie Fleming, Horace D. Taft Associate Professor of Physics,

Yale University

(ISU ADVANCE Scholar: Dr. Mayly Sanchez, Assistant Professor of Physics) ISU ADVANCE Scholar Lectures presented during Year 4:

Protecting Multicast Sessions in WDM Optical Networks

Delivered at the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Computer Science, April 9, 2009

ISU ADVANCE Scholar: Dr. Lu Ruan, Associate Professor of Computer Science (Eminent Scholar: Dr. Lixia Zhang, Professor of Computer Science, University of

California, Los Angeles)

Noncongruence Modular Forms and Modularity

Delivered as part of the Québec-Vermont Number Theory Seminar, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, April 23, 2009

ISU ADVANCE Scholar: Dr. Ling Long, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Iowa State University

(Eminent Scholar: Dr. Henri Darmon, James Mc McGill Professor, Department of Mathematics, McGill University, Montreal, Canada)

Recent Development and Study of Self-Consolidating Concrete for Slip Form Construction

Delivered as part of the 27th Microlab Colloquium, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, May 28, 2009.

ISU ADVANCE Scholar: Dr. Kejin Wang, Associate Professor of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering

(Eminent Scholar: Dr. Klaas Van Bruegel, Professor, Delft University of Technology) Reverse Zoonosis of Pandemic H1N1 Influenza Virus in Cats: a Sero-Molecular

Epidemiological Study*

Delivered at the International Symposium on Neglected Influenza Viruses Conference, Amelia Island, Florida, February 3-5, 2010 (Conference dates)

ISU ADVANCE Scholar: Dr. Jessie Trujillo, Assistant Professor, Center for Advanced Host Defenses, Immunobiotics and Translational Comparative Medicine, College of Veterinary Medicine

(Eminent Scholar: Dr. Richard J. Webby, Associate Member, St. Jude Faculty, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee)

Some Results on Supercongruences

Delivered as part of the workshop series “Arithmetic and Geometry of Algebraic Varieties” at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. March 2-7, 2010 (Meeting dates)

ISU ADVANCE Scholar: Dr. Ling Long, Associate Professor of Mathematics. (Eminent Scholar: Dr. Henri Darmon, James Mc McGill Professor, Department of

Mathematics, McGill University, Montreal, Canada) Lipid Chemistry in Food, Energy and Art Applications

Delivered as a Food Science and Human Nutrition Graduate Seminar, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, March 5, 2010

ISU ADVANCE Scholar: Dr. Toni Wang, Associate Professor of Food Science and Human Nutrition

(Eminent Scholar: Dr. Faye Dong, Professor and Chair, Food Science and Human Nutrition, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

Genome Fluidity in Soybeans and Its Importance to Plant Adaptation

Lecture presented as a Department of Biology Seminar, University of Waterloo, Canada, March 26, 2010

ISU ADVANCE Scholar: Dr. Susana Goggi, Associate Professor, Department of Agronomy, Seed Science Center

(Eminent Scholar: Dr. Susan J. Lolle, Associate Professor of Biology, University of Waterloo, Canada)

Summer 2010 trips are planned involving the following Scholar Program pairs: Dr. Malika Jeffries-EL, Chemistry

(Eminent Scholar) Dr. Timothy Swager, MIT Dr. Mayly Sanchez, Physics and Astronomy

(Eminent Scholar) Dr. Bonnie Fleming, Yale Dr. Manju Reddy, Food Science and Human Nutrition

(Eminent Scholar) Dr. Bo Lönnerdal, UC Davis C. Program Management and Evaluation