Initiative Coordinator: Gary Cottrell
 
In terms of including more minority faculty in our Center, we have identified and will continue to identify minority junior faculty from other institutions who we will ask to participate in appropriate network meetings. We have also developed a simple procedure for incorporating these faculty members into our research community:
1) Invite faculty to participate in All Hands Meeting or a Network meeting and give brief talk about their research.
2) Have an initiative or project leader propose a collaboration (funded) to the initiative/project.
3) Initiative/project leader proposes the research collaboration to the Executive Committee.
4) The Executive Committee votes on whether to fund the collaboration.
5) These new faculty collaborators are allowed to submit a proposal budget of their own for the following year.
6) In order to facilitate this process, the Center will reserve a small amount of University matching funds ($30-50k) each year to fund projects immediately if they are of importance (and not have to wait for NSF approval for budget changes).
 
In terms of graduate students and postdocs, we will use the considerable diversity already existing at Rutgers Newark to attempt to recruit diverse graduate students and postdocs to our Center labs. We do not have enough funds in any one project to pay for a postdoc or graduate student, but we have two minority graduate fellowships promised to us from our Vice Chancellor of Research at UCSD that will be useful for this purpose.
 
Our plans for recruiting minority graduate students include the Faculty Partners Program, a mechanism intended to help us form relationships with faculty at minority serving institutions. In California, there are a large number of minority serving institutions in the form of the state university system, and in neighboring states, there are a large number of Hispanic serving institutions. We will first concentrate our efforts on these by traveling there and giving talks in order to meet the faculty, for the purpose of inviting them for a two-day visit to our Center. It is through personal relationships that faculty at these institutions will begin to encourage their students to apply to us for graduate school.
 
Our plans for recruiting minority undergraduates center on two aspects of our program: 1) our partnership with the Preuss school, a 72% underrepresented minority serving charter school on campus, and 2) the Reach for Tomorrow program, which brings inner city and other minority high school students to UCSD (and other campuses) for an intensive one to two week program.  Our plans are to work with the new Preuss principal, Scott Barton, a member of our Executive Committee, to expand the number of Preuss students who are either in our labs or mentored by members of our center.

 

Back to Center Initiatives Page