1. Nina Leonhardt
  2. AGEP Coordinator
  3. NSF AGEP New York (Long Island) Primarily Undergraduate Institution Alliance's (NY-PUI)
  4. https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/cie/agep/
  5. Suffolk County Community College
  1. Erwin Cabrera
  2. Research Faculty / Director / PI
  3. NSF AGEP New York (Long Island) Primarily Undergraduate Institution Alliance's (NY-PUI)
  4. https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/cie/agep/
  5. Farmingdale State College
  1. Candice Foley
  2. Co PI NSF AGEP PUI
  3. NSF AGEP New York (Long Island) Primarily Undergraduate Institution Alliance's (NY-PUI)
  4. https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/cie/agep/
  5. Stony Brook University
  1. Wesley Francillon
  2. https://www.linkedin.com/in/wesley-francillon-2388905
  3. AGEP PI/Assistant Professor
  4. NSF AGEP New York (Long Island) Primarily Undergraduate Institution Alliance's (NY-PUI)
  5. https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/cie/agep/
  6. Suffolk County Community College
  1. Lisa Ospitale
  2. https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-ospitale-21566213/
  3. Program Coordinator
  4. NSF AGEP New York (Long Island) Primarily Undergraduate Institution Alliance's (NY-PUI)
  5. https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/cie/agep/
  6. Stony Brook University
  1. Kenneth White
  2. http://www.bnl.gov/education
  3. Manager/NSF AGEP PUI Co-PI
  4. NSF AGEP New York (Long Island) Primarily Undergraduate Institution Alliance's (NY-PUI)
  5. https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/cie/agep/
  6. Brookhaven National Laboratory
  1. Karian Wright
  2. https://www.linkedin.com/in/karian-wright-11221923/
  3. Assistant Dean for Diversity and Inclusion, Graduate School | Director of the Center for Inclusive Education | Co-PI
  4. NSF AGEP New York (Long Island) Primarily Undergraduate Institution Alliance's (NY-PUI)
  5. https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/cie/agep/
  6. Stony Brook University
Public Discussion

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  • Icon for: Lisa Ospitale

    Lisa Ospitale

    Co-Presenter
    Program Coordinator
    May 9, 2022 | 05:46 p.m.

    Thanks so much for visiting the NY-PUI Alliance’s AGEP Video. We welcome comments and questions on all aspects of our project! Our video focuses on our unique partnership with Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and the integral component they are to our Alliance. Our video demonstrates how partnerships with FFRDCs create new opportunities to broaden the participation of faculty and students alike through research, teaching, and mentoring thereby providing invaluable multifaceted resources to enhance their research and employment goals. Some questions that we would love input on are:

    How else do you believe we can uniquely partner with Brookhaven National Lab to provide additional learning and mentoring experiences for our Dissertators? 

    Do you currently partner with an FFRDC? If so, what resources have they provided to your program and participants?

    We look forward to your comments, feedback, and questions. Thank you for visiting!

     
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    Iris Wagstaff
    Sarah Haavind
  • Azad Gucwa

    Higher Ed Faculty
    May 10, 2022 | 07:55 a.m.

    Thank you for taking the time to view our video showcase. It has been an honor and a pleasure working with this team to further the mission of increasing diversity at primarily undergraduate institutions. 

    Please leave a comment to let us know you stopped by and if you have any feedback for our program. We are looking forward to hearing from you!

     
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    Iris Wagstaff
  • Azad Gucwa

    Higher Ed Faculty
    May 10, 2022 | 07:55 a.m.

    Thank you for taking the time to view our video showcase. It has been an honor and a pleasure working with this team to further the mission of increasing diversity at primarily undergraduate institutions. 

    Please leave a comment to let us know you stopped by and if you have any feedback for our program. We are looking forward to hearing from you!

  • Icon for: Jeff Milbourne

    Jeff Milbourne

    Facilitator
    STEM Coordinator-Writing and Learning Center
    May 10, 2022 | 03:43 p.m.

    Thanks all for your video and your project. I'm a big fan of research experiences (particularly authentic experiences at a place like BNL) as both a teaching tool and a career development/pathway tool, and this project seems to create some great experiences for both undergraduate and graduate students. 

    Mentorship is an important component of any research experience, so I'm curious how the project team thinks about/structures mentorship in the project. You referenced using the scholars to help mentor undergraduates (which is great); who and how are the scholars supported/mentored? 

    Also, from a programmatic impact standpoint, how are you thinking about project outcomes? You've got some great examples of scholars who have gone into roles as professors; I'd be curious to hear a little more about what impacts you've explored, and what you plan to explore moving forward. 

     
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  • Icon for: Lisa Ospitale

    Lisa Ospitale

    Co-Presenter
    Program Coordinator
    May 10, 2022 | 06:16 p.m.

    Hi Jeff, thanks for your post. Mentorship is an integral component of our current project. Our dissertators not only have their research mentors, but they also have a teaching mentor, a near-peer mentor, and an alumni mentor that they are paired with. The teaching mentor is there to support their microteaching experiences and to provide additional pedagogy support. The near-peer and alumni mentors are there to support professionally and personally. Many times the conversations and mentoring are based on shared stories or an understanding of what the fellow is going through within their labs, graduate studies, or life.  The relationships continue throughout the time they are in the program as well as up to 3 years post-graduation, many have become friends for life.  

    Our overall program goal is to develop, implement, study, institutionalize, evaluate and disseminate a model focusing on career development for historically underrepresented minority (URM) doctoral degree students in STEM, who successfully transition into early-career STEM faculty positions at predominantly undergraduate institutions (PUIs), or who enter postdoctoral STEM scholar positions and then transition into early-career STEM faculty positions at PUIs. 

    We are now in the process of considering what our next project will be and what impact we want to make in the future, these are conversations we are currently having and in the early stages of developing our future plans.

    What we are introducing through our current project is an "AGEP Academy" and this is for our graduate students that fit the AGEP ritceria but are not yet dissertators. This program will focus on career exploration with an emphasis on academia. I hope this answers all your questions. Thanks for watching and for engaging us.

     
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  • Icon for: Nina Leonhardt

    Nina Leonhardt

    Lead Presenter
    AGEP Coordinator
    May 10, 2022 | 06:27 p.m.

    Thank you for your comments and thoughtful questions.

    Mentoring is central to our project. Fellows are matched with teaching mentors at the PUIs through a comprehensive process. It includes interviews with the fellows to understand their  learning and communication styles. Interviews also insights into the value each scholar places on mentoring.  In addition to teaching mentors, scholars are also paired with mentors at BNL, alumni mentors and, of course, research mentors.

    Our first cohort was formed as COVID led to extensive closures here in New York, leading to delays in research completion for most of our AGEP fellows. One fellow who earned her doctorate accepted a post-doc position with a national laboratory. Three fellows from this cohort have taught ( or will this summer) as adjuncts at our PUIs.

    We are looking at how mentoring relationships are maintained and valued after the micro-teaching experience. Our thinking, which is reflected in the literature, is that such sustained relationships are essential to early career faculty.

  • Icon for: Jeff Milbourne

    Jeff Milbourne

    Facilitator
    STEM Coordinator-Writing and Learning Center
    May 10, 2022 | 06:55 p.m.

    That sounds like a great constellation of support/mentorship for your fellows, particularly the way you've structured support along different dimensions (e.g., teaching mentoring as distinct from research mentorship). 

    Sorry to hear about covid-related problems, although that seems to be the case for all of us over the last two years, trying to do our best in an impossible set of circumstances.

    Mentorship maintenance over time also makes sense for early-faculty success. Anecdotally, I've seen examples of how mentorship, or the lack thereof, can have a huge impacts early on. 

     
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    Iris Wagstaff
  • Icon for: Nina Leonhardt

    Nina Leonhardt

    Lead Presenter
    AGEP Coordinator
    May 10, 2022 | 07:37 p.m.

    Thanks again for your comments. 

  • Icon for: Sarah Haavind

    Sarah Haavind

    Facilitator
    Senior Research Project Manager
    May 11, 2022 | 02:32 p.m.

    Hello Nina, Lisa and AGEP team! This seems like a terrific project, particularly with the mentoring aspects in place. I really appreciate the "constellation" of mentoring supports as Jeff describes it, and can see how moving beyond just one-to-one can be a positive shift to enhance potential. Not to mention the concept of connecting aspiring academics directly with FFRDC labs such as BNL. So cool. I would love to hear more about where you are seeing any trends related to which mentoring partnerships unfold most easily with the least structure or intervention and maybe which types might require the most scaffolding overall? Have you set measures of success on the accountability side, with the mentors that is, and if so can you share more about that? Thanks in advance for your thoughts. I also love your "AGEP Academy" idea. Wow !

  • Icon for: Lisa Ospitale

    Lisa Ospitale

    Co-Presenter
    Program Coordinator
    May 11, 2022 | 03:37 p.m.

    Hi Sarah, thank you for your comments and support and great questions as well. This year in particular, with in-person meetings resuming, we have seen tremendous growth in the relationships between teaching mentors and mentees. They meet regularly and complete a reflection on their interactions, as mentioned in a previous comment, some of these relationships have led to our fellows becoming adjuncts. The reflections help keep the mentors accountable and assist us as an Alliance to see if there are any issues we need to address. The mentor relationship that I believe has been the most difficult to navigate has been the near-peer/alumni relationships and that is because many of them are long-distance relationships. Developing those pairs and matching them appropriately take the most time and then having a long-distance relationship from the start can be difficult to, but we have also had success teams since meeting over Zoom could be easier than coordinating 2 very busy schedules to meet in person. 

    We have been fortunate that our mentors, in all aspects, have been dedicated to the project and truly want to work with our fellows and help them to develop successfully. They believe in our mission and the goal of the program and want to be part of the growth of our fellows.

     
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    Sarah Haavind
  • Icon for: Bhaskar Upadhyay

    Bhaskar Upadhyay

    Facilitator
    Associate Professor
    May 12, 2022 | 11:36 a.m.

    The access to the world-class laboratory to provide exposure and engagement to underrepresented students is really commendable. I believe in mentoring for success, I wonder how the mentoring program is conceptualized - open, assigned, group,... Also, what is the extent of student involvement in the actual research going on in these laboratories? I think if students don't get to be part of actual research experiences, then this becomes a "windowshopping" experience and does not have much impact on students of color/girls and other BIPOC groups.

  • Icon for: Karian Wright

    Karian Wright

    Co-Presenter
    Assistant Dean for Diversity and Inclusion, Graduate School | Director of the Center for Inclusive Education | Co-PI
    May 13, 2022 | 09:52 a.m.

    Thank you for your comments. As mentioned by my colleagues, mentors are assigned using a holistic matching process that includes interviews with both the mentors and the student participants. As for research at the national laboratory, several of our research mentors have joint appointments with BNL. This allows their students to get first-hand experience using the DOE Lab facilities. Additionally, our students and teaching mentors have the opportunity to participate in workshops on how to become a user of the facilities and build research collaborations with FFRDCs in general. The goal is to have our participants engage with these laboratories themselves and with their students for many years to come. We also have AGEP alum who have made themselves available to mentor current AGEP students. One such alum is a Radiochemist at BNL and one of the only black women in her field. She was also the first African American to earn a PhD in Radiochemistry at her institution. 

     
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    Sarah Haavind
  • Icon for: Nina Leonhardt

    Nina Leonhardt

    Lead Presenter
    AGEP Coordinator
    May 12, 2022 | 06:27 p.m.

    Thank you for visiting our video space and for your comments. 

    Mentor pairs are the result of comprehensive, holistic matching process. 

    AGEP fellows are doctoral candidates. Their research at BNL is critical to their academic research/interests.

  • Icon for: Kenneth White

    Kenneth White

    Co-Presenter
    Manager/NSF AGEP PUI Co-PI
    May 13, 2022 | 11:13 a.m.

    Thank you for visiting and for your questions.  The Lab does have real opportunity for engagement as Karian notes above.  Much depends on the nature of the participant's research priorities.  Participants learn about the many capabilities of the national labs, how to access the research facilities, and more about how Lab staff are committed to providing support to enable the use of the tools and interaction with scientific staff at the Lab.  Many of our AGEP fellows have been directly involved in research at BNL.  We have also had them do micro-teaching experiences in an informal setting to build their skills in that area as well.  

  • Icon for: Iris Wagstaff

    Iris Wagstaff

    STEM Program Director
    May 13, 2022 | 11:20 a.m.

     Thanks for this needed work. AGEP has a long history of providing research, educational and career opportunities for a diverse pool of undergraduate students. I am excited to see this impact the New York Alliance will have on providing expanded and sustainable opportunities for these students via the partnerships with FFRDCs.

  • Icon for: Lisa Ospitale

    Lisa Ospitale

    Co-Presenter
    Program Coordinator
    May 17, 2022 | 06:21 p.m.

    Hi Iris, thank you for visiting our page and for viewing our video. Our project recruits URM PhD candidates in a STEM field. Our mentors from our FFRDC do an amazing job of working with our fellows to provide them an opportunity to collaborate with other national labs. They also provide our fellows with micro-teaching experiences and teaching mentorship. As an Alliance we have been very fortunate to have the staff at Brookhaven National Lab as an integral part of our team and we are excited as well to see the impact we can continue to make for URM STEM PhD candidates. Thank you again for watching.