EWU Awarded National Science Foundation Grant

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Higher education advocates, including prominent organizations such as the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, have long maintained that increasing participation among underrepresented university faculty members, particularly in STEM fields, is critical to building and maintaining our nation's knowledge and science economies.

Now, thanks to a three-year, $975,000 award from the National Science Foundation, EWU will be better equipped to build on previous NSF-supported efforts to attract and retain a more diverse cohort of STEM-focused scientists and scholars.

Led by principle investigator Edwin Ellias, a professor of Chicana/o/x studies at EWU, the new initiative is called "Utilizing Practices to Leverage Institutional & Intersectional Formative Transformation," or UPLIIFT. It was funded thorough the NSF's ADVANCE program, which, since 2001, has "invested over $270 million to support projects at more than 100 institutions of higher education and STEM-related not-for-profit organizations in forty-one states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico." Eastern last received support from the ADVANCE program in 2010.

According to an UPLIIFT project overview released by Elliot and his team of co-investigators, the new work at Eastern will involve "an intersectional approach to examine and mitigate the processes that create inequities for historically excluded faculty."

This approach, the overview continues, will seek to document "the campus climate experienced by historically excluded faculty; contribute to efforts to mitigate bias in faculty recruitment; build data collection and analysis efforts related to faculty recruitment; and establish a Faculty Work Activity Dashboard that will institutionalize data collection on the 'hidden' workloads that lead to inequities in faculty retention and promotion."

Work for the UPLIIFT project will begin this fall. It is funded through the summer of 2027.

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