ADVANCE Leadership Award: Big Sky Leadership Initiative to Advance Women Into Careers in Research Leadership

Montana State University, Bozeman MT

Investigators

Abstract

The Big Sky Leadership Initiative (BSLI) will advance women as research leaders via a sustainable, tiered and cascading system of mentoring and professional development. The BSLI draws on Montana State University's existing strengths, its prominent interdisciplinary research centers and crosscutting programs, its well-positioned senior women faculty in sciences and engineering, to develop an innovative system for mentoring women scientists, social scientists and engineers at different career stages and transition points. Each track of the BSLI has specific goals and contributes to a systemic and sustainable program. Senior women will enter into formal mentoring relationships with research leaders at outside institutions who have extensive experience developing and maintaining complex research centers. In turn, this network of senior women will mentor early-to-mid-career women faculty, providing them opportunities to develop their research and introducing them to the organizational structures through which interdisciplinary research is accomplished. BSLI also includes an integrated series of four two-day, intensive leadership development workshops on a variety of topics of importance to scientists and engineers. Formative and summative evaluation and dissemination of the program results are included.