Expanding Geoscience Research Access For Historically Excluded Communities

The Geological Society Of America, Inc., Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

This project supports the Geological Society of America (GSA) Graduate Student Research Grants (GSRG) program and its three primary goals: 1) Increase opportunities for students of historically excluded communities to achieve success in research; 2) Build career skills of students through gainful experience with grant writing, project management, and research; and 3) Support graduate student research in the geosciences and strengthen the geoscience workforce. Geoscience research is highly relevant to society throughout the United States and the world, impacting important matters such as natural resources, energy production, climate change, natural hazards, environmental quality, and more. However, geoscience is one of the least diverse scientific fields in the United States. Members of racial/ethnic groups that have been historically excluded from the geosciences make up only ~23% of all U.S. graduate students enrolled in the geosciences, compared to ~38% of U.S. graduate students in other STEM subjects, and ~43% of the overall U.S. population. To address these gaps, GSA aims to enhance its GSRG program with a new Module aimed at increasing the number of students from these historically excluded communities who apply for and receive geoscience research grants. The student grant recipients will use their funding to generate concrete scientific results in a variety of geoscience disciplines, such as paleontology, geophysics, volcanology, and more. This new Module is part of GSA’s longstanding Graduate Student Research Grant (GSRG) program, which has provided over 20 million dollars to more than 12,000 geoscientists throughout the last 92 years. The key elements of this Module are: 1) Funding the research of an increasing number of graduate students from historically excluded communities; 2) Further leveraging of GSA’s On To the Future (OTF) program, which provides travel funds and mentoring to students from historically excluded communities to help them attend and participate in GSA Connects (GSA’s annual conference); 3) Enhanced outreach to GSA’s student members from historically excluded communities and campus representatives at Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs); 4) Continued outreach outside of GSA; and 5) Changes to the GSRG application and scoring process. Over a three-year period, GSA seeks to provide research grants to approximately 1,000 students, with funding through the NSF award as well as from the Geological Society of America (GSA) and the Geological Society of America Foundation (GSAF). GSA plans to provide roughly one quarter of these students with supplemental funding to enable them to travel to scientific conferences to present the results of their research to the broader geoscience community, network with other students and professionals in their field, and participate in professional development activities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.