The Equity in Graduate Education Resource Center just released their newest research-based resource guide, “Starting Conversations about Culture in STEM.” This guide is designed to help department leaders initiate the critical work of transforming the culture of their departments to be more inclusive of racially- minoritized backgrounds. Such culture change can help to address inequities in access and degree completion in the STEM disciplines. 

This research-based guide was developed from the findings of an NSF INCLUDES Alliance-IGEN Research Accelerator project, which was led by Radomir Ray Mitic at the University of North Dakota. Mitic and his team, which includes graduate students Maire Brandenburg and Tiffany Moore, and Pullias Center postdoctoral scholar Kristyn Lue, sought to better understand the experiences of racially-minoritized graduate students in the space sciences. Their hope is that the findings from their study can help practitioners and researchers improve the experiences of racially-minoritized STEM graduate students by improving program and campus culture, mentorship and structural diversity. This guide is one way of helping practitioners and department leaders do so.

The Equity in Graduate Education Resource Center, led by USC Rossier Professor Julie Posselt, is focused on promoting equity in graduate education through cycles of rigorous, community-inspired research on challenges of policy and practice. This yields actionable findings, which are translated into high-quality professional development opportunities where faculty and administrators receive tools and resources to create institutional change in their local contexts.