Hispanic-serving institutions partner to grow next generation professors

 

POSTED ON Sep 13, 2018

 

The City College of New York has partnered with the University of Texas at El Paso to grow the next generation of Hispanic professors in environmental sciences and engineering. The five-year project is funded by a $3.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The partnership is in response to the NSF’s Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program solicitation.

AGEP seeks to improve pathways to the professoriate and success of historically underrepresented minority graduate students, postdoc fellows, and faculty in environmental science and engineering, and other science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education fields.

City College, which is designated a Hispanic Serving Institution of Higher Education by the U.S. Department of Education, will receive $2.315 million of the funding and the University of Texas at El Paso $1.3 million.

The project will be led by CCNY faculty Jorge E. Gonzalez, Fred Moshary, Joseph Barba, Kyle McDonald, and Ellen E. Smiley.

UTEP experts include: Miguel Velez-Reyes, Craig Tweedie, and Ivonne Santiago.

Participants will include Hispanic doctoral students of Caribbean or Mexican origin, who are advanced level candidates in civil, electrical, mechanical or biomedical engineering; earth and atmospheric sciences; ecology and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines.

Under the administration of City College’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Cooperative Remote Sensing Science and Technology (CREST) Center, the two institutions will develop training for transitioning Hispanic environmental sciences and engineering doctoral students to STEM instructional faculty positions at community colleges and other institutions.

There are three community college partners in the Hispanic AGEP Alliance: LaGuardia Community College, Queensborough Community College and El Paso Community College in El Paso, TX.