Two Rutgers University–Newark (RU-N) researchers recently won a $250,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to continue a program to increase the number of Black, Latinx and Indigenous students earning degrees in the geosciences at the Rutgers’ Newark and New Brunswick campuses, and to help them enter graduate school and/or successful careers in the field.
Professor Ashaki Rouff, of the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and Psychology Professor Luis Rivera, who now serves as Vice Provost, are using the funds to expand the foundation’s STEM Transformations and Advancing Retention (STAR) program, which the pair started at RU-N in 2022 after receiving an initial project grant from Sloan.
For this second phase, Rouff and Rivera are again teaming up with Carrie Ferraro, Assistant Professor of Professional Practice at Rutgers–New Brunswick and Director of the Rutgers Science Explorer program, who’s been overseeing the initiative on the RU-NB campus since 2022.
"With support from the Sloan Foundation, we’re able to continue this successful student-centered program and now get more faculty involved in this effort,” said Rouff, speaking of the program’s dual trajectories.
Funds from the first grant—which Sloan funded from 2022 to 2024 at $250K—were used mainly to build the student component, which included a summer “broadening participation” program that provided instruction, field trips, and academic and workforce/career mentoring for 15-20 undergraduate students working on climate resiliency issues.
The latter included “visual pathway” career mentoring, which educates students about opportunities and helps them visualize pathways to fulfilling STEM careers, and near-peer mentoring, or guidance from students a bit farther along in their studies, whom the students could both relate to and draw inspiration from.
While this student component—the centerpiece of the original grant proposal—will continue during the second phase of the project, the team will use the new grant to enhance faculty participation in the STAR program to build a more supportive environment for students from underrepresented minority groups, who may enjoy the geosciences but would typically steer away from careers in the subject area, which is the least diverse of all STEM fields, according to Rouff.
With support from the Sloan Foundation, we’re able to continue this successful student-centered program and now get more faculty involved in this effort.
Rouff and her team ran antiracism seminars for geoscience faculty members during phase one, which helped them acquire and implement mentoring practices that counteract cultures of racism and exclusion that persist in the discipline. With this second grant, they’ll build faculty cohorts across both Rutgers campuses, who will administer surveys to explore the department-level experiences of undergraduate and graduate students and to develop strategies to maintain or improve their geosciences learning environments.
“This is really about making faculty aware of how the system, as it is currently set up, affects their students,” said Rouff. “We got a lot of positive feedback from faculty after our original workshops, and most asked for more opportunities to talk among themselves and develop strategies, and so we’re building on that.”
Rouff and her team are splitting the workload for phase two, with Ferraro expanding the workforce development component, Rouff focusing on the near-peer and faculty mentoring, and Rivera examining the psycho-social effects of the program and conducting a final evaluation for the Sloan Foundation.
Rivera, a social psychologist who studies biases and how they affect the identities of individuals from stigmatized groups, has played a similar role evaluating the Garden State LSAMP program, run by Distinguished Professor Alec Gates (also of RU-N's Earth & Environmental Science department), which is part of an National Science Foundation initiative to recruit, mentor and support underrepresented minority college students in pursuit of careers in STEM fields.
“Luis’ participation in STAR grew out of his work with GS-LSAMP,” said Rouff. “His evaluative component really strengthened our grant proposal.”
Since arriving at RU-N in 2014, Rouff has spearheaded several initiatives to increase minority participation in STEM fields, including the Newark Geoscience Ecosystem, a four-year education and workforce development initiative begun in 2023, and the Dynamic Urban Environmental Systems and Sustainability project, a summer research program for area undergraduates funded by the National Science Foundation’s REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) initiative.
As climate issues continue to disproportionately affect communities of color, Rouff believes it is crucial that scientists from those underrepresented populations have a seat at the table while devising solutions to the crisis. The STAR program is one way of addressing that gap in representation.
“Students from urban environments, who are bearing the brunt of climate change, may not see the geosciences as a viable career path, but STAR aims to change that by showing them how the field is relevant to their lived experiences,” said Rouff. “And Newark is a perfect place for that.”
Original story published by the School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers-Newark.
