Clarkson University Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Andrea Ferro is leading a team of 14 colleagues from across the country on a new $1.25 million, four-year, collaborative project funded by the National Science Foundation to advance women in academic science and engineering careers. Clarkson will see $763,337 of the NSF award.
The project, titled “Strategic Partnership for Alignment of Community Engagement in STEM,” or SPACES, aims to identify, understand, and minimize the loss of women faculty through targeted activities and by leveraging the deep, interconnected leadership team.
“Women, especially Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic (or Latinx) women, face many barriers to success in the academic workplace due to sexism and racism,” says Ferro. “This project targets two large barriers: the experience of isolation for underrepresented minority women faculty and the devaluation of research conducted by minority women faculty – especially community-engaged research.”
Community-engaged researchers work together with people from a community to solve issues associated with the health and well-being of the community. These issues are often related to environmental exposures to pollutants and related health effects.
“However, community-engaged researchers repeatedly have the rigor of their scholarly activities questioned or discounted as service during annual review, tenure, and promotion evaluations,” explains Ferro. “This systemic undervaluation of their research contributes to the attrition of many women who enter engineering motivated to address societally important problems. The personal and societal costs of their contributions and the associated innovative, effective engineering solutions for underserved communities are enormous.”
SPACES is a partnership of 11 academic institutions and four core professional societies in environmental engineering: the American Academy of Environmental Engineers & Scientists, the American Association for Aerosol Research, the Association of Environmental Engineering & Science Professors, and the Water Environment Federation.
The project team includes current or recent presidents of these societies, environmental engineering department or program leaders, department heads, engineering deans, and national leaders in community-engaged research and equity initiatives.
The institutions include Clarkson (lead), University of Arizona, University of California Berkeley, University of California Irvine, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Florida, University of South Florida, California State University Northridge, Michigan State University, San Jose State University, and Syracuse University.
Ferro, who also serves as associate director for research in Clarkson’s Institute for a Sustainable Environment, is internationally recognized for her research on indoor air quality and human exposure to aerosols. She has worked directly with communities, schools, and hospitals to measure, understand and mitigate pollutant exposure. She is a Fellow of the International Society for Indoor Air Quality and Climate and is a recent past president of the American Association for Aerosol Research.
A project abstract can be found at www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2204550.