2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

WIP: NSF-funded Activity in Support of the LGBTQ+ Community: Award Search Strategy and Selection Criteria

Presented at Engineering and Public Policy Division (EPP) Technical Session 2

In this Work in Progress (WIP) paper, we detail the initial steps taken to study NSF grants that seek to benefit the LGBTQ+ community through understanding their experiences or by working toward their full participation in society. To this end, we have identified active and expired NSF grants that either advance knowledge of LGBTQ+ experiences or offer some benefit to the community (e.g., tailored professional development, addressing and changing the marginalizing culture of STEM, etc.). We then developed a coding scheme to categorize these grants with respect to the level of positive impact they have on the LGBTQ+ community using modified Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts criteria that parallels the NSF’s own criteria for evaluating proposals. The work established in this paper to identify and code LGBTQ-focused NSF grants will next allow us to extract trends in these grants over a period of over 4 decades.

Authors

Dr. Daniel A. Sanchez University of Pennsylvania [biography]

Dr. Sanchez is an ASEE Engineering Fellow and Penn Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering in 2021 and his BSc in Mechanical Engineering in 2015, both at The University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation research, which was supported by fellowships from the NSF GRFP, GEM Consortium, and Ford Foundation, explored the mechanics and chemistry of bubbles made from atomically thin materials. From 2016 to 2019, Dr. Sanchez served in many leadership roles through Out for Undergrad and the UT Austin chapter of oSTEM - both of which promote the professional development of LGBTQ+ STEM students. He currently serves on the O4U Life Sciences Conference Advisory Board.
Dr. Rocio C. Chavela Guerra American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) [biography]

Dr. Rocío Chavela Guerra serves as an instructor in the Experiential Engineering Education Department at Rowan University. In her prior role, she served as Director of Education and Career Development at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), and as headquarters liaison to ASEE’s Commission on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. With over ten years of experience in educational programming, communities of practice and stakeholder convenings, and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, Rocío has served as principal investigator or co-investigator in numerous federally funded projects. Rocío holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University, and B.S. and M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Universidad de las Americas, Puebla (UDLAP) in Mexico. Prior to joining ASEE, Rocío served as a faculty member at UDLAP’s chemical and food engineering department, and as a graduate fellow at the U.S. National Academy of Engineering’s Center for the Advancement of Scholarship on Engineering Education (CASEE).
Dr. Stephanie Farrell Rowan University [biography]

Dr. Stephanie Farrell is Professor and Founding Department Head of Experiential Engineering Education at Rowan University (USA). Prior to 2016 she was a faculty member in Chemical Engineering at Rowan.

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