2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Case Study: Impediments to achieving systemic changes to support diversity, equity, and inclusion in the engineering professoriate

Presented at Faculty Development: Broad Impact

Current diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in engineering colleges largely focus on systemic changes to improve the recruitment of women of Black, Hispanic, and Native American ethnic backgrounds and the retention of all women. Numerous funding agencies offer grants to fund research and initiatives to improve the representation of historically underrepresented backgrounds in the engineering professoriate. Previous research has identified the importance of having faculty recruitment and retention data available to make data-informed decisions regarding DEI initiatives. Thus, four campuses within a large public university system applied for and were awarded an NSF ADVANCE Partnership grant, including developing a system-wide secured dashboard pairing faculty demographic data (primarily gender, ethnicity, and country of undergraduate education) with hiring, retention, and promotion data to identify any areas of concern and better inform future DEI initiatives. The grant further proposed to use the dashboards to inform the implementation of the Aspire IChange program, an NSF INCLUDES funded program that uses a data-driven self-assessment to identify inequities in faculty recruitment, retention, and advancement, and to realize systemic change within engineering colleges in the university system. This paper discusses the challenges faced in implementing this multi-campus grant as a case study to illustrate the systemic obstacles to achieving systemic change that exist in higher education institutions. Some of these challenges include a lack of strategic clarity on diversifying faculty, frequent changing of administrators, unclear definitions of system-level administration, campus administration, and other grant personnel responsibilities, lack of direct data sharing practices and procedures between universities within the system, inconsistent practices in the handling of faculty data among campuses, and administration of subawards between campuses. Recommendations for implementing future multi-campus initiatives within a university system are presented.

Authors

Dr. Kimberly Stillmaker P.E. http://orcid.org/0009-0004-9549-9904 California State University, Fresno [biography]

Dr. Kimberly Stillmaker is an Associate Professor in the Civil Engineering Department at California State University, Fresno and currently serves as the Director of Foundations For Success, the Lyles College of Engineering's first year program. Her areas of expertise are in structural engineering, specifically seismic design and analysis of steel structures, and gender equity in engineering. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in structural engineering as well as introductory level engineering courses. She is the 2025 recipient of the CSU Wang Family Excellence Award for Outstanding Faculty Innovator in Student Success. She holds a PhD in Civil Engineering from UC Davis and an MBA from California State University, Fresno.
Dr. Arezoo Sadrinezhad http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-0285-1082 California State University, Fresno [biography]

Dr. Arezoo Sadrinezhad is an Associate Professor of Civil Engineering with a focus on Geotechnical Engineering. She is a licensed Professional Engineer in the state of California. Her research interests include geotechnical earthquake engineering and engineering education. Additionally, she is actively involved in Gender, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (GDEI) research within engineering. Dr. Sadrinezhad is a Co-PI on an NSF-ADVANCE grant (KIND) in collaboration with three other CSU campuses (Cal State LA, San Jose State, and Cal Poly SLO). This grant aims to enhance the representation of women in engineering faculty positions across the CSU system. As part of this initiative, she serves as the director of the mentoring program and is also the College Mentoring Coordinator for faculty.
Feruza Amirkulova http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6348-4941 San Jose State University [biography]

Dr. Feruza Amirkulova is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at San Jose State University (SJSU). She graduated from Rutgers University with a Ph.D. and MSc in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Previously, she completed her Ph.D. in Technique, specializing in Civil Engineering from Samarkand State University. She received her BSc and MSc in Mathematics from Samarkand State University, graduating with honors. Dr. Amirkulova is the recent recipient of the Guidry Family Faculty Teaching Fellow appointment at SJSU. Dr. Amirkulova’s research interests are focused on computational modeling, simulation, and deep learning assisted design of metamaterials that exhibit extraordinary wave bearing properties.
Prof. Sue Rosser http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8729-3373 San Francisco State University [biography]

Sue Rosser has been the Provost Emerita at San Francisco State University since 2020. From 1999 - 2009, she served as Dean of Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech. She has published 14 books and more than 150 journal articles on the theoretical and applied aspects of gender, science, and technology.
Dr. Lalita G Oka http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0161-4453 California State University, Fresno [biography]

Dr. Lalita Oka is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Geomatics Engineering at the California State University, Fresno. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Geotechnical Engineering. Her research interests include experimental geotechnics, numerical modeling, liquefaction assessments, and dam safety. She is also interested in issues related to women in engineering and has published numerous articles in ASEE conferences.
Kira Abercromby California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Prof. Younghee Park http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0651-2384 [biography]

am an Associate Professor in Computer Engineering at San Jose State University. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University in 2010. I obtained an award of excellence as a distinguished faculty mentor for the SJSU Student Research Competition in 2017. I was selected for the Kordestani Endowed Chair in the College of Engineering in 2016 and 2017 as a distinguished research professor. I also received the Faculty Award for Excellence in Scholarship in the College of Engineering at SJSU in 2018. I am the President and Founder of SVCSI (Silicon Valley Cybersecurity Institute), a non-profit organization in Silicon Valley. I was a visiting professor at IBM Almaden Research starting from July 2019 to August 2020 and I was Vice-chair of IEEE Computer Society, Santa Clara Valley Chapter for one year in 2021. My primary research interests are in network and system security. My research has been funded by many local industries and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Dr. Maryam Nazari California State University, Los Angeles
Dr. Jessica C Bennett Association of Public and Land-grant Universities [biography]

Jessica Bennett, Ph.D., is Assistant Vice President of STEM Education at APLU. She leads a variety of NSF-funded projects focused on enhancing institutional capacity to foster environments that recruit, retain, develop, and compensate a thriving faculty. Her scholarship focuses on organizational environments and faculty pathway experiences. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.

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