Cutright awarded NSF grant to support underrepresented faculty in engineering

There are few things we encounter in our daily lives that have not been touched in some way by engineers. From bridges to clean water to mobile phones, we rely on engineers to create, design and build most of the materials we need to function.

We depend on engineers for many of the big challenges that we face, too. The more engineers there are in the workforce, the better likelihood we can successfully take on these challenges. Yet at a time when there is a need more people in engineering fields, the numbers of women and people of color going into engineering academia, and advancing in the faculty, are low.

Dr. Teresa Cutright, a University of Akron (UA) professor of civil engineering, is the principal investigator on a five-year, $800,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a proposal to prepare underrepresented groups to excel in academia with training and mentorship, to support mentorship training, and to build national networks for the sharing of knowledge and resources.

Cutright’s proposal for the ACADEME (Academics with Diversity Education and Mentorship in Engineering) Inclusive Mentoring Hub was funded in the most recent cycle of NSF’s Broadening Participation in Engineering (BPE) Track 3 funding for inclusive mentoring hubs. The only other project in this round is led by Seattle University in Washington state.

In this project, Cutright is leading a national coalition of academics, some of whom have been working with her for eight years, to ensure these individuals underrepresented in engineering fields are recruited and supported through mentorship, and that mentors are appropriately trained and connected to other mentors, which will lead to retention and growth in the workforce.

“What we know is that we need everybody’s experiences to help solve the global challenges we face,” Cutright said. “It’s very hard to do that when there are people who believe that only men can be engineers, or that women and people of color aren’t a good fit for academic positions.”

Addressing the demographics

Statistics show that white males dominate engineering faculty, with the greatest differential at the seniormost faculty levels. This is an issue of which the NSF is aware, and why it funds projects like Cutright’s that seek to broaden participation in engineering.

In engineering, co-ethnic males are always at a higher percentage of a faculty than co-ethnic females, even though women make up more than 50% of the population in the U.S.  According to the American Society of Engineering Educators, at the associate professor level in engineering academia, 56% are white men and women, 21.4% are females across all ethnicities, and people of Hispanic, Black, Native American and Pacific Islander, and other backgrounds compromise the remaining positions. At the full professor level, 59% are white men and women, 14.2% are female across all ethnicities, and the rest are Hispanic, Black, Native American and Pacific Islander, and other backgrounds.

The NSF considers women of all backgrounds, individuals with Native American, Pacific Islander, Black or Hispanic backgrounds, those with disabilities and veterans to be underrepresented groups in engineering fields.

The UA project will provide year-long professional training to better prepare doctoral students and postdoctoral individuals for successful careers as engineering professors; training and resources for other universities to duplicate doctoral and postdoctoral training from previously funded projects; inclusive mentoring; effective and culturally responsive mentor training for existing university and community college faculty; and networking within the Hub.

The ACADEME Hub will have a special focus on culturally responsive mentor training. This kind of mentor training is closely related to the concept of culturally responsive teaching, a term coined in 2000 by researcher Geneva Gay. In this method, teachers utilize students’ customs, characteristics, lived experiences and frames of reference as tools in the classroom. The same concept will be applied to ACADEME mentorship training, which will be valuable in engineering fields where few higher-level academic mentors have the same lived experiences as their mentees.

“We want to create this network and resources for both those who need mentors but don’t have access to someone who looks like them, and for potential mentors who are seeking guidance in how to connect with someone with a different background,” Cutright said. “With everything we’re doing, we want to create a ripple effect and multiplications of training so that hopefully someday we’ll be obsolete.”

The project will include summer training sessions for people who want to learn about how to effectively mentor, along with online materials at a dedicated page on the UA website. There will also be online webinars. Beyond the activities of the Hub, the project intends to establish links with other recently funded Track 3 hubs and BPE projects.

Longtime national effort

Cutright’s co-principal investigators, all women who have risen in the academic ranks, are Dr. Linda Coats and Dr. Tonya Stone, a professor and associate professor, respectively, at Mississippi State University; Dr. Rebecca Willits, a professor at Northeastern University; and Dr. Lakiesha Williams, a professor at the University of Florida.

The ACADEME Inclusive Mentoring Hub builds on research that started in 2016, when Cutright and Coats, who is a STEM education specialist, first discussed exploring the challenges that women and other underrepresented faculty members face in advancing in their careers. With the funding, Cutright, Coats and Williams, along with a collaborator at the University of Houston, which has a substantial Hispanic student and faculty population, conducted 2 ½-day workshops for undergraduates thinking about pursuing advanced degrees and graduate students considering careers in academia.

Additional funding allowed the program to expand to two weeks, added Stone and Willits, and held more intensive development training for post-doctoral and senior doctoral individuals recruited from across the country. The sessions were held at a different institution each summer and offered year-round mentoring.

After Cutright and Coats received supplemental funding, the collaborators brought together the participants in Washington, D.C., to do a program wrap-up and in-depth interviews about the types of obstacles faced by the participants and what strategies worked for individuals as they take on those obstacles.

Cutright, Coats and Dr. Nidaa Makki, who is an associate dean of research and graduate studies in UA’s Buchtel College of Arts and Sciences, recently published the paper, “Ten Steps Forward, 15 Steps Back: The Strides and Missteps of Diversity in Engineering,” in the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering. Using data gathered from interviewees in Washington, D.C., the paper examines how women and other underrepresented groups manage throughout the academic training path to enter careers in engineering academia.

“Engineers deal with so many different issues that we all face,” Cutright said. “And we need multiple options for dealing with these issues. We need people from all walks of life, all backgrounds and all disciplines to solve the global challenges that are coming our way.”

Read more about the ACADEME Inclusive Mentoring Hub, including information about how to apply for fellowships, on the program’s website.

Media contact: Cristine Boyd; cboyd@uakron.edu; 330-972-6476