Solving STEM Inequities

Increasing participation among underrepresented university faculty members, particularly in STEM fields, is critical to building and maintaining our nation’s knowledge and science economies, experts say. Now, thanks to a three-year, $975,000 initiative funded by the National Science Foundation, EWU will be better equipped to make its own STEM faculty more representative.

Led by principal investigator Edwin Elias, an associate professor of Chicana/o/x studies at EWU, the new program is called Utilizing Practices to Leverage Institutional & Intersectional Formative Transformation, or UPLIIFT. It was funded through the NSF’s ADVANCE program, which, since 2001, has invested over $270 million to support projects at more than 100 university and STEM-related not-for-profit organizations. Eastern last received support from the ADVANCE program in 2010.

“[The grant] allows me to conduct research and to provide tangible solutions for retaining and recruiting historically excluded faculty,” Elias says, emphasizing that at Eastern, as elsewhere, barriers to boosting inclusivity remain substantial.

According to an UPLIIFT project overview released by Elias and his team of co-investigators, the new work at Eastern will utilize “an intersectional approach to examine and mitigate the processes that create inequities.”

This approach, says Elias, will help him and his team create a “more complete picture of the specific challenges underrepresented groups face, allowing us to enact institutional practices, structures, relationships and campus climate into an equitable and meritocratic workplace.”

Work for the UPLIIFT project began this fall. It is funded through the summer of 2027.