EWU Awarded National Science Foundation Grant

Higher education advocates, including prominent organizations such as the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, have long maintained that increasing participation among underrepresented university faculty members, particularly in STEM fields, is critical to building and maintaining our nation’s knowledge and science economies.

Now, thanks to a three-year, $975,000 award from the National Science Foundation, EWU will be better equipped to build on previous NSF-supported efforts to attract and retain a more diverse cohort of STEM-focused scientists and scholars.

Led by principal investigator Edwin Elias, an associate professor of Chicana/o/x studies at EWU, the new initiative is called “Utilizing Practices to Leverage Institutional & Intersectional Formative Transformation,” or UPLIIFT. It was funded thorough the NSF’s ADVANCE program, which, since 2001, has “invested over $270 million to support projects at more than 100 institutions of higher education and STEM-related not-for-profit organizations in forty-one states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.” 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 said, emphasizing that at Eastern, as elsewhere, barriers to boosting inclusivity remain substantial. “All faculty face multiple challenges in higher education today: the emerging digital revolution, a revolving door of administrative leadership, and a decrease in student enrollment are changing the landscape in higher education. These multiple forces leave all faculty in flux and uncertainty at their institution. Through such a massive change, historically marginalized groups tend to face these challenges, depending on their discipline, more often and in a severe manner.”

According to an UPLIIFT project overview released by Elias and his team of co-investigators (Judd Case, professor of biology; Kayleen Islam-Zwart, professor of psychology; Ning Li, professor of public administration; Suzanne Rieseberg, lecturer in electrical and computer engineering; Julia Smith professor and chair of history, anthropology, and modern languages and literatures; and Jennifer Waldo, associate dean of CTEM), the new work at Eastern will utilize “an intersectional approach to examine and mitigate the processes that create inequities.”

This approach, Elias says, 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 will begin this fall. It is funded through the summer of 2027.