The National Academies have suggested that increasing diversity in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math will be critical to the future competitiveness of the US in these areas [1], and the leadership of both the National Science Foundation [2] and the American Physical Society is taking this seriously. Physics and Astronomy programs grant, on average, only one PhD every 5 and 10 years, respectively, to members of underrepresented groups [3]. We are therefore not surprisingly the least diverse of the sciences [4]. In this talk, I will discuss several opportunities that may help our community move toward meeting these goals, and, importantly, the potential benefits to programs and individual investigators willing to take on these challenges. The most universally applicable and easily implementable actions regard perturbing graduate admissions policies and practices [5], and employing key features of successful Bridge Programs into graduate programs [6].
[1] National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine, “Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America's Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads,” The National Acadamies Press (2011);
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12984[2] Joan Ferrini-Mundy, “Driven by Diversity,” Science 340, 278 (2013).
[3] Stassun, K.G., “Building Bridges to Diversity”, Mercury, 34, 3 (2005).
[4]
http://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/minoritydegrees.cfm[5] Casey W. Miller, “Admissions Criteria and Diversity in Graduate School,”APS News, The Back Page, February 2013.
http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201302/backpage.cfm[6] Stassun, K.G., Sturm, S., Holley-Bockelmann, K., Burger, A., Ernst, D., & Webb, D., “The Fisk-Vanderbilt Masters-to-PhD Bridge Program: Broadening Participating of Underrepresented Minorities in the Physical Sciences. Recognizing, enlisting, and cultivating ‘unrealized or unrecognized potential’ in students”, American Journal of Physics 79, 374 (2011).
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