COLLEGE STATION, Texas, Nov. 27, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in IT (CMD-IT) announced today the receipt of an NSF INCLUDES Grant to support the creation and work of the Diversifying Future Leadership in the Professoriate (FLIP) Alliance. The goal of the FLIP Alliance is to address the broadening participation challenge of increasing the diversity of the future leadership in the professoriate in computing at research universities. According to the 2016 CRA Taulbee Survey, only 4.8% of the faculty at PhD granting universities is from underrepresented minority groups, i.e. African American, Hispanic, and Native American.
“In the FLIP Alliance, we will intentionally bring together the small number of departments at research universities that are responsible for producing the majority of the PhD students that become faculty to leverage effective strategies for increasing the diversity of their doctoral programs,” said Valerie Taylor, Executive Director, CMD-IT. “This will create an alliance that can quickly and radically change the demographic diversity of the professoriate across computing. Our focus will be on the following underrepresented groups in computing: African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and People with Disabilities.” The co-principle investigators on the INCLUDES grant are Charles Isbell at Georgia Tech and Jeff Forbes at Duke University; senior personnel include Stafford Hood and Denice Hood at the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA) at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign to handle the evaluation and assessment of the alliance.
A diverse faculty serves as excellent role models for a diverse student body, brings diverse backgrounds to the student programs and policies developed by the department and brings diverse perspectives to the organizations research projects and programs.
The FLIP Alliance consists of FLIP Advocates at the following institutions, which were found to be the largest producers of computer science faculty at research universities: Cornell University, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Tech, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, University of Texas, and University of Washington.
For more information, visit http://www.cmd-it.org/programs/current/flip-alliance/.
About CMD-IT
The vision of CMD-IT is to contribute to the national need for an effective workforce in computing and IT through inclusive programs and initiatives focused on minorities and people with disabilities. CMD-IT’s vision is accomplished through its mission to insure that underrepresented groups are fully engaged in computing and IT and promotes innovation that enriches, enhances and enables underrepresented communities. For more information, please visit www.cmd-it.org.