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| April 15, 2020 |
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STEM Update | spring 2020, week 3
Dear colleagues, Many thanks to you all for the tremendous efforts you have made to bring our classes this spring fully online. We have been so impressed with your creativity, your flexibility, and, most importantly, your dedication to our students and their education. Please continue to take care of yourselves and your loved ones. Despite the many disruptions we’ve faced, we are making every effort to continue our progress on the STEM initiative. We write with some important updates and an invitation to provide input in some planning discussions. Soon after STEM-X was complete, we broke ground on the new SCDI building. We celebrated the topping off of SCDI in September 2019. The opening of the building is scheduled for fall 2021. Recognizing that a number of operational and policy decisions required our attention this year, we focused much of our time on these areas. We look forward to engaging the next dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Daniel Press, in setting a path for the planning committees that will focus on our curricular and co-curricular needs in STEM. As we move forward, we reaffirm our commitment to the STEM Vision which will continue to guide all of our planning efforts. Best wishes, Lisa Kloppenberg, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
STEM Research Space Policy We are pleased to provide you with a third and final update on a STEM Research Space Policy:
Kudos to the Working Group for crafting a policy that is fair and transparent, has a bottom-up decision-making structure that empowers departments and programs, and recognizes the diversity in how research is done across the STEM fields. As the Working Group has completed its task, we have retired it, discharging its members with our sincere thanks. Over the next few weeks, the College and the School will each independently select three faculty members for the Research Space Inventory Committee. Committee members from the College and from the School will independently consult with their respective dean and colleagues to develop a Productivity/Activity survey and data collection process specific to the College or School. This task must be completed by the end of the Spring Quarter, as surveys will be sent out around the first of September, and responses will be due October 1, the same day as Faculty Activity Reports.
STEM Student Advisory Representatives (StAR) Committee In fall 2019, the diversity STEM student organizations — StAR, SHPE, SWE, NSBE, WinSTEM, and ACM-W — hosted the STEM Diversity and Inclusion Open Forum. The forum was open to students, staff, faculty, and administration and was organized "to create a more inclusive environment for minority students, by discussing and developing strategies to mitigate the issues uncovered by last year’s student-only forum." Participants included representatives from the College of Arts & Sciences, School of Engineering, Career Center, and Provost’s Office. Most of the event involved breakout group discussions centered on case studies related to these issues. Informed by these discussions, student leaders drafted a summary of the fall 2019 forum feedback and proposed solutions, which they shared with STEM academic leadership and the DISE committee. Diversity, Inclusion and Student Engagement (DISE) Committee works closely with student groups, academic units and university offices to increase students’ sense of belonging and identity in STEM. The DISE Committee reconvened in January 2020 with the primary goal of reviewing the feedback compiled from the fall 2019 STEM Diversity and Inclusion Open Forum.
STEM Budget and Operations Budget Update On June 12, 2019, the STEM Budget Planning Working Group presented to the STEM Executive Committee a Proposed STEM Resource Model that projected the cost of STEM operations for initial SCDI occupancy and proposed a consolidated staffing model to support long-term STEM operations. Since then, the provost and deans’ offices have gathered staff data and financial information for the STEM budget, as well as CAS and SoE STEM expenses. We are in the process of reviewing and analyzing the information to understand resource needs prior to the opening of SCDI. Given the uncertainty around COVID-19, we will need to build in some flexibility with our projections. Operations Update In February 2020, Sean Collins was appointed to the new role of Interim Director of STEM Operations. While physical construction on the SCDI building has ceased during the Shelter-In-Place Order, STEM operational planning has not. Working closely with the Deans, Sean has developed operational priorities and timelines to realize successful occupancy of SCDI-new and STEM-R spaces. To this end, we have established a STEM Operations Planning Team (described below) to assist this process. The STEM Operations Planning Team, comprised of the Interim Director of STEM Operations (team lead) and representatives from CAS (John Birmingham and Rafael Ulate) and SOE (Shoba Krishnan and David Clark) as well as members of the Provost’s staff, will gather data, information and stakeholder input in order to develop strategic recommendations on key operational matters identified in the team’s charge which can be found here.
Sobrato Campus for Discovery and Innovation Construction Update SCDI construction activities have ceased during the Shelter in Place order, but we have all watched with amazement at the pace of construction progress over the past few months. Prior to the shutdown, we hosted biweekly construction tours, and we hope to resume those when campus life returns to a more normal state. We are also eager to show our STEM community a physical mock-up of the laboratory furnishings when we are able to gather again As of the Shelter-In-Place Order, the following work had been completed on the SCDI building:
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