Professional development training for STEM community managers

At the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE), I designed and taught 3 multi-week courses and over 12 workshops for professionals who lead, manage, or fund a wide range of STEM organizations, such as professional associations, national labs, university-based research centers, and philanthropies.

I facilitated more than 30 instances of these trainings, for groups between 10 to 80 participants.

Trainings I’ve designed and taught

• Multi-week courses
  • Community engagement fundamentals
  • Building community playbooks / collaboration guides
  • Nurturing online communities
• Workshops
  • Introduction to community engagement
  • Planning and facilitating virtual meetings and events
  • Interpersonal dynamics and team culture
  • Planning and coordinating teamwork

With funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, I also conducted a medium-term assessment of CSCCE’s Community Engagement Fundamentals course.

The study found that 95% of respondents have applied multiple course concepts, frameworks, and activities in their roles. Respondents also experienced positive socioemotional outcomes such as increased confidence (87%) and connection to peers (90%).

A campaign to celebrate and amplify the CUNY interdisciplinary research community

Converge to Transform was year-long anniversary campaign to celebrate and amplify the interdisciplinary research community at the City University of New York’s Advanced Science Research Center (CUNY ASRC).

I conceptualized, designed, and coordinated a series of social events, marketing and communications projects, conferences, and webinars to highlight CUNY ASRC’s impact and encourage conversations across departments.

This campaign led to a 200% increase in unique views of the CUNY ASRC homepage and an average 112% increase in social media followers across three platforms during the 2019 – 2020 fiscal year.

You can learn more about my approach to community-first event planning in this blog post: Leveraging anniversary programming & content to nurture community.

A field trip program to inspire New York City high-schoolers

I managed a $1M capital construction project to build an interactive science education center while simultaneously launching a field trip program for New York City high school students.

The CUNY ASRC IlluminationSpace was completed in 2018 and now serves hundreds of visitors each year. The purpose of the program is to inspire New York City high schoolers with interactive educational media and friendly conversations with CUNY scientists.

A report summarizing post-trip surveys during the 2018 – 2019 school year found that:

• 100% of visiting teachers would organize a future field trip
• 94% of visiting students learned something during the field trip that they’d share with others
• 90% of visiting students agreed or strongly agreed they’d recommend the field trip to others
• 74% of visiting students planned to do more research about something they learned during their visit

Dozens of CUNY undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty have also received science communication training to lead tours and hold engaging conversations about their research and careers in STEM.

My team also organized special public engagement activities that reached an additional 3000 young people and advised faculty on broader impacts statements to expand the center’s public engagement programming.

You can hear more about my perspectives on STEM public engagement, informal STEM education, and science communication training programs below.

An NSF-sponsored career development and mentoring program

The EFRI-REM program at the City University of New York was highly successful program to encourage students from underrepresented groups to participate in cross-disciplinary research on assistive technology.

The program ran from 2012 – 2015 and was led by Professor Zhigang Zhu. In 2015, I advised on program development and strategy, created and delivered an eight-week career development workshop, and designed and conducted a comprehensive program evaluation.

The program evaluation assessed the impact of the REM 2015 program on students’ research, communication, interpersonal skills, confidence, and desire to pursue a degree in STEM.

Students were asked to assess themselves in these areas at the beginning and end of the program. Faculty and graduate student mentors also assessed their own mentoring skills as well as the skill levels of their mentees. Both sets of survey results show that the students improved in nearly all areas. Each student also reported that they intended to pursue an advanced degree in a STEM discipline.