PI: A. Kelly Lane; Co-PI: Anita Schuchardt & Ariel Steele
NSF IGE Award: 2429128
$995,095
10/2024-09/2025
"Faculty advisors play a core role in the experiences of science graduate students in the United States. They often have significant control over a student?s stipend, workspace, resources, research project, collaborators and, ultimately, time to graduate. The influential position of the advisor makes the choice of advisor pivotal to graduate students? progress. This project contributes to knowledge about factors affecting graduate student success by investigating the methods used to pair graduate students with an advisor and the impact those methods may have on graduate students? sense of belonging, intent to persist in their programs, and satisfaction with their advisors. The researchers will explore the experiences of administrators, faculty, and students with the practices and policies of various recruitment methods to identify what pre-existing elements should be removed or modified."
PI: A. Kelly Lane
NSF EHR:ECR Award: 2201809
$387,605
10/2022-09/2024
Gender inequities have been regularly identified in biology education; however, students whose identities do not fit into the inaccurate gender binary have oft been overlooked in studies of gender inequity in biology. A key cause of these inequities is the concept of gender essentialism, the belief that genders, and gender roles, are natural, biologically derived categories: that there is a “natural essence” of femaleness or maleness influencing behaviors and proficiencies. Gender essentialism can impact students of all genders in variety of ways including 1) promoting stereotypes of all genders especially of women, trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming students, 2) inhibiting students from accurately learning biology concepts, and 3) disregarding the lived experiences of gender diverse students. In collaboration with Dr. Aramati Casper at University of Colorado- Boulder and Dr. Sarah Eddy at Florida International University, we are investigating how gender diverse students experience biology content focused on sex and gender, how faculty teach sex and gender, and what factors co-vary with faculty understanding of the required nuance to accurately teach sex and gender.
PI: A. Kelly Lane; Co-PI: Kristina Prescott & Katie Furniss
NSF IUSE Award: 2141979
$299,736
01/2022-12/2024
The aim of this project is to explore introductory biology students' beliefs surrounding genetics and race. The end result will be an assessment that instructors can use to see if their methods of teaching genetics reinforce or combat inaccurate ideas about race. In addition, we will be testing a hypothesis that understanding certain genetics concepts is correlated with more accurate understandings of why race is not biological.
Co-PIs: David Greenstein and Kirstin Nielsen
A. Kelly Lane is a Co-investigator
NIH IRACDA Award
~$3.4 million
NIH IRACDA Program is a training grant for programs to support postdoctoral scholars in biomedical research and education. We recruit postdoctoral scholars from backgrounds that have been historically excluded from STEM research. The scholars then conduct cutting edge biomedical research, receive pedagogical training, and gain experience teaching at two teaching-intensive institutions: Normandale Community College and North Hennepin Community College.