NSF grant seeks to advance women in chemistry, engineering at Florida universities

Florida State University is one of five Florida schools to share in a $600,000 grant aimed at recruiting, mentoring, and promoting more women faculty members in chemistry and engineering departments. Leading the $123,406 portion of the grant for FSU are Professor Penny Gilmer of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Professor Rufina Alamo of the Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering. “Specifically, each university plans to offer workshops for senior faculty, department chairs, administrators, and human resource personnel on methods to enhance recruitment of women,” Gilmer said. “In addition, senior faculty will provide mentoring experiences for junior women faculty in these departments.” And Alamo said, “At a time when the United States is no longer producing enough scientists and engineers to provide the technological advances upon which our nation’s economy has come to depend, we can’t afford to continue losing so many talented young women to other professions.” According to the latest available NSF statistics (2006), women are still vastly underrepresented in the tenured ranks at U.S. universities. For example, only 5% of full professors in engineering are women, while 8.3% of full professors in the physical sciences (which includes chemistry) are women. The data can be accessed at http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08308/tab5.xls. To read more about the FSU grant, go to http://www.fsu.edu/news/2009/11/17/nsf.grant/