Connecting Women and Completing the Circuit of International Research Collaboration |
||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||
Congratulations to all 2009 WIRES participants for a successful summit! |
||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||
What is WIRES? Who will be at WIRES?
Participants chosen to attend the summit will include female engineering faculty, graduate students, post doctoral fellows, researchers from industry, and program directors from funding agencies. All of the US participants have been identified; however, we are still accepting applications from non-US women engineers from universities and industry and from Program Directors from organizations that fund research in the areas of energy systems, simulation based engineering and micro/nanotechnology. If you are a US woman engineer and you wish to be included in the database of women engineers who want to engage in international research collaborations, you may also enter your data by clicking on the "Apply Now" button below.
Intellectual Merit Broader Impacts What are some of the goals of WIRES? Obtaining Goals
Pre-summit activities will involve collecting and distributing information about each participant to those attending the summit. The information will include their research-education background, research expertise-interests, facilities available to them and professional society memberships. This information will help identify potential partnerships between the global participants. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) will host this data base in a secure location that only participants can access. This website is much more than simply a discussion board and will help members connect with each other. This site will enable summit participants to network prior to and after the summit in a similar way as the university students use "Facebook" and "MySpace" to communicate. We encourage the participants to contact each other prior to the summit through the ASME PeerLink networking site. A panel of at least three pairs of engineering researchers who have successfully engaged in research across national boundaries will be identified to facilitate a session where they will describe their research and collaboration team and will discuss what each partner brought to the collaboration and why the research was uniquely enabled by the collaboration. Participants will be given the opportunity to offer advice or best practices. Each presentation will be followed by questions/discussion from the summit participants. This panel and audience participation will generate a list of best practices (and worst practices) for international collaborations. The organizing committee will help identify researchers who have participated in international collaborations to be polled about their best practices/advice. The engineering professional societies recognize that global diversity is desirable and have developed initiatives, programs and policies to foster involvement of engineers from all over the globe.
Representatives from US funding agencies-organizations will describe a pathway for funding international collaborations at the summit. Program Directors from NSF's Office of International Science and Engineering, OISE, will address what types of interactions are of the most interest to them and talk about how to integrate international components into their research proposals. A program director from the Engineering Directorate will address guidelines for interactions that they are looking to support. USAID-Higher Ed for Development will describe partnerships between US universities and those in other countries that they are interested in funding. Funding agencies will also identify the current initiatives and/or focus areas that would be open to international collaborations. Prior to the summit, program directors will identify potential proposal opportunities and this information will be posted for participants to look over.
There are at least three levels of barriers to females fully participating in international research collaborations: institutional, national and international. The NSF ADVANCE program has made a large impact in breaking down institutional barriers for female faculty advancement. ADVANCE initiatives have encouraged improvements at the college and department level as well as the national level, where many of the practices and policies put in place through the ADVANCE program grants have now become more widely adopted. The most effective strategy to reduce institutional barriers may include elements that do not exist at the institutional level. Therefore, it is important to understand which policy instruments are most effective at reducing the barriers at different levels. In this summit, we will identify global gender equity issues that will benefit from a global strategy, thus addressing the international barriers to female faculty full participation and advancement. A short pre-summit survey will help identify what issues the female engineers find the most challenging. The results from the global participants will be analyzed and will be discussed at the summit. Briefings from international researchers will allow the participants to appreciate the differences and similarities between the female engineers between the female engineers from different companies.
Researchers from around the world will describe how research is funded and conducted during the summit session. Participants will gain an understanding of how funding models vary across the globe. The application-survey for the summit will provide a database of female faculty who are interested in conducting international research. Additionally, female engineers who may not be able to attend the summit will be invited to be included in the database. Note that the participants can request that their information not be included in the database. Dr. Mary Lynn Realff Dr. Gretchen Kalonji Angie Abbot Amanda Chamberlin SPONSORED BY:
|
||||||||||||||
