Gabriella Coloyan Flemming, Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, Title: The Fallacy of “There are no ‘good’ candidates”: Diversity, Institutional Prestige, Academic Pathways, and Engineering Graduate Student and Faculty Social Mobility
SEMINAR (Zoom)
This Biological Engineering Seminar will be hosted in person as well as online via Zoom. RSVP to receive the zoom link by emailing info@bioengineering.ucsb.edu.
Zoom will open after the host has joined at the start of each seminar. You can ask questions through the chat forum and by raising your "hand" and the speaker will call on you.
Speaker
Gabriella Coloyan Flemming, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Dept. of Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering
University of Texas at Asutin
Faculty Host
Beth Pruitt
9:00 am in Bldg. ESB Room #1001
The Fallacy of "There are no 'good' candidates": Diversity, Institutional Prestige, Academic Pathways, and Engineering Graduate Students and Faculty Social Mobility
Abstract
A common response to the question “Why are there low numbers of underrepresented minority (URM) graduate students and faculty members?” is “Well, there were just no ‘good’ candidates.” But, what exactly qualifies someone as a “good” candidate? One key criterion when judging prospective graduate student and faculty candidates are the institutions they have previously attended. In an examination of 15 years of the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) and Survey of Doctoral Recipients (SDR), we explore the pathways of Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino engineering Ph.D. earners between types of institutions and different rankings of institutions. This seminar will discuss our analysis of the social mobilities from Bachelor’s to Master’s to Ph.D. and Ph.D. to tenure-track faculty and their implications for the recruitment of a diverse graduate student body and faculty. A preview of current research on how underrepresented graduate students’ experiences and relationships with their advisors affect their decisions to pursue or not pursue a faculty career will also be presented
BIO
Gabriella Coloyan Fleming received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie
Mellon University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Her graduate research focused on nanoscale heat transfer, experimentally characterizing thermal transport in nanoscale materials. After working at the University of Michigan's Center for Engineering Diversity & Outreach as the NextProf Program Manager, she is now a postdoctoral fellow at UT Austin with a joint appointment in Mechanical and Electrical & Computer Engineering. Half of her research explores DEI issues during the graduate school experience and how they affect the faculty hiring pipeline, especially for people with underrepresented identities. The other half of her research focuses on fabricating flexible, wearable electronics for biomedical applications.
