During the summer, Fengyan Li, a professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, with three other organizers piloted a new model for engaging and integrating underrepresented researchers in Computational Mathematics at a two-week workshop held at the Institute for Computational and Experimental Mathematics Research (ICERM), Brown University, Providence, RI.
Entitled “Empowering a Diverse Computational Mathematics Research Community” (https://icerm.brown.edu/topical_workshops/tw-24-edmc/), the workshop organized each participant into two types of communities: research and learning. The research communities consisted of seven research teams, each with up to five early career participants led by experienced mentors, to learn about each other’s expertise and to initiate a novel collaborative research project (or even a research program). In addition to ample time for team research, there were an icebreaker session and lightning talks for participants to get to know each other, team briefings to share about progress, and the final team presentations. These research communities are committed to continue the research initiated at the workshop, with possible meetups at conferences or research institutes, to bring their work toward conference presentations and journal publication(s). All mentors of the research communities were recruited from underrepresented minorities in mathematics, while the participants included both underrepresented minorities and computational researchers from various career stages with different areas of expertise.
The seven learning communities, each named after a prominent under-represented mathematician, mixed senior and junior participants but were run in a leaderless format. Rather, the learning community activities generally began with a plenary session featuring an invited speaker or a panel session on topics such as mentoring, career skills, the benefits of diversity, and work-life balance. After a whole-group interaction with the presenter or the panelists, the participants met with their smaller learning communities to continue the discussion on the theme. This format was designed to cultivate the connection and understanding among junior and senior members on the team.
A key intent of the two-week workshop, then, was to introduce each participant two forms of durable socialization into the wider computational research community: a new research collaboration and an independent mentoring and supportive network. “The larger goal of the workshop”, to quote from the workshop website, “is to form a positive, diverse community of researchers who are committed to supporting each other’s professional and scholarly growth”.
