The Elsevier Foundation

The following grants have been awarded under the 2008 New Scholars Program, providing support to the efforts of the academic and research community to address the fundamental challenge of balancing childcare and family responsibilities with demanding careers in science and technology. To read more click here.

An Elsevier Foundation grant will be used by the Association for Women in Science (AWIS) to develop an educational/support program, including a toolkit with supplementary resources and extended coaching to enable AWIS’ 51 chapters around the county to help early-to-mid career women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learn to effectively manage their personal and professional lives. Building on an established network, this three year project will address the critical career point when women’s attrition from STEM fields is highest.

American Physical Society

This Elsevier Foundation grant will enable the American Physical Society to provide childcare grants to young physicist parents at the APS’ large annual spring meetings. The program addresses the critical role that professional societies can play in long term diversification within the physics discipline by creating a more family-friendly environment. It also aims to ease the financial disadvantage parents responsible for childcare may face in attending meetings which are essential to collaboration, visibility, networking, and a successful career.

University of the Pacific, Stockton California and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington New Zealand

This Elsevier Foundation grant provides an integrated approach to childcare and mentoring needs at the annual Evolution conference. The Society for the Study of Evolution, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the American Society of Naturalists will partner with Elsevier to establish on-site, subsidized child-care service; a professional mentoring program for 50-100 pairs administered through MentorNet; and a themed key note lunch symposium. Ensuring that young women researchers can attend this critical conference will help reduce their well-documented attrition in the field of biology.

Childcare at The EMBO Meeting

European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO)

The Elsevier Foundation grant will enable “The EMBO Meeting” , the first annual life sciences meeting organized by the European Molecular Biology Organization, to offer subsidized multilingual onsite childcare services at the 2009 conference venue in Amsterdam. This program will enable young European life scientists to take full professional advantages of the EMBO conference and serve as a family-friendly model among scientific societies in Europe.

A Program for Personal and Professional Development of Women Scientists in Georgia

With a grant from the Elsevier Foundation, this project will create a framework of national issues, capacities, mentoring and support for women scientists in Georgia. While the Soviet era officially offered women equal access to education, employment and remuneration, no real or lasting opportunities were created for women to develop as leaders in science. To address these challenges, this grant will conduct a survey of 100 Georgian postdoctoral women candidates, a week-long training curriculum for 150 scientists, and build a new virtual network and website resource. Georgian women scientists from different regions and institutions will learn the tools, skills, and networks needed to advance their careers including developing grant proposals, managing research projects, publishing results, successfully balancing work and family -- and assuming leadership positions.

Professional Development Grant for Parents of Infants and Toddlers
University of California - Irvine

The Elsevier Foundation grant will be used to develop an innovative program to address the unique challenges faced by scholars with family responsibilities in travelling to professional conferences and research meetings in national venues that are necessary to advance their careers and contribute to scientific discovery and innovation. The new program will provide dependent care assistance to faculty in science, technology, engineering and math who are at least 50% responsible for childcare and will be administered through an established competition with formal guidelines and backed up by a survey to evaluate its impact as part of the University’s overall program for promoting work-family balance. The formal framework and evaluation report that will result from this program will enable them to establish other sources of funds to sustain the program after the Elsevier grant.

An Elsevier Foundation grant will be used to create and disseminate a series of programs to help new scholars in science, technology, engineering and math to meet their academic and parental obligations while on the job. The centerpiece of the initiative is the development of a lactation model program, which will establish a prototype onsite lactation room and advisory resources for lactating faculty mothers. It is envisaged that this prototype facility will be sustained permanently following the grant period with university funds and will be replicated elsewhere at the university and in the region based on a formal assessment of its effectiveness. The program builds directly on initiatives developed under a grant from the National Science Foundation to increase the percentage of women faculty hired, identify barriers to recruitment and retention in these fields, establish parental leave programs, and create greater understanding in the academic departments of the need for family-friendly practices. This lactation program is an innovation in the academic arena in the scientific and technical disciplines and has good potential for creating a model program that will be adopted by other institutions.

An Elsevier Foundation grant will be used to address barriers to relocation that affect the recruitment and retention of new women scholars. The program will address a wide set of new scholars – notably women with working spouses and partners, whose own careers often present a significant obstacle to relocation – by establishing resources to help new faculty settle in a new location, relocation counseling, a regional career network for faculty spouses, and career coaching for both the scholar and the spouse. The program is particularly innovative in taking a regional approach that extends not only to other universities, but also to all PhD-hiring institutions. It would become self-sustainable through membership fees and will create incentives for institutions to participate in the network by offering credits to institutions that actively participate, e.g. by interviewing and hiring a spouse. RPI is playing a nationally recognized role in the advancement of women faculty in technology and the Settlenet initiative therefore has high potential to serve as a model program.

Increasing representation of female researchers in the computability community
Computability in Europe Conference Series/University of Amsterdam

An Elsevier Foundation grant will support the Computability in Europe Conference Series to increase the participation of women scholars in a field where they are currently underrepresented. CiE (Computability in Europe) is a European network of mathematicians, logicians, computer scientists, physicists and others interested in new developments in computability. Its conference series CiE-CS plays an important role in giving female researchers the opportunity to present results and serve as plenary speakers and role models. CiE-CS will use the grant to establish a mentoring program at the conference to establish formal and informal contacts among senior scientists and graduates students. It will further fund the provision of childcare at the conference to encourage and allow women scholars to attend, a significant innovation for a Europe-based conference.

From Graduate Student to Assistant Professor: Helping Post-doctoral scientists and engineers meet the demands of career and family life
Princeton University

The grant will create programs with a particular focus on the post-doctoral period, a critical time in which a disproportionate number of women scholars in science and engineering make the decision not to apply for assistant professor positions in research universities. The program will address work-family balance issues that are distinct from those faced by graduate students and faculty, since post-doctoral training occurs in a fairly brief time period and almost never takes place either at the university where the researcher has earned her degree or at the university where she will ultimate become a faculty member. For post-doctoral researchers with families, the challenges of this dislocation include separation from spouses or domestic partners, who also often tend to be pursuing academic careers at the same time, and difficulty in finding childcare while travelling to conferences. To address theses challenges, the Elsevier Foundation grant will support extension of funding for a dependent care travel program for post-doctoral fellows and support for travel for fellows whose spouses are graduate students or post-doctoral fellows in science and engineering at another institution.

An Elsevier Foundation grant will allow the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) to provide stipends to cover childcare expenses for selected traveling scholars who attend the ASCB Annual Meeting. While women scholars make up nearly half of post-doctoral researchers in biology, there is a sharp fall off of women in the ranks of assistant professors, associate professors and full professors. Society conferences offer attendees opportunities to highlight their research, hear from leaders in the field, and network with peers. Consistent with studies and feedback from academic institutions, the Society has identified family care issues as one obstacle to the participation of new women scholars in the ASCB annual meeting. This participation is an important venue for career development in the field.

Encouraging Diversity and Work/Life Balance in Engineering Faculty
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, College of Engineering

With a grant from the Elsevier Foundation, the UIUC College of Engineering will develop and test new approaches to enhance to its existing programs to address the under-representation of women faculty in technical fields. The Elsevier Foundation grant will be used to establish a monthly forum for faculty and post-doctoral students and their families to provide social reinforcement, advice and peer-counseling. It will also establish small groups of scientists and engineers, not including families, which will consist of both new and senior faculty to discuss work and work-life issues. The program also includes diversity workshops for faculty, department heads and search committee members, to enhance awareness among the engineering faculty of how gender issues can unfairly limit the opportunities available to women. The new programs will support an established university-wide program, which has received past grants from the National Science Foundation, to increase the advancement of women faculty in technical fields, through recruitment and retention programs, spousal hire programs, and awareness-building.

Boston University
This grant supports the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Initiative at Boston University. As part of an active program of mentoring and leadership development for women scholars, WISE will sponsor an outstanding female graduate student.

California Institute of Technology
The grant will support the work of Dr. Lisa Taneyhill, who is exploring the target and function of genes involved in neural crest induction and migration in the laboratory of Dr. Bronner-Fraser. The grant will support her continued scholarship and her role as a mentor for other women scholars at California Institute of Technology.

University of California, Berkeley
The UC Berkeley “Big Ideas @ Berkeley” program supports young scholars in implementing community programs. As a part of this program, this grant will enable Dr. Madelaine Plauché, a post-doctoral field researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley, to deploy the Open Sesame Project Toolkit in four village centers in Tamil Nadu, India. The Open Sesame Project sponsors access to online information for all literacy levels in developing regions of India by creating open-source and easy to use spoken dialog systems for training and education purposes.

University of California, Berkeley
As part of the “Big Ideas @ Berkeley” program, the Science Technology and Engineering Policy Group (STEP) seeks to create better technology policy through collaborations between scientists, technologists and policy-makers. This grant will enable Kate Hammond, a joint Ph.D. candidate at the University of California-Berkeley and UCSF, to develop training programs that provide scientists with the skills to communicate effectively and understand the decision-making process of political institutions.

Dependent Care Program, Princeton University
Princeton University aims to establish a dependent care program to address the worrisome trend of female Ph.D. candidates unable to pursue their careers as science and engineering professors while raising a family. This grant will allow Princeton to begin funding a program to help graduate students and post-doctoral fellows with the necessary childcare associated with travel to academic conferences.

Annual Award, Society of Toxicology
As part of an initiative to promote leadership in the field, this grant will establish and fund an annual award over three years. The Society of Toxicology is a global leader in advancing science to enhance human, animal, and environmental health.

Day Nursery, Keio University, Japan
In an effort to support women scholars with family responsibilities, this grant will help contribute to the establishment of a day care program at Keio University, the oldest private university in Japan.