About Us

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Expanding upon the success of NSF’s GOLD Program, we seek to:

• Improve career progression and sense of belonging in the geosciences
• Develop an innovative, hybrid mentoring program, pairing early-career leaders with established leaders

Early-career leaders being those from successful federal education programs such as the NOAA Educational Partnership Program and established leaders coming from academe, government agencies, industry, and other geoscience organizations. 

In the geosciences, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and women have historically been underrepresented. In recent years, geosciences have been ranked as one of the least diverse STEM disciplines for undergraduate and graduate-level degrees (Bernard & Cooperdock, 2018), with only 6% of doctoral degrees awarded to underrepresented students over the past 40 years (Dutt, 2019).  Despite a growing consensus that the lack of diversity in science presents an inequity requiring action, decades of research, policies, and projects have shown that diversifying science is not as simple as encouraging women and minorities to earn university degrees in STEM (King et al., 2019). 

 In our program, participants across the generations of geoscience and social sciences will be immersed in multiple virtual platforms that leverage cutting-edge educational technology and allow mentoring relationships to be initialized and cultivated regardless of location. In addition, the mentoring experience will culminate in a professional development conference that integrates a strong social science component. 

 Virtual and in-person mentoring is essential to not only establish a cohort of diverse geoscience and social science leaders but also to provide opportunities centered on workforce development, network enrichment activities, as well as effective mentorship and advisement techniques and/or best practices. This project seeks to leverage strong diverse networks that include the NOAA EPP and former GOLD project participants in order to drive the next generation of geoscience and social science leaders full STEAM ahead.