A proposal recently funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation unites the American Geosciences Institute (AGI) and the Deep Carbon Observatory to increase the participation and retention of United States citizens and permanent residents who are geoscientists from underrepresented groups (African American, Hispanic, Latino/Latina, Native American, Native Alaskan, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander) in DCO. The project will focus on bolstering and advocating a broad awareness of DCO activities for early- to mid-career underrepresented geoscientists, including graduating PhD candidates, post-doctoral fellows, assistant professors, and their counterparts in the private sector, to produce more active DCO participants.
AGI, the DCO Secretariat, and the four DCO Science Communities will collaborate to enhance the overall visibility of DCO to underrepresented groups in the geosciences. This collaboration will bolster their professional success by engaging them to become active members of the DCO Science Network and contribute to DCO’s high profile, interdisciplinary research. The project’s goals include improving professional success, increasing career retention, and developing a cohort of role models and mentors who are underrepresented geoscientists. AGI plans to engage selected individuals to collaborate with the DCO on research activities through seed funding projects to support their work and to place them in a career posture resulting in long-term active members of the DCO community. AGI will continue to facilitate broad awareness of DCO through its geoscience community-wide network as well as targeted communications within its specific, diversity-oriented networks throughout the two-year program term.
A final report will describe the project’s objectives and activities, and will also analyze its outcomes, which will be made widely available to the geoscience community via the AGI and DCO websites.
The proposal’s principal investigator is Heather R. Houlton of AGI, who can be contacted by those interested in learning more about this project.
