Breakout Sessions

Chris Heavey, Executive Vice President and Provost
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

The HSRU recently established an affinity group of Provosts and Vice Presidents for Academic Affairs. Please join us for this session to meet and connect with fellow provost members of the Alliance and engage in a conversation about the opportunities this group can explore and pursue in the interest of the Alliance goals.

Winston Schoenfeld,
VP Research,
University of Central Florida

Vice Presidents and Vice Chancellors for research at HSRU member institutions meet monthly and are sometimes joined by other members of the research development teams. Join us in this session if you are part of the working affinity group or if you have not had the opportunity to engage with our group prior. We welcome a discussion on some of our progress as a group, a dialogue on reflections about the summit, and our upcoming opportunities to partner meaningfully to further the goals of the HSRU through our research partnership enterprise.

Jennifer Wilken,
Associate Vice Provost,
Arizona State University

Metrics with meaning: What’s in a target? 

As the HSRU Alliance emerges as a force for change according to our shared mission, what metrics will be useful and necessary to shape and measure our individual and collective progress? Beginning with the explicit goals of increasing the number of Hispanic doctoral students and the professoriate, please join this generative and interactive conversation and add your ideas to the bank of metrics that we might use to model the correlates, early signals, and benchmarks that will empower and inspire our work.

Melissa Haas, Director of Federal Relations, University of Illinois System

Government relations representatives for HSRU Alliance member institutions are welcome to attend this session, which will include planning and strategizing potential federal advocacy and engagement opportunities to further elevate the Alliance and its objectives. This session will be of particular interest to staff with external relations, federal relations, and/or state relations as part of their portfolios.

Scott Hernandez-Jason, Assistant Vice Chancellor of Communications and Marketing, UC Santa Cruz

Those who work in communications at HSRU Alliance institutions are welcome and encouraged to attend this breakout session, which will include discussing opportunities to increase the Alliance’s visibility, the best ways to keep communications leads informed of Alliance objectives and efforts, and how best to coordinate across the Alliance.

In many physical sciences and engineering programs, women are underrepresented as are Hispanic faculty members and graduate students. By using the power of the HSRU Alliance, we can create cohorts across institutions and develop scaled relationships where we would otherwise be siloed. Such cohorts will provide opportunities for collaboration, expand mentorship networks, and facilitate interdisciplinary and cross-institutional work that will not only diversify these fields, but also push the boundaries of discovery and knowledge. UC Santa Cruz is hosting an HSRU conference in June 2023 to begin facilitating the development of these cohorts.

Are you looking to connect to a community of support and allyship for advancing servingness work at your own institution and in partnership with others? How can the Alliance actively engage participating institutions in accelerating efforts that are centered on servingness? What tools and strategies can we use to learn, exchange, and inspire good practice across the Alliance? How can the table be broadened to engage those closest to the work? How might a community of practice support talent and leadership development across the Alliance? Join the conversation to help us think through what an HSRU community of practice might look like.

Who should join: Administrators, faculty, and staff interested in graduate school preparation, undergraduate research, graduate school transition, and graduate school admissions.

This session will explore the  manifold ways undergraduate research involvement can advance Hispanic  students in graduate school preparation across the HSRU alliance.  It is well known that  these experiences increase Hispanic students’ professional skill development and readiness for success in graduate school through mentoring, increased sense of belonging, scientific identity building, self-efficacy, racial identity safety, and enhanced understanding of the complex research process. Increasing evidence shows that course-based research experiences (CUREs) that engage students in a semester-long project are cost-effective vehicles that introduce a large number of undergraduates to research and increase interest in graduate degrees. Another important finding is that students who participated in collaborative undergraduate research with faculty early on reported significant gains in the ability to think analytically and logically, connect ideas, and learn on their own; this practice particularly benefits first-generation college students. Importantly, adopting and implementing these practices is particularly effective in supporting students from historically excluded communities, including Hispanic students. 

We will  initiate meaningful conversations about the role of the HSRU Alliance in advancing Hispanic students’ equitable transition from undergraduate to graduate degrees for successful career development. Some of the specific questions we will  probe include:

• How can we close the gap between Hispanic representation in undergraduate and graduate programs in the Alliance? Are there existing conspicuous successful pipelines?
• What are the best undergraduate research practices that can be replicated to mitigate the underrepresentation of Hispanic students in graduate programs?
• What are, if any, some of the key standardized and repeatable metrics we would want to use to regularly measure the efficacy of an HSRU’s approach to undergraduate research to increase Hispanic student success in undergraduate to graduate school transition?

Participants will brainstorm ways to help Hispanic students move from graduate study to postdocs and to faculty positions. How can HSRU members work together to facilitate such pathways? What models for building that type of a pipeline are available? How can we institutionalize programs across our member universities? Are there challenges faced by graduate students that we should consider? How can we start even earlier so that undergraduate students are familiar with programs across HSRU institutions?

Please join us as we dig into and grapple with the challenges and opportunities related to the state of our data ecosystems and data cultures within our institutions. We are eager to hear your thoughts and perspectives about aligning our aspirations with our current capabilities.  We will discuss a broad array of areas including data availability, data architecture/modeling, data lineage, and data literacy within our institutions. Ultimately, as we all strive to improve data-informed outcomes for our students and institutions, your engagement will be key.