The City College of New York is partnering with the University of Texas at El Paso to educate the next generation of Hispanic professors in environmental sciences and engineering. Entitled "Collaborative Research: The Hispanic AGEP Alliance for the Environmental Science and Engineering Professoriate," the five-year project is funded by a $3.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation. It begins July 1, 2017. 

Harlem-based City College, which is designated a Hispanic Serving Institution of Higher Education by the U.S. Department of Education, will receive $2.315 million of the funding and UTEP $1.3 million.  

Under the administration of CCNY's NOAA CREST, the two institutions will collaborate to develop, implement and study a model for training and transitioning Hispanic environmental sciences and engineering (ESE) doctoral students to STEM instructional faculty positions at community colleges and other institutions. Candidates must have completed all coursework and be dissertating, as they transition.  

Participants will primarily include Hispanic doctoral students of Caribbean or Mexican origin, who are advanced level doctoral candidates majoring in ESE fields. These include civil, electrical, mechanical or biomedical engineering; earth and atmospheric sciences; ecology and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines.  

The project will be led by CCNY faculty Jorge E. Gonzalez, Fred Moshary, Joseph Barba, Kyle McDonald and Ellen E. Smiley. UTEP experts include: Miguel Velez-Reyes, Craig Tweedie, and Ivonne Santiago.  

The CCNY-UTEP partnership is in response to the NSF's Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program solicitation. AGEP seeks to advance knowledge about models to improve pathways to the professoriate and success of historically underrepresented minority (URM) graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty in specific STEM disciplines and/or STEM education research fields.  

There are three community college partners in the Hispanic AGEP Alliance: LaGuardia Community College, Queensborough Community College and El Paso Community College in El Paso, TX.  

The NSF grant to CCNY and UTEP brings up to $23 million in awards to City College since last fall for training underrepresented minority scientists and engineers. Last September CCNY won a $15.5 million NOAA grant to produce mostly minority STEM scientists.  

In addition, $5.2 million was received from the U.S. Department of Education in October to promote STEM education, particularly among underrepresented groups.  

Source: Published originally on www.eurekalert.org, CCNY-UTEP partner to produce next generation Latino professors, City College of New York by Jay Mwamba, May 26^th, 2017.