This group houses all individuals who are interested in working on Mentoring Teams for the advancement of the STEM Ed PaCER Postdoctoral Research Fellows. Join this group to sign up as a potential mentor!

Post a reply to the discussion if you are interested in working on Mentoring Teams for the advancement of the STEM Ed PaCER Postdoctoral Research Fellows. Please include responses to:

1) My research focus.
2) Why I enjoy mentoring.
3) My professional values.

Meet the Mentors for STEM Ed PaCER Postdoctoral Research Fellows

10 replies, 11 voices Last updated by Beth Herbel-Eisenmann 13 hours, 15 minutes ago
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    • #67470

      Laura Lee Sumpter
      Participant
      @sumpte10

      Post a reply to this discussion if you are interested in working on Mentoring Teams for the advancement of the STEM Ed PaCER Postdoctoral Research Fellows.

      Please include responses to:

      1. My research focus.
      2. Why I enjoy mentoring.
      3. My professional values.
    • #67472

      Julie C Libarkin
      Participant
      @libarkin

      My research focus. Model-driven, community-engaged research, mentoring, and administration addressing access, inclusion, equity, and justice in science, engineering, and academia. Discipline expertise in earth science, natural resources, physics.

      Why I enjoy mentoring.  Helping others achieve personal and professional goals is the best part of my job. Ultimately, I want people I work with to identify goals, build activities and gain achievements aligned with those goals, and establish themselves in the lives and work they most desire.

      My professional values. Individual and collective well-being means that each of us should be well and our communities should also be well. “Wellness” looks different for each of us – figuring out how we can navigate different norms and needs is the hardest aspect of my job.

    • #67509

      Sophie Huss
      Participant
      @sophiehuss

      My research focus. Community-engaged research focused around building capacity for ethical engagement in extractive spaces – from mining to museums. Disciplinary training in near-surface geophysics and archaeology.

      Why I enjoy mentoring. I enjoy seeing folks grow into who they are as they find their path in life. Mentoring is a great way to be part of that process – through building relationships and getting to know people for the whole person they are, providing support and facilitating paths to folks’ goals, and co-learning with mentees and other mentors in unique ways!

      My professional values. Above all, I value loving-kindness and compassion. Work often plays a central role in our lives, but it is only part of what makes us who we are – we are all complex and whole people! Recognizing that other life happenings are going on outside of work, embracing our shared humanity, and holding space for grace and compassion in the workplace are at the forefront of how I operate as a professional.

    • #67526

      Emiko Blalock
      Participant
      @emikoblalock

      My research focus: My background is in higher education, and I tend to use organizational and sociological lenses. I consider myself a critical qualitative researcher using community- and narrative-based methodologies to address problems of social inequity in spaces where communities and STEM+Medical education intersect.

      Why I enjoy mentoring: I love to riff, I love to share, and I love to learn from others. I love talking about ideas and helping people try them out or making connections if I don’t have the right area of expertise. I enjoy supporting other colleagues to achieve their visions and ideas, even if the path we travel involves getting a bit “messy”

      My professional values: Rest. I rest in whatever way it means for each day, whether walking, staring out windows, thinking, singing, sleeping, napping, playing. Without rest I could not “work” with kindness, generosity, curiosity, and care.

    • #67527

      Joshua Drew
      Participant
      @jadrew
      1. My research focus.  I work on community based conservation – mostly with an aquatic focus, mostly through combining ecology, history and conservation biology. I have projects working with communities (and friends) in Fiji as well as those within New York State as well.
      2. Why I enjoy mentoring. I like helping people explore the multiple paths and futures that lie within them. I enjoy the chance to help make other peoples’ journeys easier through learning from the (many) mishaps I’ve had along my own journey, and I love helping people learn how to define their own meaning of success.
      3. My professional values. There’s a great quote “In academia, everyone is smart, distinguish yourself by being kind”. I may not always live up to that, but it’s what I fall back to whenever I need guidance in my professional life.
    • #67528

      Miles McNall
      Participant
      @mcnall
      • My research focus: I have 25 years of experience with the evaluation of programs that support the health and well-being of school-aged children. I bring this evaluative lens to my current role, where I coordinate professional development opportunities for researchers in the principles and practices of community-engaged research and broader impacts. I am interested in understanding what community-engaged research practices truly benefit communities – from the perspective of community members, not researchers.
      • Why I enjoy mentoring: I have always learned as much from mentees as they have learned from me. I appreciate and am inspired by the energy and passion of emerging community-engaged scholars and love helping them find they pathway toward making a difference.
      • My professional values: Creating a culture of caring and respect. Fiercely resisting the pressure to treat other human beings as a means to one’s professional ends.
    • #67547

      NICOLE BUCHANAN
      Participant
      @nuchana

      My research focus.

      My research foci are: 1) identifying structural barriers to the full inclusion of marginalized faculty (e.g., BIPOC, queer and women faculty) in STEM and higher education more broadly. Specifically, I look at the ways in which the research conducted by marginalized faculty, particularly when they focus on non-traditional topics and populations, is devalued (e.g., epistemic exclusion) and the consequences of this exclusion on faculty careers and well-being. 2) applying Intersectionality Theory to understand harassment and victimization at work and in educational settings (e.g., racialized sexual harassment) and the consequences for women of color.

      Why I enjoy mentoring.

      Mentoring junior scholars, particularly BIPOC, queer, and women scholars, is one of the most effective ways I know to transform higher education. Their work has the potential to fuel research innovation and create an inclusive and welcoming academy where more faculty and students thrive.

      My professional values.

      I aim to use my work to foster a more inclusive space where traditionally excluded people can thrive in higher education. For me, this requires transparency regarding the often unstated rules of higher education, broadening inclusive practice, and embodying servant leadership to ensure we meet the diverse needs of our academic community.

    • #67615

      Kate Flick
      Participant
      @kflick

      My research focus: My background is in community and environmental sociology, forestry, and community-engaged ways to make sense of climate change.  I like using artistic, western scientific, and cultural lenses to apply research in K12 to Elder educational settings.  Most recently I have been exploring geoscience and what place-based and Indigenous-focused geosciences look like here in the Great Lakes region.

      Why I enjoy mentoring: I love being part of lightbulbs popping on in people’s heads and then seeing what happens when those light bulbs turn into a field of whirling fireflies.  I get excited to do Mind Wanderns with folks and nurture people in their sense-making and “doing” journeys.  Specifically, I try to encourage Place-Thought that gives a central agency to the Place/land and fosters individual and community animacy.  As Watts 2013 articulates in Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans: “It is necessary to tease out what the land’s intentions might be and how she tries to speak through us. …To be animate goes beyond being alive or acting, it is to be full of thought, desire, contemplation, and will.”

      My professional values: Everyone has different realities and experiences that are valuable.  However, our dominant reality sometimes has trouble allowing space for this diversity.  I strive to work towards healing landscapes that include more biodiverse knowledge, relationality, and senses of community wellbeing.

    • #68421

      Rebecca Carina Jordan
      Participant
      @jordanre

      My research focus.  My research focuses on understanding how individuals reason with scientific data. In particular, I seek to understand how individuals generate and test explanations for complex phenomena.  I have worked with several audiences (e.g., grade 6-12 students, undergraduate and graduate students, and the public involved in citizen science) to test general research questions about causal reasoning with regard to individual decision-making in environmental contexts. I have a need for a scholar who is interested in doing a side project helping others to understand PFAS and its health effects.

      Why I enjoy mentoring.  I enjoy working with people because of the creative solutions, perspective-taking, and discussions that arise. I enjoy facilitating peoples’ journeys toward goal attainment, whatever those goals may be.

      My professional values.  I enjoy the creativity, open discourse, and the collaboration of research.  I want to see community engagement in the research that affects their lives.

    • #69109

      Tasia Kendrick
      Participant
      @tasiakendrick
      1.  My research focus: My educational research program is focused on creating, implementing, and assessing learning outcomes and objectives that align with curricular aims to prepare Animal Science undergraduate students for their careers. I am developing my program and ‘niche’ in the area of educational research. My other research domain is within animal disease and genetics. Primarily I focus on Bovine Leukemia Virus (BLV) in cattle, working with farmers and veterinarians on diagnosis, prevention, management and control within their herd. Most recently, I have a goal to incorporate high school students (think AP biology) with graduate students and community members (farmers and veterinarians) to complete some of the needs and lack of knowledge in BLV research. I have contacts but would love the assistance to get things organized and started. [However, I am open to really anything with this program!]
      2. Why I enjoy mentoring: I feel mentoring is my way of giving back to the community and providing a very small “stamp” in the world. [Responsibility is high on my StrengthsQuest profile.] I hope that any individual I mentor, becomes something greater than myself – whatever that might look like. The gained knowledge and enthusiasm for something once considered difficult or unachievable, while I too learn new things from each mentee is what ‘charges my batteries and keeps me going.’
      3. My professional values: I enjoy people, communication, transparency, and collaboration in research. My goal is for collaboration to turn into friendships that last a lifetime. For example, the farmers I work with share life successes and challenges with me (not research or even farm related) long after a project has ended.
    • #70234

      Beth Herbel-Eisenmann
      Participant
      @bhe
      1. My research focus. My scholarship has used various types of participatory methodologies and includes long term partnerships with educators both in and outside of school. We’ve drawn on a range of ideas from sociolinguistics, critical discourse studies, critical mathematics education, intersectional feminism, positioning theory, and postmodern theories to critically challenge ideas, methods, and practices in mathematics education. By doing so, the work generated within the partnerships not only explores theories/ideas in practice but also speaks back to the theories/ideas. Our overarching goal in the work is to create experiences where youth feel they are valued and engage in learning that is relevant, affirming, and conceptually deep. In the partnerships that have involved youth participatory action research, we also work to support youth to do research related to issues they care about and to create change in their communities.
      2. Why I enjoy mentoring. Every day I collaborate with people, I learn new things about myself, the world, my scholarship, etc. I enjoy mentoring because I love to hear about people’s perspectives and dreams about the world and their work and support them to enact their desires in ways that honor their perspectives and journey. It brings me hope that we can work together, learn from one other, and create change toward more just systems and structures.
      3. My professional values. First and foremost, I try to create relationships built on critical hope, dignity, trust, and mutual respect. As a white, cisgender, monolingual woman, I work to be diligent about attending to and challenging long-standing systems that have disenfranchised and dehumanized many people. This is particularly relevant to STEM as one considers the epistemic, material harm that it has done in the world, alongside considering the potential for STEM education to create spaces where people thrive and find joy. We all have important ideas, feelings, and visions for how the world could be, and I recognize that ‘objective’, impersonal knowing is often privileged over experiential, emotional forms.  Thus, I value conversation, time, listening and brainstorming with people and am committed to doing work that prioritizes the perspectives of people most marginalized by the policies and practices of dominant institutions (e.g. schools/universities) because these perspectives can reveal power and possibilities for liberation in ways that sanctioned forms cannot.
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