UMaine one of 37 nationwide STEM projects to get NSF grant

Courtesy / University of Maine Mohamad Musavi, associate dean at the University of Maine in Orono, is principal investigator for a new $300,000 NSF grant to build on the college's existing work to boost women and minorities participating in STEM fields.

Write a Comment

By Lori Valigra

Researchers at the University of Maine in Orono will get a $299,451 grant from the new National Science Foundation INCLUDES program aimed at diversifying and boosting participation by women and minorities in STEM fields.

The school is the only one in Maine to have received one of the grants.

“Participation of these groups in STEM isn’t proportional to the numbers across Maine and the United States,” Mohamad Musavi, principal investigator on the new project and associate dean at UMaine’s College of Engineering, said. He added that nationwide only about 18% of females participate in engineering, while some 50% of the U.S. population is female. About 15% of females in Maine are in engineering.

The grant starts on Jan. 1, 2017, and ends on Dec. 31, 2018.

During the year, Musavi and his colleagues will collaborate with colleagues in five other states — Florida, Tennessee, New York, North Carolina and Idaho — to see if the STEM work his lab has done from an earlier grant will work in those states. The goal of INCLUDES is to get a system that can scale nationwide.

National goals

“[The states] will implement small projects in their own environments and we hope at the end of one year that we’ll have enough evidence to scale up nationally,” Musavi said.

In one year, he said, NSF will review the 37 winners of the current award to see how their approaches scaled across a small number of states, and then narrow down the five or six best approaches and give each of them $12.5 million. At that point, if Musavi gets the new grant he said he would expand to 20 institutions in 20 states and 100 school districts.

“A lot of states will create their own philosophy,” Musavi said of the current project. “They’ll learn from us and we’ll learn from them.”

Musavi said UMaine was invited to apply for the NSF INCLUDES project because of success in an earlier, $750,000 NSF EPSCOR grant, it received in October 2013. That grant involved managing stormwater runoff from the environment into the ocean and engaging a large workforce, in this case students from 12 high schools from Kittery to Calais, to assist the community in solving the problem. About 120 students and 20 teachers were trained over two years at both the university and their high school. Musavi said the training involved learning both the science of stormwater and the engineering tools to measure and treat it.

Building self-confidence

“There’s a big debate about why minority groups aren’t coming into primarily engineering and computer science,” he says, adding that a lack of self-confidence among students may be part of the problem.

“We thought the stormwater project would especially attract the native American population in Maine,” he said. “Involving females and minorities gives kids hands-on experience in real-world problems. They can help their own community.”

Also boosting UMaine’s profile at NSF is the success of Paige Brown, who participated in the NSF EPSCOR program while at Bangor High School. She invented a way to pull harmful phosphorus from local stormwater in Bangor, and won the prestigious, $150,000 Intel Science Talent Search prize. Musavi says Brown is now an engineering student at Stanford University, and being around the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, she could opt to one day start a company based on her invention.

Local businesses also are supporting UMaine’s program with money and equipment. They include Emera Maine, Maine Community Foundation, Bangor Savings Bank and Idexx.

“This [INCLUDES grant] is the beginning of the road for us,” said Musavi. “They’ve given the opportunity for 37 institutions to prove their program is valuable to scale up nationally.”

Maine Maritime hosts inaugural STEM Conference for Girls

It may be a great idea, but STEM Loan Program didn't get funded

MDI Bio Lab inspires art for a visceral experience of science

UMaine Business Challenge lands $30K sponsorship