Advancing equity in the geosciences

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Dr. Julie Libarkin, professor in MSU's Earth and Environmental Sciences and lead in the Geocognition Research Laboratory, is co-leading a new project with Dr. Nicole Gaspari, an associate professor at Tulane University. 

This Pilot Project is intended to build and evaluate sustainable pathways for participation in cyber training within the Earth science fields. The program will be inclusive, with a specific focus on the geoscience Latinx graduate student community in the United States. The geosciences lack diversity and Latinx students are one of the most underrepresented groups in the field.  Lowering the barrier for entry for Spanish-speaking geoscientists by creating Jupyter notebooks with Spanish text and training sessions taught in Spanish will be the focus of this work.  

Computer programming and modeling, although not typically parts of the geoscience curriculum, are required to some degree; this project will use open science resources, such as GitHub, to share out programming resources and will address five goals: 

(1) Enhance Python education for the geoscience community

(2) Enable English as a second language (ESL) and bilingual learners to fully engage in training

(3) sharpen science communication skills among geoscience graduate students

(4) Build networks and mentoring relationships and

(5) Build sustainable infrastructure for geoscience programming.

Ensuring that Latinx scholars are included in these efforts is the purpose of this project, and will result in a more equitable environment for diverse earth and environmental scientsts. 

Co-Principal Investigators: Nicole Gasparini (Tulane University); Julie Libarkin (Michigan State University).

This project is funded by the National Science Foundation (2118272).