NSF Meeting Explores Minority Leadership

NSF Meeting Explores Minority Leadership

RICE NEWS

November 4, 1999

About 70 national leaders from academia, private foundations, government agencies, government research laboratories and industry recently met at Rice to discuss how to develop minority leaders in science and engineering.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored the Summit Meeting on Promoting National Minority Leadership in Science and Engineering, held Oct. 18-19 at Rice, which focused on how American businesses, universities and government agencies can identify, nurture and entitle potential minority leaders in science and engineering, especially when there are currently so few senior minority leaders.

Rice University President Malcolm Gillis welcomed meeting attendees, who worked to build solutions and create concrete suggestions that will allow the nation to create true underrepresented minority leadership in science and engineering.

The meeting’s goal was to create an effective plan that universities, industry, government and funding agencies will embrace and implement.

The organizers plan to issue a report outlining the group’s specific recommendations.

Following the meeting, Judith Sunley, interim assistant director for education and human resources at the National Science Foundation, said, “Leadership issues are always particularly difficult to deal with, and it is important to gather this group that is broadly based and representative of diversity to address the issue. There is still a lot of work to do on the part of the meeting organizers in pulling together all the thoughts and ideas into a document that everyone can get behind.”

Conference organizer Richard Tapia, the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice, said the meeting brought together leaders who had not had opportunities to meet.

“The quality of the attendance, the quality of the discussion and the quality of the ideas, with the mix of people, not just minorities, was excellent,” he said.

Tapia, a member of the National Science Board, the governing board of the NSF, presented a talk on the “Lack of Minority Leadership: Possible Causes and Plausible Solutions” at the conference.

Shirley Malcom, director of Education and Human Resources Programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), presented the keynote address.

Watch for information on the NSF’s report in future issues of the Rice News.