ADVANCE awards grants to departments Inaugural departmental grants focus on mentoring programs
BY JADE BOYD Rice News staff
Rice’s ADVANCE program has awarded grants to six academic departments to establish pilot programs for mentoring junior faculty. ADVANCE officials say they hope the programs will foster a more diverse science and engineering workforce by increasing the representation and retention of female faculty.
JEFF FITLOW
Brendan Hassett, left, professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics, said the ADVANCE grant
will allow new faculty member Danijela Damjanović, right, assistant professor of mathematics, to bring respected scholars to campus for academic colloquia.
“The pilot mentoring programs will provide models that other departments can learn from as they design their own programs for mentoring junior faculty,” said Jan Rinehart, executive director of ADVANCE. “Ultimately, our goal is to create a more supportive, more equitable climate in all academic departments at Rice.”
One of the inaugural grants went to the Department of Mathematics. Department Chair Brendan Hassett said Mathematics’ mentoring program is designed to speed up the integration of new faculty into the department by giving them the authority — and the budget — to bring respected scholars to campus for academic colloquia.
“It’s a good strategy to bring young scholars into departmental decision-making as soon as possible,” he said. “Giving them responsibility for planning colloquia is one way to do that.”
Hassett said the strategy is particularly useful in mathematics because collaboration and new ideas — the sorts of things that come from bringing outside experts to campus — are critically important to mathematicians.
“When we gain an insight or get a new idea, we can act on it almost instantly,” he said. “We don’t have to redirect laboratories with lots of equipment to pursue something new. We can be very nimble, and as a result, mathematicians are constantly forming new collaborations and scientific connections.”
Danijela Damjanović joined Rice as assistant professor of mathematics this fall. She comes to Rice from Harvard University, where she served as a Benjamin Pierce lecturer in mathematics and as co-organizer of the Brandeis-Harvard-MIT-Northeastern Joint Mathematics Colloquium. Hassett said Damjanović will organize Rice’s weekly mathematics colloquium, and the ADVANCE grant will allow her to bring in more senior scholars than might otherwise be possible.
Rice’s ADVANCE program awarded its first six departmental grants this fall to:
About Jade Boyd
Jade Boyd is science editor and associate director of news and media relations in Rice University's Office of Public Affairs.
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