Eileen Spain to Join RCSA, Launch New DEI Program
Eileen M. Spain, a 1995 Cottrell Scholar and Carl F. Braun Professor of Chemistry at Occidental College, will join Research Corporation for Science Advancement as a Program Director in August 2023 to launch a new program to increase the number of faculty from underrepresented groups in the physical sciences.
“Eileen is an exciting choice to lead this initiative,” said RCSA President & CEO Daniel Linzer. “As a teacher-scholar committed to the success of those she has mentored, and an administrator who has implemented programs to create STEM communities of inclusion and equity, she brings skill and experience to our efforts to move the scientific enterprise forward.”
Spain is a first-generation college student who earned her bachelor’s degree at Sonoma State University after transferring from Santa Rosa Junior College, and her Ph. D. from the University of Utah. Her research focused in recent years on physical chemistry at interfaces where the interface is employed as a space to make new materials or to reveal new chemical reactions or dynamics, and her career peer-reviewed publications span molecular spectroscopy, atomic collision dynamics, and characterization of bacteria, films, and interfacial structures with an emphasis on atomic force microscopy techniques. She joined the faculty at Occidental College in 1995, chaired the Chemistry Department from 2006-2009, and most recently served as the special assistant to the dean of the College for assessment and accreditation.
“I am deeply honored to join RCSA as a program director and particularly excited to help launch RCSA’s new initiative to support underrepresented postdoctoral scholars as they transition to faculty positions,” Spain said. “Fostering intellectual community among diverse scientists is critical to RCSA’s mission and aligns with my career-long passion to develop student and postdoctoral talent through inclusive excellence in teaching, research, and mentorship.”
Spain will join Senior Program Directors Andrew Feig, Silvia Ronco and Richard Wiener in overseeing the operation of RCSA’s programs and initiatives, including the Cottrell Scholar Program and Scialog. All former senior faculty themselves, RCSA’s program directors develop and sustain relationships with program participants and partners, advisory and review committees, and staff, faculty, and students at colleges and universities across the United States and Canada.
The new program Spain will implement, the three-year Emerging Scholars Initiative, is envisioned to begin in 2024. It will support a cohort of postdocs in astronomy, chemistry, and physics during a critical period in their careers: the year they are preparing to look for faculty positions, the year they are actively interviewing, and their first year as newly independent faculty investigators. The program will prepare participants by pairing them with host institutions for mock interviews and feedback before they begin their job search, and by creating a safe space for feedback and the sharing of experiences as they build a support network they can rely on throughout their careers.
The program will benefit the host institutions by preparing them to conduct interviews in ways that reduce bias and strengthen their efforts to increase diversity in their hiring. It will also give them an early look at likely strong candidates for upcoming positions.
The new initiative evolved from a Cottrell Scholar Collaborative project that RCSA funded in 2019. Led by CS 2006 Keivan Stassun of Vanderbilt University, collaborating with CS 2006 Darren Johnson of the University of Oregon, CS 2006 Adam Leibovich of the University of Pittsburgh, and CS 2018 Grace Stokes of Santa Clara University, the two-year pilot program provided funds for postdocs from research-intensive universities and primarily undergraduate institutions to visit another institution for a mock faculty job interview — including meetings with faculty and administrators, and presentation of a seminar — followed by structured feedback. In total, the project supported interactions among 18 postdoc applicants and 32 prospective host departments, achieving 14 matches of hosts with postdocs for practice job interviews.
“It's gratifying to see that RCSA is going to run with the idea and scale it up,” said Stassun. “Our pilot ended up taking a substantial hit due to COVID and having to transition to virtual participation for part of the time, but we were able to demonstrate the concept well enough, thankfully. Indeed, I think we emerged even more convinced of the value of a program like this.”
Stassun said the program demystified the interview process, and participants said that knowing the details helped them to be much better prepared and confident for subsequent job interviews.
“It's still a reminder of how much of academia involves unspoken expectations,” he said. “We can go a long way to remove barriers for folks who are underrepresented by simply making the tacit more explicit," he said.
Xin Lu, now an assistant professor in the School of Science & Engineering at Tulane University, had seven campus visits in early 2020 as part of the pilot program. She said she was “nervous and unconfident” at first but saw a big improvement after the first visit, the mock interview.
"I am very grateful that the faculty members at the University of Vermont were very friendly and generous in sharing experience with me, even if we all knew that it was a mock interview,” she said. “I got some positive feedback on my talk, which certainly helped me in gaining confidence, and received constructive suggestions on how to improve my research proposal. Beyond the on-campus visit, this experience also inspired me to be more careful about details I was not aware of earlier.”
RCSA’s new initiative will incorporate best practices from the collaborative project and will rely on the Cottrell Scholar and Scialog communities to host interviews and recommend participants.
“This is a great example of how transformative ideas percolate up from the Cottrell Scholar community, which rightly has been called the ‘action arm’ of the foundation,” Linzer said. “Under Eileen’s leadership, the program they set in motion can have an even larger impact across fields and across the country."
Spain agreed.
“RCSA’s Cottrell Scholar and Scialog communities are a tremendous asset,” Spain said. “I’m looking forward to working with them to see this distinctive program reach success.”
