2023 Cottrell Scholar Conference Focuses on Cultural Change
New Cottrell Scholars and Holland Award recipients received trophies at the 2023 Cottrell Scholar Conference.
More than 130 members of the Cottrell Scholar community met July 19-21, 2023, at the 29th Annual Cottrell Scholar Conference in Tucson, Arizona, to network, welcome new members, and share ideas on creating a scientific community that is more diverse, more inclusive, and more human.
“These are people who care,” said RCSA Senior Program Director Silvia Ronco. “That’s what makes the Cottrell Scholar Conference so compelling: This group is always looking for better ways to support their students and each other.”
Co-chaired by CS 2015 Jen Heemstra and CS 2008 Tehshik Yoon, the conference theme of “Incentivizing Cultural Change” challenged Cottrell Scholars as changemakers to focus on ways they can work to realign the reward structure in academia to value “inclusive environments where everyone can thrive,” Heemstra said.
“The question is not just how to make the scientific community better in a way that is evidence-based, that is thoughtful, that is going to be successful and durable,” Yoon added. “The real question is how do we do it? How do we go back to our departments and get them thinking about the same issues as the people who are part of this community?”
As at previous conferences, a primary goal was to welcome this year’s class of new Cottrell Scholars. These teacher-scholars from institutions across the United States and Canada gave five-minute talks about their work, focusing mostly on their educational plans.
A full schedule of thought-provoking presentations followed, providing topics and inspiration for organized breakout discussions as well as more informal networking sessions.
In her keynote talk, “Building Lifeboats without Sinking Yourself: Cultural Change on the Tenure Track,” CS 2019 Kerstin Perez, Columbia University, shared her experience, across different institutions and career stages, doing the uneasy work of balancing support for students with advocacy for her own personal and professional success.
“For academic faculty on the tenure track, cultural change is not in our job descriptions,” she said, noting that a disproportionate mentoring burden falls on scholars who are minoritized in some way in their field but are in high demand from students.
“How can we perform and support the labor of instituting positive cultural change — which is not only undervalued in tenure and promotion but can be interpreted as evidence that we are not adequately committed to our scientific research — while also ensuring compensation for ourselves and those that come after us?” she asked.
In her talk, she shared her work to build classroom communities that foster the recruitment and retention of undergraduate physics students, as well as her experience advocating for compensation for this type of effort. She offered practical advice for making the invisible work of cultural change and building a classroom culture that supports all students more visible to others, and how to leverage that work to get resources for research.
Holden Thorp, Editor-in-Chief of the Science family of journals, discussed the multiple reasons for -- and possible solutions to -- anti-science rhetoric prevalent in national discourse during his keynote talk, “Truth During Chaos: Science in a Time When Facts Don’t Matter.”
In this challenging climate, where misinformation is orchestrated, trust in science is under attack, and efforts to undermine inclusion in science are gaining steam despite significant evidence that who does research really matters, he said the scientific community has done “a lousy job explaining how science works.”
“When Tony Fauci goes on TV and says you don't need to wear a mask, and then three weeks later says we found out the virus is airborne so you've got to wear a mask, every scientist knows exactly what happened,’’ he said. “But the public doesn't know how to process that, and of course there are people who use that to push their agenda.”
What can scientists do?
“First, we have to teach the public that science is a process,” he said. “It's iterative. It's not fixed in time. It’s done by teams of people. And of course, that there's always going to be somebody who disagrees. That's part of our process. But we don't debate it by yelling at each other on television, or on Twitter. We debate it by writing papers that get reviewed, and we discuss things with each other.”
The mainstream media’s notion that coverage should be “fair and balanced” also frequently means that any discussion related to science is not a fair fight, he said.
“We have to convince the world that there’s a difference between a whole bunch of peer-reviewed papers and some guy with a podcast,” he said.
The conference also featured talks by winners of this year’s STAR and IMPACT Awards, which encourage academic leadership excellence and the improvement of science education by Cottrell Scholars.
CS 2003 and 2023 STAR Award recipient T. Daniel Crawford, Virginia Tech, talked primarily about his work founding the Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI), which serves and enhances the software development efforts of the global computational molecular sciences community by providing software infrastructure, and by enabling the adoption of standards and best practices.
CS 2010 and 2023 STAR Award recipient Linda Columbus, University of Virginia, described her continuing quest for parity in curriculum, detailing her successful approaches to redesigning undergraduate STEM courses to decrease the performance gaps between first-generation and continuing generations, underrepresented minority and majority, and transfer and four-year students.
CS 1994 and 2023 IMPACT Award winner Mark Bussell, Western Washington University, described his longtime advocacy for high-impact research opportunities for undergraduates, including how he has helped transform his university's chemistry department into a national model with student participation in faculty-mentored research at its core.
Another highlight of the conference was the chance for Cottrell Scholars to welcome six new members to their community: Raychelle Burks, American University; Luis Colón, University at Buffalo; Robert Gilliard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Ted Goodson, University of Michigan; Malika Jeffries-El, Boston University; and Jane Liu, Pomona College. As recipients of RCSA’s first Robert Holland Jr. Award for Research Excellence and Contributions to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, these senior scientists received trophies and gave talks on their long records of leadership and impact in helping to increase diversity in the physical sciences.
RCSA President Dan Linzer said the Holland Award, designed by Cottrell Scholars to celebrate scientists who have “excelled in their research and in the cultural changes that are needed in our fields,” is the latest example of the way ideas generated by Cottrell Scholars help inform the work of the foundation.
Each year at the conference, new ideas for collaborative projects emerge from discussions, and RCSA funds up to four of them with Cottrell Scholar Collaborative awards. Some of these projects have had national impact and helped RCSA launch new programs.
RCSA plans to launch a new initiative in 2024 to increase the number of faculty from underrepresented groups in the physical sciences. The idea evolved from a two-year Cottrell Scholar Collaborative pilot project that RCSA funded in 2019.
“The Cottrell Scholar community continues to make a difference by deeply caring, doing research and education and mentoring, and creating inclusive environments that celebrate everyone's contributions to the work that we all do,” Linzer said. “We hope this continues to be a community where you can share your ideas, reaffirm your values, and come up with approaches that can be implemented across the country and in Canada to make change happen.”
