Newsletter (Dec 2023): Apply for 2024 Alumni Grants and Awards!
SSMN Quarterly Newsletter
December 2023
Happy Holidays, Sloan Scholars! In this quarter’s newsletter…
- Announcing the 2024 Grants Program and the first annual SSMN Awards!
- Featured Scholar: Karin Block-Cora
- Upcoming Events & Workshops
- Career Opportunities
- Scholar Highlights
- Fall recap: Webinar Recordings & photos from the SREB Institute
Announcing the 2024 Grants and Awards
The SSMN is pleased to open applications for the 2024 SSMN Grants competition and, for the first time, the SSMN Awards—a new annual program that will recognize the research, career, and professional development achievements of our Sloan Legacy, UCEM, and SIGP alumni. SSMN Awards will be given in five categories:
Professional of the Year
Higher Education Professional of the Year
Early Career Alumnus Award
Excellence in Community Engagement Award
Outstanding Mentor Award
Alumni are encouraged to apply on their own, though they may also nominate fellow alumni to apply. Read more about each SSMN Award category and consider which one (or two!) speaks to your achievements. Applications are due March 15, 2024.
SSMN Grants are once again available in three categories:
Research Seed Funding (up to $10,000)
Mentoring and/or Career Development (up to $5,000)
Conference Travel (up to $2,000)
As always, all Sloan Scholar alumni are eligible for grants and awards. Detailed guidance is available on the 2024 Grants page.
The deadline for all grant and award applications is March 15, 2024. Good luck!
Featured Scholar: Dr. Karin Block-Cora
Dr. Karin Block-Cora, professor of earth and atmospheric science at the City College of New York, approaches academic mentoring as both a cheerleader and a pragmatist.
“There's too much ego sometimes in mentoring,” she told the SSMN staff recently, when we visited her Harlem campus. “I think we often feel like, ‘Oh man, I worked so hard to get this student to be super spectacular and awesome, and they never even became a professor.’ And the thing is, it's not about us.”
In October, she was one of three faculty to receive the City University of New York’s 2023 Mentoring Award.
She also serves on the SSMN Advisory Board—a role she calls her “fun service work,” because of the relationships she’s built with the other board members and the ability “to potentially directly help people—and not just help people, but help my community, who helped me so much.”
Dr. Block-Cora earned her Ph.D. in earth and environmental sciences from the City University of New York in 2006, focusing on igneous petrology. She worked for three years as a postdoc at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, an institute of Columbia University, before starting as a professor at CCNY, where she has been ever since.
In the SSMN's latest Featured Scholar, Dr. Block-Cora talks about her career, what she loves about working at CCNY, and how her approach to mentoring has evolved.
Upcoming Events & Workshops
The First 90 Days: How to Establish Yourself in Any New Position (Register here!)
Friday, Jan. 19, 2024 2:00–3:30 p.m. ET
In this workshop, academic-career expert Naledi Saul will demonstrate the skills and practices a skillful scientist puts to use in the first 3 months of a new job or scholarly environment: assessing their environment, strategically finding allies and avoiding pitfalls, uncovering hidden expectations, and aligning efforts for team success. Read more about Saul’s method here and register for the workshop!
2024 Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership Symposium: Weaving Together STEM, Community, and Culture
March 1-2, 2024, in Tucson, Arizona
The SSMN, NACME, and leaders of the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP) have partnered to host the first biennial SIGP Symposium—a new space for SIGP scholars from around the country to gather, create community, and find enrichment in a slate of activities and talks catering to primarily current SIGP scholars. If you’re a Sloan alumnus in or near the Tucson area and you’re interested in networking with current SIGP Scholars at the symposium, let us know—we'd love to talk!
Career Opportunities
Faculty mentorship opportunity for engineers: PIs on an NSF-backed initiative to support and retain faculty of color in the engineering professoriate are seeking faculty members of color who might be interested in being paired with senior and emeritus faculty of technically similar expertise/backgrounds. The program is called Increasing Minority Presence within Academia through Continuous Training at Scale (IMPACTS), and you can read the program abstract here. Questions and expressions of interest can be directed to Billyde Brown ([email protected]).
Klesse College fall commencement. (Photo: Cody Gonzalez)
⭐️ Scholar Highlights ⭐️
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Karin Block-Cora, City University of New York ’06 and member of the SSMN Advisory Board, was awarded the Mentoring Award from the CUNY Graduate Center.In its announcement, the university wrote that several current and former students nominated Dr. Block-Cora; one wrote that Dr. Block-Cora helped her “demystify who is a scientist and discover my own potential as a scientist.” Read more about Dr. Block-Cora in our latest featured scholar article!
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Joscelyn Mejías, Georgia Tech ’19 and a K99 postdoc at Johns Hopkins, was named a 2023 L’Oreal For Women in Science Fellow. In a video shared by L’Oreal USA, Mejías explains how the dearth of research on uterine fibroids, which she is working to undo, demonstrates the need for greater “diversity in thought” in the research sphere.
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Cody Gonzalez, Penn State ’22, who joined the University of Texas–San Antonio as an Assistant Professor earlier this year, recently celebrated the commencement of his first graduate student from UTSA’s Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design. Gonzalez and his colleagues also celebrated the success of their NASA-funded proposal with Exploration Architecture Corporation (XArc), titled “SurveyorBot: A Proof of Value Precursor Mission for Launch / Landing Pad Geotechnical Assessment.”
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Thomas Searles, Rice University ’11, is PI on a new initiative to establish a consortium of colleges and universities dedicated to broadening educational pathways in quantum engineering. The project, called the ReACT-QISE Consortium, was recently awarded a $4.8-million grant from the Department of Energy.
- In Scientific American, Debbie Senesky, UC Berkeley ’07, wrote about her work building electronics that can withstand extreme environments, for use in space. (She’s in a video, too!)
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Zachary Rayfield, Cornell ’14, started a new position as Head of Goals-Based Investing Research at Vanguard.
- Karen Lozano, Rice University ’99, was inducted to the National Academy of Engineering earlier this year — “for contributions to nanofiber research and commercialization, and highly impactful mentoring of students from underserved populations at an undergraduate institution.” Recently, Dr. Lozano was also recognized by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, alongside 34 other American immigrants noted for their outstanding contributions to U.S. society.
Fall Recap: Webinar Recordings and SREB Institute photos
- On Nov. 30, scientist-activists Nicole Williams and Cynthia Prieto-Diaz led a practical, hands-on workshop for scientists interested in turning their social-justice goals and values into actions. Watch the first half Scientists as Social Justice Advocates and hear the presenters explain the small-group activity, which is available as a planning exercise that you can do independently from home. Watch the webinar recording here.
- At our Alumni Funding Panel #1: Getting Funded in Your First Five Years, on Nov. 1, Drs. Joseph Badillo, Lauren Hagler, and Shawna Follis offered recommendations and answered questions about applying for NIH K99/R00 awards, the NSF LEAPS award, and the HHMI Hanna H. Gray Fellowship. Watch the webinar recording here.
- On Dec. 7, Alumni Funding Panel #2: NIH Grants, Private Funding, and Collaborative Projects featured Drs. Sam Campos and Nancy Diaz-Elsayed contributing to a wide-ranging conversation about their experiences finding and securing funding to fit very different projects. As in the previous month's panel, panelists talked about the application process, how they chose funders, the kind of feedback they sought from colleagues, how they collaborated with community and private-sector groups, and more. Watch the webinar recording here.
- In October, more than 100 Sloan alumni and current scholars gathered for the SREB Institute on Teaching & Mentoring in Tampa, Florida, and alumni presented on a variety of topics at the SSMN Research Symposium. Symposium Presenters reflected that they enjoyed hearing each other talk about their own research and passion projects. We've added our photos from the events to this shared Dropbox file — we invite you to download them, and, if you have your own photos to share, add a folder!
Find all webinar recordings in the SSMN Webinar Library.
From the SSMN team, thank you all for making 2023 another fantastic, successful year. It's an honor to work with you!
Bookmark the SSMN events page on your browser!