AGEP
PROJECT PROFILE INFORMATION:
PI: Lester A.
Lefton, Ph.D.
Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost 200 Gibson Hall, Tulane University 6823 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70118 |
Program
Coordinator / Director: Dr. Henry Bart - Project Director, Associate
Professor,
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department,
Tulane University
Email: hank@museum.tulane.edu Program
Coordinator / Director: Dr. Calvin Mackie - Project Co-Director, Associate
Professor,
Mechanical Engineering Department, Tulane
University Email: Calvin.Mackie@tulane.edu |
Preferred
day-to-day contact person: Ms. Jannie Price
Program Administrator Graduate Alliance for
Education in Louisiana Email: jeprice@tulane.edu |
Primary Partners: Louisiana
State University Southern
University Baton Rouge Secondary Partners: Xavier
University of Louisiana Dillard
University Southern University New Orleans |
Disciplines
/ departments:
Website address: http://www.gaela.tulane.edu/
Impact nugget:
The Graduate Alliance for Education in Louisiana (GAELA) is a recent addition to the AGEP family (formed in 2003). GAELA involves Louisiana’s two Carnegie Research I institutions and four of its five HBCU’s. The project is building upon existing minority STEM undergraduate programs at GAELA institutions (LSAMP, HBCU-UP, MARC), and implementing new strategies designed to make STEM graduate education at Louisiana’s flagship universities more inclusive. We held our first recruitment fair in Fall 2003 and are actively participating in other recruitment conferences regionally and nationally to increase the pool of minority graduate student talent at GAELA institutions. We are closely examining the doctoral training experience of minorities currently in our institutions and taking steps to change the culture to make the process more conducive to minority participation and success. One example of culture change we are working to emulate broadly is the tremendous success co-PI Isiah Warner has had in the graduate program in Chemistry at Louisiana State University. The program has awarded doctoral degrees to 23 African Americans over the past three years and currently has an enrollment of 32 African American graduate students.