Events and Activities

Mentoring Astronomers: Students to Early Faculty

The CSMA and CSWA are sponsoring a special session devoted to an exchange of information and best practices on mentoring as part of the summer 2010 AAS meeting. This session will consist of a participatory mini-workshop to discuss and practice implementing effective mentoring techniques.

The speaker is involved in developing and conducting research mentor training programs affiliated with the Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching; the Delta Program in Research, Teaching, and Learning; and the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. The mentor training has been designed to be effective for STEM disciplines and has been field tested with astronomers in particular. The seminar has been adapted for use with proteges who range in experience from grad students to postdocs, to faculty. The primary content will be the presentation and discussion of a few case studies. Topics that will be discussed in the context of mentoring are expectations, communication, independence, diversity, understanding and ethics.

The special session will be held on Tuesday, May 25, 2010, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM in the Hibiscus AB room.

Mentoring Astronomers: Students to Faculty

The CSMA and CSWA have sponsored two sessions devoted to an exchange of information and best practices on mentoring as part of the 2010 AAS meeting in Washington, D.C. The intended audience were astronomical researchers and faculty, as well as students, who act as mentors to more junior colleagues, and who will continue to be mentors as they progress through their careers. These sessions, first presenting best practices and information, and the second a participatory workshop, were held in the morning and afternoon, respectively, on Wednesday, January 6, 2010.

Special session presentations from the workshop can be downloaded below:

• Dana Lehr (Nigel Sharp), The NSF Postdoctoral Mentoring Plan Requirement (pdf)
• Kathleen Flint, A Mentoring Toolkit: Tips and Tools for Mentoring Early-Career Researchers (ppt)
• Eric Hooper, Learning to Become a More Effective Research Mentor for Your Trainees (ppt)
• Eric Hooper, Questions for Case Studies (ppt)

For the IYA, the Las Cumbres Observatory/UT Brownsville/CSMA Speakers Program

The CSMA is jointly developing a speakers program in which colleges and universities can request talks or presentations on astronomy topics of interest to inviting institutions. We match these requests with our participating speakers, and pay for their travel and hosting expenses. The CSMA is particularly interested in matching requests with historically black colleges and universities, and other minority serving institutions. For more information, including a request form, please see the Speaker Program website on http://arcc.phys.utb.edu/web/LasCumbres/REQUESTS/howto.html , or contact the CSMA and LCO organizers, Keivan Stassun and Virginia Trimble.

Hubble's Diverse Universe

215th American Astronomical Society Meeting, Washington, D.C.

The US International Year of Astronomy 2009 Cultural Astronomy Working Group, in conjunction with the CSMA, held a viewing of "Hubble’s Diverse Universe" at the 2010 AAS meeting in Washington, D.C. The documentary featured interviews with African American and Hispanic American astrophysicists, and discusses their research, the role of NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope in their careers, and the issues with diversity in astronomy.

Mentoring a New Generation of Minority Astronomers

We have hosted a luncheon at the 2009 AAS Meeting in Long Beach, CA to discuss the role of mentorship. Further information can be found here.