Collaborative Research: BPC-DP: African-American Researchers in Computing Sciences (AARCS)

This project aims to broaden African American participation in tenure track faculty and research scientist positions within the education pipeline. African Americans represent only 5.2% of all university faculty in the U.S. and only 1% of tenure track faculty in computer science.

Targeted presentations by African American computing sciences faculty and graduate students will expose African American undergraduates nationwide to role models, research, and graduate school opportunities that are specifically designed to address concerns and misunderstandings about computing sciences faculty and research. Program components also include a Future Faculty/Research Scientist Mentoring program and an annual AARCS mini-conference.

The program will serve as a successful model that can be incorporated into larger Alliance projects and replicated at other institutions to target African Americans and other underrepresented groups.

This model will be empirically researched and evaluated to illustrate the effects it has on creating behavior, affective, and cognitive changes in the thoughts and actions of African American and other undergraduate students.