Pathways to Career Success: A STEM Career Mentorship Program
Jeffrey Jones
The Pathways to Engineering Success Program focuses on guiding undergraduate STEM students toward thriving careers in chosen fields. This mentorship initiative pairs students with experienced professionals to provide practical insights, career guidance, and leadership development. Through hands-on learning, resume coaching, and exposure to real-world challenges, the program equips participants with the tools and confidence to excel in specialized engineering fields, while promoting diversity and inclusivity in STEM careers.

Creative Scientific Inquiry Experiences
Ellene Tratras Contis, Eastern Michigan University
The Creative Scientific Inquiry Experience (CSIE) is a STEM-related program funded by the U.S. Department of Education that connects students with faculty and with community projects through an integrated science curriculum. We specialize in creating learning experiences for students in STEM fields through innovative courses and student events. Our courses are 1-2 credit hours, and faculty work with community partners to develop coursework that allows students to work on real-world problems.

Enabling Faculty to Adopt Deliberative Democracy Pedagogy: a tool to broaden and engage
Gwen Shusterman, Portland State University
This project has been focused on catalyzing pedagogical innovation in introductory science courses. In particular, structures have been put in place to facilitate the implementation of the model of Deliberative Democracy Pedagogy (DDP). DDP is an active learning strategy, based on deliberative democratic models of citizen engagement in science policymaking. This integrative pedagogical approach, revises the delivery of conventional introductory science content around modules that engage students with current science policy controversies. Teaching teams of faculty and graduate students have attended summer pedagogical workshops, developed curricular modules, implemented the modules and participated in regular Communities of Practice meetings.

Health Sciences and Technology Academy (HSTA)
Travis York, APLU
The Health Sciences & Technology Academy increases the number of African American and other underrepresented students in West Virginia who pursue degrees in health sciences and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors, thereby increasing the number of health practitioners and advocates in the medically undeserved communities of West Virginia. HSTA helps West Virginia high school students succeed in health care and other STEM-based undergraduate and graduate degree programs. We marshal the efforts of hundreds of mentors―teachers, community members, and higher-education faculty, staff, and students―to create a framework that supports children facing social and financial challenges in obtaining a diploma and furthering their education.

Crossing Boundaries for STEM Teaching through Mini-Conferences
Shande King, The University of Tennessee
Partnering with other STEM faculty members across the university campus, the our center hosted their first mini-conference, open for K-12 STEM educators as well as university faculty members, researchers, and other community outreach organizations. In this abbreviated PechaKucha-style conference, speakers from all university STEM and education departments, local K-12 schools, and other local STEM organizations presented different research highlighting educational practices that focused on advancing K-12 and undergraduate student engagement and inquiry into STEM fields. Concurrent sessions of 10 minutes allowed various departments and other education representatives to highlight their specific fields of interest, followed brief question-and-answer sessions. Sessions were grouped according to similar themes, and upon the completion of each theme's presentations, connections were made to underline the practices already advancing STEM education. Further, presenters and attendees provided helpful feedback for continued improvement in STEM education, and in this comfortable environment, they exchanged information for future collaboration.

NM EPSCoR Early Career Leadership Workshop
Travis York, APLU
The New Mexico EPSCoR Post Doc Leadership Workshop is an innovative 3-day intensive, residential program designed to enhance the professional skills of post-doctoral scholars in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The workshop uses interactive approaches to develop leadership skills that contribute to post doc career development and success.

STEMcoding project
Chris Orban, Ohio State University-Main Campus
Groups like code.org have revolutionized computer science education for the elementary school and junior high levels. But for the most part the revolution has not yet reached high-school STEM courses like physics, math and chemistry. The STEMcoding project exists to re-imagine introductory STEM courses with computer science in mind. Many schools are unable to offer computer science, but they may have a physics, or chemistry or math teacher who could integrate coding into some part of their course if there was coding content that was well aligned with the learning objectives of that course.

Developing and implementing institution data dashboards to drive course transformation
Shanna Shaked, University of California-Los Angeles
We are working with institutional research folks, deans and other interested faculty to develop and implement institutional data dashboards that can be used to foster conversations and interventions to improve teaching.

UA-AAU STEM Collaborative Learning Spaces Project
Lisa Elfring, The University of Arizona
The Collaborative Learning Spaces Project (CLSP), an extension of the UA AAU Undergraduate STEM Education Project, is a university-wide collaborative effort at the University of Arizona to develop classroom environments that are more suitable for active learning pedagogies than traditional lecture halls. Instructors and their teaching teams who are using these rooms receive training and participate in faculty learning communities (FLCs) to explore best practices and innovative ideas for use of these spaces.

Institutional Impact of Scaling-up Course-Embedded Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs)
Judy Awong-Taylor, Georgia Gwinnett College
Georgia Gwinnett College was established in 2006 as a public liberal arts institution with a mission to provide open access to all high school graduates regardless of SAT scores. In 2011, The School of Science and Technology (SST) implemented a program for enhancing student engagement and learning in all STEM disciplines. GGC's Four-year Undergraduate Research and Creative Experience (4YrURCE) program is based upon a discipline-specific course-embedded research model which scaffolds multiple research and creative experiences for all STEM majors during all four years of matriculation. To date, 54 courses have been re-designed as CUREs and over 3,000 students (unduplicated count) are impacted annually. Longitudinal program-level assessment data includes student performance, student attitudinal, and faculty attitudinal data gathered over the past five years of the initiative.