ADVANCE Rising Tide Center to celebrate first five years March 24

The ADVANCE Rising Tide Center at the University of Maine will mark its fifth anniversary with a celebration March 24.

The 1 p.m. event will be held in the McIntyre Room of the Buchanan Alumni House to thank everyone who has supported or participated in ADVANCE initiatives during the last five years.

The ADVANCE program is funded by the National Science Foundation and seeks to develop systemic approaches that can be institutionalized at higher education institutions to increase the representation and advancement of women in academic science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), and social-behavioral science careers.

“While the NSF ADVANCE grant is designed to support women faculty in the STEM and social-behavioral sciences, this initiative has improved hiring, mentoring, peer-review, and promotion and tenure processes across the campus,” says Jeffrey Hecker, ADVANCE principal investigator and UMaine’s executive vice president for academic affairs and provost. “The Rising Tide Center has elevated and enriched the UMaine community. We’ve come a long way in five years and are excited to celebrate the accomplishments and commit to continuing the work.”

Over the last five years, the UMaine project has gained many accomplishments, including a grants program leading to 104 new collaborations, 39 supported graduate students, 67 conference presentations, 18 publications and more than $700,000 in external grant funding.

The project has led to the development and support of family-friendly workplace policies, the Male Advocates and Allies program, career recognition and faculty mentoring recognition awards, targeted mentoring and training programs, and new faculty orientation and networking events.

The ADVANCE Rising Tide Center also co-wrote a handbook on diversifying faculty searches and established Maine Career Connect, a nonprofit consortium of area employers providing dual career and family services for employees new to Maine.

The center has offered an annual networking conference; workshops on topics such as bias literacy, negotiations, fostering collegiality and mentoring; and a variety of online resources, including those available through the ADVANCE website.

In fall 2016, the ADVANCE Rising Tide Center will become the UMaine Rising Tide Center. The center’s mission will expand to include women faculty from all disciplines with the goal of improving gender equality on campus and throughout the community.

The anniversary event’s keynote speaker, Meredith Hastings of Brown University and co-founder of the Earth Science Women’s Network, will discuss “From Ice Cores to Cities to Oceans: Fingerprinting Reactive Nitrogen Sources and Chemistry.”

Hors d’oeuvres and live music will be provided at a 2 p.m. reception following Hastings’ presentation. The event is free and open to the public. Attendees are encouraged to register online.

Hastings is an associate professor at Brown University. Her research interests span air quality, atmospheric chemistry, acid deposition and biogeochemistry, and she teaches courses on weather, climate and climate change. Prior to joining the faculty at Brown in 2008, Hastings was a Joint Institute for Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO) postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington. She completed her Ph.D. at Princeton University, working with researchers in the Department of Geosciences and at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.

Hastings is an NSF CAREER Award and American Geophysical Union’s Atmospheric Science Ascent Award recipient. She also was recently named as one of Insight into Diversity’s 100 Most Inspiring Women in STEM.

More information about the event and ADVANCE Rising Tide Center is online.

Contact: Elyse Kahl, 207.581.3747