Join us for a virtual seminar by Dr. Meredith Hastings, Brown University. Her talk is titled "Empowering scientists to transform workplace climate through the ADVANCEGeo community-based intervention program."
Date and Time: Thursday, June 13, 2024 at 11:00am EST
Join us via Teams.
Abstract:
"The National Science Foundation-funded ADVANCEGeo Partnership aims to transform workplace climate in the geosciences through cultural change and individual development. Efforts to diversify scientific disciplines often focus on recruitment, yet hostile workplace climates create environments where not all scientists can thrive. Scientists from groups that have been historically excluded because of their gender, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability status report more negative interactions in the workplace compared to their colleagues. These include devaluation of work efforts, insulting remarks, bullying and intimidation, identity-based discriminatory remarks, and gender harassment. These behaviors can negatively affect wellbeing, health, professional advancement, and career success, with community-wide repercussions. The ADVANCEGeo Partnership program’s main interventions are a community-based model for bystander intervention education to respond to and mitigate the harm of systemic exclusionary behaviors in research environments, and the promotion of ethical codes that identify harassment, bullying and discrimination as scientific misconduct. The program’s emphasis began in the geosciences because of the importance of this field to societal outcomes, the persistent lack of diversity amongst STEM fields and the variety of places and spaces where geoscience work takes place (e.g. remote field environments). In collaboration with professional societies inside and outside of STEM, our model is already being adopted by other disciplines."
Biography:
Meredith Hastings is the George Ide Chace Professor of Physical Sciences in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Brown University and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. Prior to joining the faculty at Brown in 2008, Meredith was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington’s Joint Institute for Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO). 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. She is an NSF CAREER awardee, a recipient of the American Geophysical Union’s Atmospheric Sciences Ascent Award and was named one of Insight into Diversity’s 100 Most Inspiring Women in STEM. She is currently a co-PI of ADVANCEGeo (serc.carleton.edu/advancegeo), a national program funded by NSF to transform workplace climate in the geosciences and other scientific fields through the development of bystander intervention and research ethics training in partnership with professional societies. She also serves as President of the non-profit Earth Science Women’s Network (ESWN, www.eswnonline.org), an organization she founded to connect women in the Earth sciences and facilitate career development and community building, and provide informal mentoring and support. She is also a proud mom of two incredible middle-school aged daughters.
For more information on the GESTAR II Seminar Series, click here.