At the UC Irvine Week of SEISMIC, which took place March 14-16 in 2022, participants were able to spend time working on two papers and one grant proposal. “It was the first time we were meeting anyone in-person from the team,” Denaro says. Collaboration within SEISMIC had been primarily online during 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic. Attendees were also able to visit the new Anteater Learning Pavillion, which features classrooms designed to support active learning.

Multiple SEISMIC members, many within the Measurement Working Group, designed a collaborative proposal between institutions, with the final proposal including the University of Maryland, Purdue University, University of Michigan, Arizona State University, and University of California Irvine. The proposal outlines a plan to identify faculty and institutional “Bright Spots” that promote equitable STEM student success. While the proposal was originally declined, the team resubmitted a revised version in July of this year. Participants also worked to develop a paper on the findings of a parallel analysis involving five SEISMIC member institutions. This paper was just recently accepted for publication in CBE-Life Sciences Education, and will be available in the near future (Denaro et al., in press). Finally, SEISMIC members also worked on a paper exploring student pathways in STEM curricula, which was published in Frontiers in Education in 2023 (Fiorini et al., 2021). Learn more about the UC Irvine Week of SEISMIC with a blogpost by SEISMIC Project Manager Nita Tarchinski here.

At Arizona State University’s Week of SEISMIC, which took place November 8-11 in 2022, Brownell was focused on sharing the research that has been done as a result of SEISMIC. “We had good attendance, people got excited about the research, and I feel like we met most of our goals,” Brownell shares. One of the highlights was a campus-wide Natural Sciences Inclusion Summit, which was integrated into ASU’s Week of SEISMIC and has since grown into an annual event. Multiple SEISMIC members gave “lightning talks” at this event on topics such as exploring how research and teaching affect science graduate student mental health (Katelyn Cooper) and the need to move beyond numbers to consider racial equity (W. Carson Byrd). Now heading into its third year, the summit draws over 200 attendees. There was also time built in for the Constructs Working Group to collaborate in-person, and for presentations such as Dr. Susan Cheng’s talk on using a systems approach to increase DEI initiatives. To learn more about the ASU Week of SEISMIC, you can read a blogpost by Nita Tarchinski here.

Still, even with the attention to detail in planning, time is always of the essence. “We had all this momentum, and we wanted to keep going,” Denaro says. The three days just flew by! Additionally, Brownell found it difficult to work around faculty’s busy schedules and find opportunities to engage with them. Denaro also notes that having Weeks of SEISMIC every two months made it difficult to attend more than one or two. “You only have so much bandwidth,” she explains.

Despite the challenges associated with finding time for events like these, both Brownell and Denaro feel they are great opportunities for in-person collaboration and sharing important work and the two would support a revival if SEISMIC 2.0 were to happen. Denaro would like to see a future iteration of the Weeks of SEISMIC spread out a bit more, simply to allow for even more people to attend. It’s a tricky balance, with 10 institutions to visit, but it’s fantastic to see people want to attend multiple SEISMIC events!