Current Winners
2023-2024
Mini-Grant Title: Training and Team Building to Prevent Sexual Harassment in the Field
Project Coordinator: Heather J. Lynch
Department: Ecology & Evolution
Project Summary: In brief, this mini-grant will allow us to partner with an organization called FieldFutures that runs workshops to help field research teams with the challenge of sexual harassment in a field setting. This workshop will be available to students and postdocs and researchers in several departments, including not only Ecology & Evolution but also Marine Sciences and Anthropology. All of these disciplines involve field work in remote settings where the traditional processes of university reporting are either ineffective or excessively delayed. In these cases, individual researchers (and research teams) need skills that will serve them well 'in the moment', and FieldFutures can help groups develop a supportive team dynamic that can contribute to a safe work environment in the field.
Mini-Grant Title: Increasing Diversity in CPR Training on Campus
Project Coordinator: Samantha Warren
Department: Center for Prevention and Outreach, SHWPS
Project Summary: The Center for Prevention and Outreach strongly believes that all on campus trainings should strive to be inclusive of our entire community. CPO would like to increase the inclusivity and diversity of our on campus CPR training manikins by introducing female presenting and diverse skin toned manikins. This will ensure trainings provided are high quality and inclusive of the entire Seawolf community. Students will have the ability to practice on male and female presenting manikins as well as light and dark skin tones to ensure that all students trained by CPO are comfortable and confident in providing life saving CPR compressions to anyone, regardless of gender or skin tone. CPO would like to certify 100 students in performing life saving CPR, with a focus on reaching student organizations that represent minority groups on campus. Increasing the number of students, faculty and staff trained to successfully perform life saving CPR will make the SBU Campus and surrounding community safer.
Mini-Grant Title: Establishing a SBU Chapter of National SACNAS Organization
Project Coordinator: Dianna Padilla
Department: Ecology & Evolution
Project Summary: We will be working to establish a Stony Brook Chapter of SACNAS, Society for Advancing Chicanos, Hispanics and Native Americans in Science. It is the largest and most diverse multicultural scientific organization in the US. Although the name reflects its origins, it has broad reach to all groups underrepresented in STEM. It welcomes all college students and professionals, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, race, national origin or ancestry, ethnicity, or religion. A Stony Brook Chapter of SACNAS will link us to the national organization and regional chapters, allowing our members to apply for funds for training and meetings. A SBU SACNAS Chapter will support the development of a campus climate that values diversity, equity and inclusion, and promote the ability of members of the community to thrive and achieve their individual goals.
Mini-Grant Title: Enhancing LGBTQ+ Medical Education
Project Coordinator: Joseph Bacchi
Department: Obstetrics & Gynecology
Project Summary: LGBTQ+ patients face many adverse health conditions. It is well known that they are at higher risks of medical and mental health issues but are less likely to seek care due to concerns of provider knowledge and access to safe, non-judgmental health care facilities. They often feel as though more provider education is needed to address their individualized health needs.
The goal of this project is to increase provider education at the medical student and resident level. A multidisciplinary LGBTQ+ educational series will be created and distributed to trainees. The impact of this education can be evaluated via surveys and quizzes before and after the lectures. In addition, our goal is to provide hands-on learning through simulated patient encounters with a gender diverse individual acting as a "standardized patient". By appropriately training students and residents, we can create better access of care for the LGBTQ+ community.
Mini-Grant Title: Faculty as Inclusive Teaching Ambassadors (FITA)
Project Coordinator: Hyunjin Jinna Kim
Department: Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT)
Project Summary: The FITA (Faculty as Inclusive Teaching Ambassadors) initiative, launched and coordinated by CELT, aims to raise faculty awareness and interest in inclusive pedagogy by providing innovative professional development opportunities at the higher education instruction level. Specifically, the initiative focuses on accomplishing the following goals: (a) provide an inclusive teaching course addressing a teaching practice that centers students’ diverse race, culture, language, and ability with corresponding teaching orientation, knowledge, practice, and assessment; (b) promote changes in participating faculty ambassadors’ inclusive teaching orientation, knowledge, practice, and assessment; (c) create professional development opportunities for instructional faculty and staff to share inclusive teaching practices; and (d) advance knowledge, practice, and awareness of inclusive pedagogy on campus through the creation of professional communities and exchange. Ultimately, the FITA initiative intends to promote the implementation of inclusive pedagogy and provide spaces for professional knowledge exchange and community building.
Mini-Grant Title: Building the Africana Studies Digital Archive
Project Coordinator: Abena Asare
Department: Africana Studies
Project Summary: Stony Brook University's Department of Africana Studies (AFS), established in 1968 as one of the first Black Studies programs in the United States, includes a wide collection of memorabilia, rare books, and other materials. The department's internal archive includes a collection of over 200 VHS tapes from the 1980s and 1990s, digitized and preserved in 2017 with the help of the Stony Brook University Library Services (Shafeek Fazal).
Including dynamic lectures by literary and political luminaries such as Ama Ata Aidoo, Jayne Cortez, Dr. Na'im Akbar and Amiri Baraka, cultural performances from student organizations and Black theatre innovators from the tri-state area, and seminar recordings, the SBU Africana Studies Video Archive is a priceless legacy-in-process. It is time to build a website to allow these original digital records to be viewed and utilized by researchers across campus and around the world. With the help of the Presidential Mini-Grant Award (2023), we collaborate with Library Services (Mona Ramonetti) to build a permanent, open access archival collection that will 1) preserve a crucial part of the department’s history for the benefit of the university community 2) connect Africana Studies with researchers across the globe 3) form a key collection within Africana Studies' ongoing multi-space library and archives project.
Mini-Grant Title: Pathways to Healthcare: Providing Underrepresented Students with Applied Learning
Experience
Project Coordinator: Urszula Zalewski
Department: Career Center
Project Summary: The Pathways to Healthcare pilot launched in Fall 2021 with 30 underrepresented students who were introduced to more than a dozen clinicians and researchers, learned clinical procedures, visited cadaver labs, and gained the latest perspective on the admissions process to medical school and other healthcare professional programs from Stony Brook University’s Renaissance School of Medicine and School of Health Professions leaders. The SBU Career Center collaborated with two physicians from Stony Brook Medicine to develop a year-long, credit-bearing externship to explore the wide array of career opportunities in healthcare: EXT 488: Pathways to Healthcare, led by a team of four: two career center professionals and two medical doctors, to meet student demand for healthcare experiences and to enrich learning through academic assignments. Two years later, 60 underrepresented students have completed the program with 100 percent reporting that the experience broadened their understanding of healthcare careers and enabled them to form and articulate their specific interest in healthcare, as well as create their action plan to pursue their goals.
The program was purposefully designed to introduce students to an array of healthcare roles, not limited to medical doctors, and Drs. Nocito and Cohen tapped their extensive networks for engagement. Moreover, the hands-on activities made all the difference; students loved this style of learning and shared very positive feedback about these aspects in their final evaluations. Funding from the Presidential mini-grant will be used to purchase training equipment and conduct background checks to provide underrepresented and first-generation students access to hands-on experiences at Stony Brook Hospital.
Mini-Grant Title: Seminar Series in Culturally Sensitive Psychotherapy
Project Coordinator: Wilfred H. Farquharson IV
Department: Renaissance School of Medicine
Project Summary: Stony Brook HOME Telepsychiatry program functions to provide free mental health services to the underserved members of the community, many of whom are of Latinx backgrounds. We are looking to offer a seminar which aims to provide culturally humble psychotherapy training to medical student volunteers, and thus enhance the quality of our service.
Trainees will develop their skills in evaluating Latinx with mental health disorders and establish culturally informed treatment plans. Sessions will be based on educational materials derived from the National Hispanic and Latino Mental Health Technology Transfer Center (MHTTC) and facilitated by our ethnically diverse community of psychiatrists and psychologists in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health.
The goal of the seminar series is to strengthen the medical student’s abilities to provide culturally competent psychiatric care and psychotherapy to patients of the SB HOME Telepsychiatry program. It will be comprised of approximately six 1 hour and 30-minute virtual sessions delivered from July to December 2023. We expect to enroll six to ten fourth-year medical student volunteers who will follow patients from July 2023 to March 2024.
Mini-Grant Title: Power Electronics, Grid Integration, and Solar Engineering for Environmental Justice
High Schoolers with Brookhaven National Laboratory
Project Coordinator: Derek O'Connor
Department: Economic Development
Project Summary: Launching in Summer 2024, 20+ high schoolers from disadvantaged communities will have the opportunity to spend six weeks between Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory, gaining hands-on training in renewable power generation, integration, and sustainability. Sponsored by National Grid and supported by the Suffolk County Department of Labor, students will be split into two, three-week cohorts at BNL and SBU (then rotate), working in advanced power electronics laboratories, learning the fundamentals of power grids, solar panel mapping, offshore wind planning, hydrogen generation, and distributed energy resources. This paid training will provide awareness into power and utility career pathways, build an educational foundation for further energy studies, and create a pipeline of future workers into the Long Island electricity workforce ecosystem. Students will visit National Grid power stations, interact with industry experts, and gain insight from skilled trade leaders while earning valuable and tangible workforce experience.
The Presidential Mini-Grant will be utilized to fund an Executive Breakfast Working Group among disadvantaged school district leadership, industry sponsors, engineering faculty, and government partners for programmatic outcomes-discovery and community engagement in the Fall of 2023.