Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) opportunity titled Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) is a discretionary, science and technology focused grant program designed to increase the participation and success of underrepresented minorities (URMs) in STEM graduate education and postdoctoral training, with an explicit emphasis on preparing participants for academic STEM careers. The program is grounded in a long-term national objective: moving the numbers of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and other Pacific Islanders, including individuals from these groups who also have disabilities, toward levels that reflect their representation in the available pool. AGEP frames this as essential to strengthening the future STEM workforce and, in particular, building a more diverse STEM professoriate. The program highlights that faculty serve as important intellectual and professional role models who influence what future scientists and engineers see as possible and expected.

At its core, AGEP supports the development, implementation, study, and dissemination of innovative and evidence-based models for graduate education and postdoctoral training that remove barriers and promote practices associated with higher retention, completion, and advancement of URMs. Projects must focus on URM U.S. citizens participating in STEM graduate programs and/or postdoctoral training and on their preparation for academic careers at all types of colleges and universities. While the primary focus is academic career preparation in STEM, proposals may include broader STEM professional development if the proposal makes a strong, well-justified case for how those activities support the program goals. NSF welcomes proposals spanning any NSF-supported STEM discipline, including the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, as well as multi-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and interdisciplinary STEM areas.

AGEP strongly encourages participation from a wide range of institution types, especially those that serve large numbers of students from the populations AGEP aims to support. This includes community colleges, primarily undergraduate institutions, minority-serving institutions such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities, as well as women’s colleges and institutions that primarily serve persons with disabilities. These institutions are encouraged to serve either as lead applicants or as alliance partners across the different AGEP project types, reflecting the program’s view that improving pathways into graduate school, graduate success, and faculty preparation often requires coordinated, multi-institution efforts.

The solicitation supports three main project categories. AGEP Transformation awards are intended for strategic alliances of institutions and organizations working together to build, test, and study innovative, evidence-based models and standards for STEM graduate education, postdoctoral training, and faculty career preparation. The emphasis here is not just on offering activities, but on transforming systems by identifying negative factors that limit URM participation and success and replacing them with practices shown to improve outcomes. AGEP Knowledge Adoption and Translation (AGEP KAT) projects focus on scaling what is already known to work by expanding the adoption or adaptation of existing research findings and evidence-based strategies across institutions. In other words, KAT is about taking proven approaches and translating them into broader practice in varied institutional contexts. AGEP Broadening Participation Research in STEM Education (AGEP BPR) supports investigator-initiated empirical research that develops and studies new theory-driven models and innovations related to URM participation and success in STEM graduate education, postdoctoral training, and academic STEM career pathways. BPR is positioned as the category for generating new knowledge and testing novel approaches, rather than primarily implementing established practices.

In terms of eligibility, AGEP Transformation proposals must come from strategic alliances of institutions and organizations. Alliance partners may include nonprofit institutions of higher education, industry, nonprofit organizations, and federal national laboratories, although NSF funding can only flow to organizations eligible under NSF rules. A key structural requirement is that at least one alliance partner must offer a Ph.D. in an NSF-supported field that is included in the alliance activities, ensuring the alliance has direct capacity to influence doctoral training and the academic career pipeline. State higher education systems may apply either as systems or as individual institutions. For AGEP KAT and AGEP BPR, proposals may be submitted by eligible individuals and organizations consistent with the NSF Grant Proposal Guide, which generally means a broad pool of U.S.-based eligible institutions and organizations can apply under standard NSF rules.

Funding is provided through cooperative agreements, with an estimated total program funding of $6,000,000 for the opportunity described. NSF expected to make about 12 awards, with award sizes ranging from a floor of $200,000 up to a ceiling of $1,750,000. The solicitation specifies no cost sharing or matching requirement. The opportunity was posted April 23, 2012, with an original closing date of July 12, 2012 and a later current closing date listed as October 30, 2012, and an archive date of November 30, 2012 (indicating this specific posting is historical, though AGEP as a program may have later solicitations).

AGEP also clarifies an important limitation for individuals: it does not award funding directly to individual students or postdoctoral scholars for their own education or research. Instead, funding flows to institutions and alliances running programs, models, or research efforts that support participant success. Students seeking individual graduate support are directed to the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), and postdoctoral scholars are directed to NSF postdoctoral opportunities listed through NSF systems. The solicitation also notes that NSF directorates sometimes offer supplements to existing awards to support diverse trainees, and it encourages principal investigators interested in such mechanisms to contact their NSF program officer.

Overall, AGEP is best understood as a capacity-building and change-focused NSF program aimed at improving the structures, practices, and evidence base surrounding URM success in STEM graduate school, postdoctoral training, and the pathway into faculty careers, with project options ranging from large-scale alliance-based transformation to broad adoption of known practices to rigorous research on new interventions and theory-driven models.

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