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NSF seeks to strengthen the future U.S. Engineering workforce by enabling the participation of all citizens through the support of research in the science of Broadening Participation in Engineering (BPE). The BPE program is a dedicated to supporting the development of a diverse and well-prepared engineering workforce. BPE focuses on enhancing the diversity and inclusion of all underrepresented populations in engineering, including gender identity and expression, race and ethnicity (African Americans/Blacks, Hispanic Americans, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Native Pacific Islanders), disability, LGBTQ+, first generation college and socio-economic status.

The NSF ADVANCE program contributes to the National Science Foundation's goal of a more diverse and capable science and engineering workforce.1 In this solicitation, the NSF ADVANCE program seeks to build on prior NSF ADVANCE work and other research and literature concerning gender, racial, and ethnic equity. The NSF ADVANCE program goal is to broaden the implementation of evidence-based systemic change strategies that promote equity for STEM2 faculty in academic workplaces and the academic profession. The NSF ADVANCE program provides grants to enhance the systemic factors that support equity and inclusion and to mitigate the systemic factors that create inequities in the academic profession and workplaces. Systemic (or organizational) inequities may exist in areas such as policy and practice as well as in organizational culture and climate. For example, practices in academic departments that result in the inequitable allocation of service or teaching assignments may impede research productivity, delay advancement, and create a culture of differential treatment and rewards. Similarly, policies and procedures that do not mitigate implicit bias in hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions could lead to women and racial and ethnic minorities being evaluated less favorably, perpetuating historical under-participation in STEM academic careers and contributing to an academic climate that is not inclusive.

Focus on diversity among women faculty: The ADVANCE program is centrally focused on funding projects to support systemic change for gender equity in STEM academic careers. Barriers to gender equity may not be identical for all groups of women faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, however. For example, African-American women, Hispanic/Latina women, and Native American women are underrepresented as tenured and tenure-track faculty in STEM disciplines compared to white women, and the challenges to recruitment, retention, and advancement may not be the same for these groups of women. All ADVANCE proposals are expected to address intersectionality and should offer strategies to promote gender equity for all faculty. Intersectionality is a concept found in the social sciences which recognizes that gender does not exist in isolation from other characteristics, such as race/ethnicity, disability status, sexual orientation, foreign-born and foreign-trained status, faculty appointment type, etc.

The purpose of the Jobs Plus Pilot program is to develop locally-based, job-driven approaches to increase earnings and advance employment outcomes through work readiness, employer linkages, job placement, educational advancement, technology skills, and financial literacy for residents of public housing. The place-based Jobs Plus Pilot program addresses poverty among public housing residents by incentivizing and enabling employment through earned income disregards for working families, and a set of services designed to support work including employer linkages, job placement and counseling, educational advancement, and financial counseling. Ideally, these incentives will saturate the target developments, building a culture of work and making working families the norm. The Jobs Plus Pilot program consists of the following three core components: Employment-Related Services Financial Incentives – Jobs Plus Earned Income Disregard (JPEID) Community Supports for Work Applicants are encouraged to develop key partnerships to connect participants with any other needed services to remove barriers to work. An Individualized Training and Services Plan (ITSP) should be developed for each participant to establish goals and service strategies, and to track progress. Background HUD, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the MDRC, through a public-private partnership, designed and supported the Jobs Plus program model between 1998 and 2003. HUD has issued two separate evaluation reports on the demonstration, in an effort to identify and document the most promising approaches to increasing employment among families in public housing. Each evaluation showed ongoing positive effects for residents when the program was well-implemented and included the three core elements.

Most survey-based prevalence estimates of type 1 diabetes among adults have been based on self-reported information about a young age at diagnosis (e.g.,30 years and 40 years) and insulin use within a year of diagnosis. However, this estimation approach misses type 1 diabetes in adults with older age of onset and may misclassify some cases of type 2 diabetes as type 1 if insulin use begins soon after diagnosis. The major goal of this project is to evaluate the validity of survey questions (or algorithms based on them) to distinguish between adults (aged 18 years of age) with type 1 and type 2 diabetes in a representative sample of adult diabetic patients in a diabetes patient registry or database. Using a gold standard, validity will be assessed by examining the sensitivity, specificity, and positive predictive value of algorithms to identify type of diabetes across demographic strata such as age, sex, and race. A secondary goal is to validate definitions of type of diabetes using electronic health records.