Renetta G. Tull

Promise: Maryland's Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate Enhances Recruitment and Retention of Underrepresented Minority Graduate Students

PROMISE: Marylands Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP), sponsored by the National Science Foundation, is a consortium that is designed to increase the numbers of underrepresented minority (URM) PhDs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields who will pursue academic careers. A strength of PROMISE is its alliance infrastructure that connects URM graduate students on different campuses through centralized programming for the three research universities in Maryland: the University of Maryland Baltimore County (the lead institution in the alliance), the University of Maryland College Park, and the University of Maryland Baltimore (UMB). PROMISE initiatives cover graduate student recruitment, retention, community building, PhD completion, and transition to careers.Although it is not a fellowship, PROMISE offers professional development and skill-building programs that provide academic and personal support for URM students on all three campuses. PROMISE on UMBs campus includes the School of Medicine, which sponsors tricampus programs that promote health and wellness to accompany traditional professional development programs. PROMISE uniquely and atypically includes a medical school within its alliance. The PROMISE programs serve as interventions that reduce isolation and facilitate degree completion among diverse students on each campus. This article describes details of the PROMISE AGEP and presents suggestions for replicating professional development programs for URMs in biomedical, MD/masters, and MD/PhD programs on other campuses.

Cepstral analysis of ‘‘cold‐speech’’ for speaker recognition: A second look

Speech affected by colds continues to be an issue in speaker recognition technology. This study is a continuation of the ‘‘cold‐affected’’ speech project [R. G. Tull and J. C. Rutledge, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 99, 2549(A) (1996)] which compared ‘‘cold‐speech’’ and normal/healthy speech of a male subject to analyze differences in vowel durations and mel‐cepstral coefficients. This new study analyzes the speech of two additional male subjects during a cold and after a cold to test speaker intrasession (‘‘cold‐speech’’ within the same recording session, normal speech within the same session), and speaker intersession (‘‘cold‐speech’’ versus normal speech on different days). The sentence being used for recording is the recitation of numbers: ‘‘1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10.’’ The lower‐order mel‐cepstral coefficients are chosen as parameters (independent variable) in this study. The research for this study shows that there are patterns in the coefficients (c2 and c3) of ‘‘cold‐speech’’ that are different from the patterns...

Analysis of ‘‘cold‐affected’’ speech for inclusion in speaker recognition systems.

Parameters of speech produced during winter weather are analyzed to determine the potential influence of distorted voices due to common cold on automatic speaker recognition systems. This research examines speech recorded before, during, and after bouts with the common cold. ‘‘Cold‐affected’’ speech shows noticeable acoustic and phonetic differences between test sessions. Examining the different states of one male speaker’s voice allows an opportunity to address the speaker intersession problem that exists in speaker recognition technology. Specific emphasis is placed on the contrasts in various sessions of TIMIT inspired sentence ‘‘She had your dark suit in greasy wash water all year.’’ It also analyzes phonetic contrasts and looks at differences in formant patterns. Phonetic transcriptions of ‘‘cold’’ and ‘‘normal’’ sessions reflect changes in place of articulation. Perceptual and acoustic analyses reveal pauses and epenthetic syllables that are not constant throughout all sessions. ‘‘Cold‐speech’’ also...

The Dissertation House Model: Doctoral Student Experiences Coping and Writing in a Shared Knowledge Community.

The Dissertation House model provides a voluntary, supplementary professional development activity that expands single-mentor and single-department approaches to create shared learning communities with multiple mentors across several academic disciplines. We find that participating in the Dissertation House increases the likelihood of retention and graduation for PhD candidates.

Global diversity in engineering education: An exploratory analysis

This paper presents an exploratory investigation of global scale diversity and inclusion efforts within engineering education. Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) are contextualized topics that shift objectives from country to country. The role of D&I in engineering education and practice has gained prominence in recent years due to the fact that engineers are facing increased need for global collaborations and are expected to be able to work in highly diverse teams and within different cultures. D&I initiatives in the field of engineering generally include gender, ethnicity, and national origin, and may include persons who are economically underprivileged and persons with disabilities. While the prominence of D&I has increased, international learning outcomes and collaborations within these efforts are limited. Within a global community a common platform would allow for the sharing of best practices and maximize learning opportunities. From a research and evaluation perspective, much work has been conducted and disseminated in the United States and could serve as transferable models for these efforts. By examining models from around the world, we can begin to consolidate, optimize, and disseminate the global benefits of D&I. In this work, various programs are reviewed as success cases because they have increased the numbers of underrepresented students who enroll in and graduate from STEM programs. The potential for solidarity amongst diversity & inclusion initiatives and programs in different regions of the world is explored. Efforts are made to determine what can be learned from synergies across D&I activities.

Chapter 9 Successful PHD Pathways to Advanced STEM Careers for Black Women

According to national statistics, small numbers of black American women earn science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) degrees. Instead of focusing on this disturbing, well-documented trend, this chapter explores STEM career success among black female graduate students who enroll in and complete PhD programs. In other words, we are engaged in an effort to address how black women in STEM fields succeed in graduate school. This chapter presents a qualitative look at successful PhD pathways. It will provide data on the pipeline of black women at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels; describe programs that the state of Maryland has employed among its public research universities to recruit and retain black women in doctoral programs; present testimonials from black women who have participated in these programs; and offer an extensive case study of 15 black women alumni of these programs who now have PhDs and are establishing their STEM careers. Programs that will be documented as successful for recruiting, mentoring, and retaining black women in STEM include the National Science Foundations (NSF) University System of Maryland Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation Bridge to the Doctorate program; the NSFs PROMISE: Marylands Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program for UMBC, the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB), and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP); the National Institutes of Healths (NIH) Meyerhoff Graduate Fellows Program in the Biomedical Sciences (Minority Biomedical Research Support – Initiative for Maximizing Student Development (MBRS-IMSD)) at UMBC and UMB; and subprograms such as the Dissertation House (DH), the Community Building Retreat, and the PROF-it: Professors-in-Training program. The case study will include the following questions: What were some of the obstacles that occurred during graduate school, and what helped you to overcome them? Were there any issues that occurred that made you want to quit? If you stopped for a while, or thought about stopping, what were your motivations for returning? Where did you receive mentoring during your graduate school process? What advice would you give to young women who are just starting? The chapter focuses on a variety of methods and practices that successfully shepherd black women from undergraduate ranks to PhD-level careers in STEM fields.

Invitation to Engage: Innovative and Collaborative Approaches to Diversifying the STEM Professoriate

Resumen-Con el fin de abordar los retos del siglo XXI, especialmente aquellos relacionados a la sostenibilidad global, es de suma importancia que las instituciones de educacion superior incorporen, retengan y promuevan una facultad diversa y de alto grado en el area de STEM. A pesar de los esfuerzos de concientizacion e intervencion de programas como el Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) y ADVANCE de la Fundacion Nacional de Ciencia (NSF), existe en los Estados Unidos una baja representacion de africano americanos, hispanos/latinos, y mujeres en la via a formar parte de la facultad en el area de STEM. Este trabajo subraya los esfuerzos realizados en la Universidad de Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) para sacar a relucir y confrontar directamente dichos retos en su propia facultad de STEM utilizando innovadores enlaces y enfoques bajo la rubrica “Invitacion a Participar”. Esperamos que nuestro dialogo sobre esta cuestion apremiante y el resumen de nuestro amplio enfoque aliente a otras instituciones a examinar sus practicas internas y sirvan como modelo para promover el cambio. A traves de este trabajo ofrecemos una invitacion abierta para que otros tambien aborden criticamente estos dialogos y desarrollen acciones innovadoras para reparar la trayectoria para formar parte de la facultad en STEM.

Encouraging Equilibrium: Career-Life Balance Outreach and the Advancement of Women in Engineering

Issues related to career-life balance (CLB) disproportionally affect women in STEM. These issues disrupt women’s career pathways, and in many cases, push them out of academia. In order to halt the exodus of women from academic careers in STEM, universities must develop interventions around CLB that recognize and address the everyday gendered CLB challenges that women graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty face. This paper showcases narratives from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s (UMBC) international CLB initiative with underrepresented STEM faculty and graduate students that set the stage for the development of three additional CLB projects. The results of the former international project inform the partial implementation of the expansion projects at UMBC, which include: 1) Accelerating Post-Leave Associate Professor, Advancement through Intensive Support at Critical Junctions, 2) a campus-wide CLB awareness campaign and, 3) campus-wide CLB educational workshops. Through this outreachcentered paper, anchored in existing best practices and first person narratives of CLB struggles at UMBC, we aim to spur conversations and provide a model for other institutions to weave CLB into the fabric of university culture as a normalized and cherished community value. Keywords— Career-Life Balance, Women, Advancement Digital Object Identifier (DOI): http://dx.doi.org/10.18687/LACCEI2015.1.1.085 ISBN: 13 978-0-9822896-8-6

An AGEP program analysis: Minority graduate student diversity in STEM disciplines at three maryland universities

The Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) is a federally funded initiative facilitated by the National Science Foundation [3]. AGEP addresses the need to recruit and retain underrepresented minorities to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The University System of Marylands (USM) PROMISE AGEP-T, a transformative initiative of the AGEP, is a program that includes all of the public universities within the USM. This program started with an initial alliance between three universities: the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), the University of Maryland Baltimore (UMB), and the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP). The PROMISE AGEP requires campuses to develop activities in three focus areas: 1) new graduate student cultivation; 2) community building that supports students and helps them excel academically; 3) professional development [12]. The Universities are encouraged to collaborate with each other to support student success with the goal of promoting successful recruitment, retention, graduation, and professorial training of participants. This paper links four theoretical retention frameworks to the intended outcomes of the PROMISE AGEP. An overview of Tintos (1993) theory of individual departure [16], Giuffridas (2006) self determination and job involvement theories [6], Bean and Eatons (2000) psychological model [17], and Padillas (1997) heuristic knowledge model [14] is presented and subsequently tied to PROMISE AGEP goals and outcomes with a discussion about the usefulness of linking theory to practice.

Evaluating consonant errors in automatic speech recognition programs

Many voice‐enabled computer applications (e.g., voice‐controlled web commands, automatic call centers) use automatic speech recognition (ASR) software that allow users to command the computer by voice. Problems occur because ASR does not exhibit 100% accuracy for all speech patterns. In preparation for future evaluation of nonprototypical voices and speech technology, this project used three subjects with prototypical (no known speech pathology) to test three commercially available ASR software programs: Voice Xpress(R), Naturally Speaking(R), and Via Voice(R). Phonetic analyses revealed consonant errors in each of the three programs. Vowel errors are not addressed in this study. Naturally Speaking(R) 4 was the most accurate of the ASR programs tested. Errors were identified at the word level and analyzed by phoneme and manner of articulation. Similarities among the consonant errors were found in each program. Tests showed stop‐to‐stop (e.g., /t, d, b, p, g, k/), fricative‐to‐fricative (e.g., /s, z, f, v,...