I am somewhere between embarrassed and excited that I’ve just been named the winner of the first ever NWO (Dutch Research Council, our national funding agency) Domain Science Diversity Initiative Award! It’s on Twitter and YouTube and everything!
In the somewhat awkward video, I express a bit of reluctance around having the money be attached to me rather than the project, that I wanted to explain a bit more here in this post.
But first a bit about the project: I started Altair using funding from my NWO VICI career grant, together with science communication expert Alex Verkade (now head of the VSC network of museums). After the first year science communication expert Marieke Hohnen took over from Alex. Every year we get together a team of University of Amsterdam student volunteers, mostly Physics and Astronomy MSc students, since the lessons mostly focus on these topics. We focus on the final three grades in an elementary school around the corner from my campus. The school is 100% kids from under-represented groups, in a neighbourhood that is around 60-70% families of what is called ‘migration background’ here in the Netherlands. Yet our campus is estimated to be around 15% or less from this group, which seems weird. So by going to the school and interacting/guest teaching in the classroom for three consecutive years of kids, reaching about 140-150 kids per year, we have a chance to form a relationship with the kids. We also do activities on Science Park campus, we get to know the parents, and we create a more open feeling about Science Park, that it’s a welcoming place for everyone.
We’re in the fifth year of the project now, obviously effected by corona so mostly online. With this NWO Diversity Initiative Award prize money, I will be able to expand this to Altair+, together with new volunteers from our Student Impact Centre (see e.g., https://students-4-students.nl/), in order to create new activities for middle-school kids on campus. The idea is to maintain contact with interested kids from Altair, but also to reach new kids, and bring them to Science Park to do activities to form cohorts around different science areas, and help mentor them on the path to university STEM studies. It’s strongly influenced by the pre-academy concept that has been successfully demonstrated in many countries by now, to increase diversity in higher education.
I am very grateful to get an influx of funding via this award, but in a general sense we currently lack longterm structural funding for diversity-related initiatives, which makes it hard to maintain continuity for the very projects that would provide the evidence/statistics we need to prove their efficacy. I have been cobbling together funds for 5 years now from various sources to keep Altair alive, and my hope is to find a way to 1) make this structural and 2) move this from being a pilot at one school to a program that can be implemented and maintained elsewhere. So while I am very honoured to get this award, and it’s fantastic to get funding that will cover three more years and help me extend/expand, it does not address the larger issue and I thought I’d use my 15 minutes to draw attention to this point.
Also, it is strange to get a personal award for something I do with a team. I want to make clear that this project would not have happened without Alex, Marieke and all the students who have helped over the years!
