Developing leadership skills and engineering identity in graduate students

Associate Professor Tracie Ferreira will use $1.5M NSF grant to prepare graduate students to excel in entrepreneurship, technology, and innovation

Associate Professor and Department Chairperson of Bioengineering Tracie Ferreira is the recipient of a $1,498,020 National Science Foundation (NSF) award for her project titled "Scholarships to Accelerate Engineering Leadership and Identity in Graduate Students."

The project addresses an urgent need to develop initiatives that support the graduation of diverse populations of students in STEM to fulfill workforce demands and prepare graduate students to advance research discoveries into practice. "Our students are invested in their community and have the skills to advance discoveries here on the South Coast," Ferreira says. "The program leverages established accelerated BS/MS programs and research efforts in the College of Engineering that support the maritime economy and will provide scholarships to 90 unique full-time students pursuing accelerated graduate BS/MS degrees in engineering. Students will receive one-year scholarships in the master's year of study."

"It is designed to provide a coordinated program for highachieving, low-income undergraduate student recruitment, and workforce development strategies to prepare and graduate MS-level students to address challenges in biotechnology, marine renewable energy, added value recyclable products, marine artificial intelligence and robotics, cybersecurity, marine restoration, and water resources and protection."

The project aims to increase the STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving graduate students with demonstrated financial need. The project also addresses the critical need to graduate leaders skilled in technology, entrepreneurship, and innovation to build and support the economy of the SouthCoast of New England. Additionally, it will provide scholarships to students to allow them to participate in activities that foster engineering identity development.

"Research has shown that students who persist in engineering tend to exhibit high levels of self-efficacy and identify themselves as belonging to an engineering community," says Ferreira. While there have been studies on the role of engineering identity in the transition from K-12 to postsecondary education, Ferreira explains that few studies on either engineering identity or challenges related to self-efficacy have investigated the transition from undergraduate to graduate-level programs.

Furthermore, there have been few studies on the impact of institutional support during these transitional years on the recruitment and persistence of engineering graduate students.

"Overall, the project is expected to fill the gap in knowledge generation on the role of self-efficacy and engineering identity among undergraduate students who continue to pursue engineering through graduate degree attainment," she says.

This project is funded by the NSF's Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income, academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields. It also aims to improve future STEM workers' education and generate knowledge about the academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students.

Ferreira's collaborators are Jean VanderGheynst, Dean of the College of Engineering and Interim Dean of the School for Marine Science & Technology; Raymond Laoulache, Associate Dean and Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Shakhnoza Kayumova, Associate Professor of STEM Education & Teacher Development; and Hamed Samandari, Full-Time Lecturer of Mechanical Engineering. Findings will be presented to the STEM education and engineering communities.

After two black holes collide, they form one much larger black hole that may or may not be moving. UMass Dartmouth Associate Professor Scott Field, and graduate students, Tousif Islam and Feroz H. Shaik, partook in a study that found the first evidence of a black hole moving at high-speed, clocked at roughly 3 million miles per hour.

Their paper is the first to provide evidence with actual astronomical data from a black hole merger, named GW200129, providing the first confirmation of theories that trace back to Albert Einstein’s 1915 equations of general relativity. Their research found that the final black hole left behind after a binary black hole merger can attain a recoil velocity, or a “kick,” reaching values up to 5,000 km/s.

This phenomenon has important implications for gravitational wave astronomy, black hole formation scenarios, testing general relativity, and galaxy evolution. Before this discovery, it was unknown if such fast-moving blackholes could be produced in the universe.

“Black holes experience a gravitational pull much like here on Earth. If you want to throw your car keys into outer space, you would need to throw them at least 25,000 miles per hour, the escape