In this paper, we summarize the poster presented at the NSF Grantees Poster Session that provides an overview of the S-STEM program. The S-STEM program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) began in 2017 and was developed to provide financial, academic, professional, and social support to incoming engineering students who are low-income and high achieving. The duration of the grant is five years. This paper summarizes the activities in the first 18 months of the project and the activities projected for the remainder of the project.
The objectives of this project are to 1) enhance students’ learning by providing access to extra and co-curricular experiences, 2) create a positive student experience through mentorship, and 3) ensure successful student placement in the STEM workforce or graduate school. S-STEM Scholars in this program received financial, academic, professional, and social development via various evidence-based activities integrated throughout four years and starting with the summer prior to starting at the university. These activities include a summer bridge program, a freshman engineering success program, an introduction to engineering design course, a guaranteed paid internship program, a service-learning project, two professional development seminars, and an enhanced capstone experience. In addition, students are supported by peer, faculty, and industry mentors.
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7881-6542
University of Illinois, Chicago
[biography]
Dr. Houshang Darabi is an Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Dr. Darabi is the recipient of multiple teaching and advising awards including the UIC Award for Excellence in Teaching (2017), COE Excellence in Teaching Award (2008, 2014), UIC Teaching Recognitions Award (2011), and the COE Best Advisor Award (2009, 2010, 2013). Dr. Darabi is an ABET IDEAL Scholar and has led the MIE Department ABET team in two successful accreditations (2008 and 2014) of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Engineering programs. Dr. Darabi has been the lead developer of several educational software systems as well as the author of multiple educational reports and papers. Dr. Darabi’s research group uses Big Data, process mining, data mining, Operations Research, high performance computing, and visualization techniques to achieve its research and educational goals. Dr. Darabi’s research has been funded by multiple federal and corporate sponsors including the National Science Foundation, and National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Peter Nelson was appointed Dean of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) College of Engineering in July of 2008. Prior to assuming his deanship, Professor Nelson was head of the UIC Department of Computer Science. In 1991, Professor Nelson founded UIC's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which specializes in applied intelligence systems projects in fields such as transportation, manufacturing, bioinformatics and e-mail spam countermeasures. Professor Nelson has published over 80 scientific peer reviewed papers and has been the principal investigator on over $30 million in research grants and contracts on issues of importance such as computer-enhanced transportation systems, manufacturing, design optimization and bioinformatics. These projects have been funded by organizations such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Department of Transportation and Motorola. In 1994-95, his laboratory, sponsored by the Illinois Department of Transportation, developed the first real-time traffic congestion map on the World Wide Web, which now receives over 100 million hits per year. Professor Nelson is also currently serving as principal dean for the UIC Innovation Center, a collaborative effort between the UIC Colleges of Architecture, Design and the Arts; Business Administration; Medicine and Engineering.
http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-1806-0672
The University of Illinois at Chicago
[biography]
Rezvan Nazempour is a graduate research assistant at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is completing her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and operations research at the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department. She received her BSIE from
Renata A. Revelo is a first-generation college student, migrated from Ecuador to the United States as a teenager with her parents and sister. She is the first in her family to obtain a Ph.D. She is currently a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her research focuses on shifting the culture of engineering via the study of engineering identity which centers students of color and examines systemic change
Ludwig C. NItsche completed bachelor's degrees in chemical engineering and mathematics at the University of Minnesota (1984) and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at MIT (1989) before embarking on a NSF-NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, UK. He joined the UIC Chemical Engineering faculty in 1991, and has research interests in fluid mechanics, transport phenomena, applied mathematics and computer simulations - with applications in drug delivery technology.
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Laboratory for Oxide Research and Education
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