Florida Atlantic University (FAU) has announced a $1 million National Science Foundation grant to help transform faculty diversity and ensure representation of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. According to the FAU press release, the grant continues the work of Emmanuelle Tognoli (1974-2022). She served as a research professor in FAU’s Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences within the College of Science and the FAU Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute. She was the original principal investigator of the proposal that led to a successful grant submission.

The NSF ADVANCE program is designed to foster gender equity through elimination of organizational barriers that impede the advancement of diverse faculty in academic institutions. Organizational barriers that inhibit equity may exist in policies, processes, practices and the organizational culture and climate. ADVANCE “Adaptation” awards provide support for the adaptation and adoption of evidence-based strategies to the academic, nonprofit institutions of higher education as well as non-academic, nonprofit organizations.

The project team will undertake new initiatives and build on current policies and data collection activities and will seek to advance self-sustaining interventions for diverse hiring and retention; transparent and equitable policies, information through a longitudinal demographic data dashboard of faculty; and strategic communications. These interventions will focus on inclusive support for gender diversity and intersectional minorities, most visibly, Latina and African American women, in hiring, retention and promotion.

The process will adapt evidence-based practices and innovations from sister ADVANCE institutions. To aid institutional integration and long-term sustainability, the project team will prioritize practices that will be bootstrapped with ADVANCE support and synergized with ongoing efforts and existing institutional infrastructures for diversity.

The project team will focus on the competencies of complex systems and data science to identify interconnected factors that influence systemic change. This will be accomplished with adaptive analytic approaches that are capable of processing large numbers of variables that dynamically interact on multiple levels over time. The successful implementation of this project for institutional change aims to achieve a more representative and participatory STEM faculty and accelerate institutional competitiveness in education and research.

Co-principal investigators of the project are Chad Forbes, associate professor, Department of Psychology, FAU Charles E. Schmidt College of Science; Karin Scarpinato, senior associate vice president for research, FAU Division of Research; Russell Ivy, senior associate provost for programs and assessment at FAU; and Evonne Rezler, senior associate dean for undergraduate studies, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, FAU Charles E. Schmidt College of Science.

According to her obituary, Emmanuelle was a neuroscientist with a passion for interdisciplinary research. She received a Baccalaureate in Physics and Mathematics from the Lycée Saint-Joseph in 1992. She then switched to study psychology at the Université de Nancy, where she earned her Licence (1997), DEA (1998), and Ph.D. (2003), the latter based in part on her work at a CNRS laboratory affiliated with the Université de Lille.

Emmanuelle moved to Boca Raton in 2003 to take a postdoctoral position in electrophysiology in the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University. She remained a member of the Center for the rest of her career, joining FAU as a research faculty member in 2007. Ever committed to interdisciplinarity, Emmanuelle also held appointments in FAU’s Departments of Physics and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Her scientific research brought together elements of experimental psychology, computational neuroscience, and dynamical systems theory.

Entering what should have been the middle of her career, Emmanuelle also became deeply concerned with the question of how best to support women entering science and other technical fields. Bringing the full force of her scientific acumen to bear, she was able to extract startling patterns and trends from mountains of raw data tracing the career arcs of women in science. Her work on this issue, as on so many others, remains unfinished.