Rackham Minority Serving Institutions Coffee Chat Series

This session will provide attendees with an understanding of how to develop reciprocal and equitable partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). A particular emphasis will be on practices taken from Mentoring@Purdue (M@P) which is a national award-winning inclusive excellence-centric mentoring program. This session is appropriate for faculty and staff who have an interest in developing partnerships with HBCUs. However, lessons learned from this talk can be applied to partnership development activities with any type of Minority-Serving Institution.

This talk shares the journey of establishing Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions (AANAPISI), the federal government’s most recent Minority-Serving Institution designated to serve Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) students. Current descriptive and demographic data will be shared, charting the 14-year growth of AANAPISIs within our postsecondary education system. In doing so, a more accurate portrait of AAPI students will be presented to emphasize the complexity of their educational experiences.    

Speaker:

Mike Hoa Nguyen is assistant professor at the University of Denver's Morgridge College of Education and faculty affiliate at the Scrivner Institute of Public Policy and the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for the Study of (In)Equality (IRISE). His research examines the benefits and consequences of public policy instruments in expanding or constraining the operations of colleges and universities, with a specific focus on federal diversity initiatives. In addition to his academic work, Nguyen has extensive professional experience with federal policy, having served as a senior staff member in the United States Congress. Nguyen currently serves as a Commissioner on the Denver Asian American and Pacific Islander Commission, a member of the Board of Directors for the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC), and continues to volunteer and provide research consulting for education and civil rights organizations. Most recently, he was a lead author on an amicus curiae brief on behalf of 678 social scientists in SFFA vs. Harvard; which was cited by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in their opinion. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley and his graduate education at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Session Overview:

This talk will provide an overview of the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master's to Ph.D. Bridge Program (FVBP) Model for inclusive graduate education. Further, Dina Myers Stroud will present findings from a study conducted as part of the Fisk-Vanderbilt LSAMP Regional Center of Excellence in Broadening Participation to understand what FVBP activities students report as contributing to their success. This session will be of particular interest to those looking to build on their mentoring practices and develop activities to foster a sense of community. 

Presenter Bio:

Dina Myers Stroud serves as faculty at both Fisk and Vanderbilt University. As the executive director of the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master’s to Ph.D. Bridge Program (FVBP) since 2012, Stroud strives to advocate for and mentor students from underrepresented and underserved groups into and through STEM Ph.D. programs. In 2018, Stroud began serving as the director of the LSAMP Regional Center of Excellence in Broadening Participation. There she directs educational research centered on the FVBP, in collaboration with the Peabody School of Education at Vanderbilt and the American Institutes for Research. Trained as a development biologist, Stroud did postdoctoral work in cardiovascular research at UCLA, NYU and the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She is also a certified national research mentoring network mentor training facilitator and was part of the original team behind the development of mentor-mentee supportive technology known as MyNRMN.