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Wanted: Women faculty for STEM fields

Paula Bubulya, assistant professor of biological sciences at Wright State University, prepares antibody samples for research.

Staff photo by Jan Underwood Paula Bubulya, assistant professor of biological sciences at Wright State University, prepares antibody samples for research.

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By Dave Larsen, Staff Writer 1:01 AM Tuesday, August 25, 2009

FAIRBORN — Paula Bubulya of Centerville works as a Wright State University research scientist, studying the organization of cells. An assistant professor of biological sciences, she also teaches lecture and lab courses at Wright State.

Bubulya is one of a relatively small number of women faculty in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines at Dayton-area colleges and universities.

Michele Wheatly, dean at the Wright State College of Science and Mathematics, wants to change that.

“You’ve got to get more women professors in science, technology, engineering, math and then you’ll be able to recruit more women students,” Wheatly said.

Wheatly, recently named a finalist for the provost position at West Virginia University, is the force behind a four-university regional partnership to share a $2.86 million National Science Foundation grant to increase the number of women STEM faculty.

Wright State, the University of Dayton, Central State University and the Air Force Institute of Technology share in the five-year grant and form the Launching Equity in the Academy across the Dayton Entrepreneurial Region (LEADER) consortium.

The group will monitor progress toward the recruitment, retention and successful advancement of women in STEM disciplines. The project’s partners hope the consortium, combined with the Dayton region’s quality of life, will create a sustainable woman-friendly STEM community to attract top talent.

The goal is to grow the knowledge economy and make Dayton a desirable location for career scientists, Wheatly said.

Currently, the LEADER schools are studying the climate for women faculty at their institutions.

“At this point, the leadership team is focusing on developing programs that we will implement as soon as the climate survey results come back in,” said Susan McGovern, consortium program director.

Researchers are looking for faculty feedback related to workplace issues. “What we are trying to look at is what are we doing right and maybe what do we need to improve upon,” McGovern said. Results are expected in late October.

AFIT plans to use those results to focus future initiatives, said Heidi Ries, dean for research.

“We have faculty development programs and mentoring programs here, and we would be interested in the results from this climate survey to see if there are particular areas that we need to try to improve,” Ries said.

Central State’s plans include a retention program for doctoral students that includes assigning an appropriate teaching load, said Kimberly Kendricks, an assistant professor of mathematics. Such efforts helped Xiaofang Wei, hired in 2007 as a doctoral student in Central State’s Water Research Management program, to finish her degree and join the faculty.

“She has two kids, so she was able to get them to school. She was able to finish her dissertation. We were able to retain her as an assistant professor once she completed that degree. So we wanted to use that as one of our best practices for recruiting other (doctoral) students and increasing our number of faculty,” Kendricks said.

Wright State needs to focus on promoting more women faculty to full professor, said Bubulya.

“I think it’s important for women to go up through the ranks because then the students who are incoming will have role models so that they themselves can picture doing that with their careers,” she said. “Not just serving as a technician in somebody’s laboratory but to actually be the principle investigator.”

Bubulya has four women and four men working in her lab, where she studies the organization of cells. Her staff includes her husband, Tom Bubulya, a fellow cell biologist.

“We’re hoping that we can work with the other institutions to place couples, because a lot of career scientists are married to other scientists,” Wheatly said.

Nationally, women account for 25 percent of engineering graduates but less than 25 percent of engineering faculty, said Malcolm Daniels, associate dean of the UD School of Engineering.

“There’s a big gap there, and this program by the NSF tries to tackle that and allows us to develop collaborative programming across the consortium to try to look at our practices and figure out what we can do better to support women faculty,” he said.

Daniels hopes the LEADER initiatives will help his school to recruit more women faculty.

“It’s very competitive to recruit women faculty in our discipline,” he said. “Hopefully, we can showcase the Dayton region as a good place to work and our respective universities as a good place for them to pursue professional careers.”

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2419 or  dlarsen@DaytonDailyNews.com.

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