CSCCE news Archives - Page 2 of 10

Welcome to Talisha Sutton – CSCCE’s new Assistant Director of Operations

Another new hire joins our team this month – welcome, Talisha Sutton! Talisha is joining us as Assistant Director of Operations, initially in a part-time position, and brings depth to our team in developing internal processes and nonprofit administration.

In this blog post, we’ll share a little more about Talisha’s experience and background, as well as what her role here will entail. In a future post, we’ll talk more about how CSCCE’s staff team has evolved over the last few months, and unveil our new org chart.

About Talisha

Talisha joins us from The Carpentries, where she served as Deputy Director of Business and coordinated a range of internal operations activities for the past 5+ years. Prior to joining The Carpentries, Talisha worked in various technical positions in the biomedical research sector, managing research laboratories and providing administrative and financial support. Her background is in biochemistry, and she holds a Masters degree in Pharmacology and Toxicology from Michigan State University. So, like many of us at CSCCE, Talisha brings a combination of a science background, an appreciation for collaboration and teamwork, and additional complimentary skills to the team!

Welcome to Alycia Crall – CSCCE’s new Director of Community

This week, we welcomed Alycia Crall to the CSCCE staff team as our new Director of Community. We’re thrilled that Alycia, a long time member of our community of practice and frequent collaborator, has decided to join us and bring her wealth of experience as a community manager in STEM to CSCCE! In this blog post, we introduce you to Alycia, and explain a little more about her newly-created role.

About Alycia

Alycia comes to us from an interim position at the Academic Data Science Alliance (ADSA), where she served as Director of Community. Prior to joining ADSA, she was Director of Community at The Carpentries, and was instrumental in developing a new strategic plan for the organization that centered around community engagement.

More than 300 learners have graduated from Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals!

This month we celebrated a very exciting milestone – more than 300 STEM community managers (305, to be exact!) have now successfully completed our foundational training in community management, Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF).

Congratulations to all of our graduates – many of whom are featured on this page of our website – and if you’re interested in taking part in the course yourself, registration is open for our fall 2024 cohort (registration deadline: 23 August). But hurry! It’s more than half full already.

“The course provides essential information to support community work whether you are just beginning or seeking to expand your community engagement activities. It provides resources to help you develop a strategy and tools to support implementation of your ideas. This course demystifies many aspects of community engagement and helps to ensure your community is built to last.”
CEF24W participant

Evaluation project underway to assess the impact of CSCCE’s foundational training, Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals

At CSCCE, one of the ways we support scientific community managers is through professional development training courses and workshops. Our 8-week online course Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF) is our longest-running training option, and has reached more than 250 community managers over the past three years across a total of 15 cohorts (with another currently in session).

Two of these CEF cohorts were private offerings for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), and late last year they asked if we could assess the mid- to long-term impact of CEF training on the individuals that took the course. CZI, like us, were particularly curious about the impacts of the course on the learners – as well as the wider impacts on their organizations and communities, and beyond in the STEM ecosystem more generally. And so, in December 2023 we surveyed graduates from 12 general registration CEF cohorts, 2 CZI cohorts, and a cohort that ran in an Australia-friendly time zone.

In this blog post, we share a little more about what we’re hoping to learn as we start analyzing the data, as well as how we’ll be sharing the outcomes of this study in a couple of months’ time. If you have any questions, or you’re interested in engaging us as consultants on your own evaluation program, please reach out to info@www.cscce.org.

The Bicycle Principles – CSCCE collaborators, community members, and staff consider short form training best practices

In a new publication, which came out in November in PLOS ONE, CSCCE community of practice member Jason Williams (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), Rochelle Trachtenberg (Georgetown University), and co-authors describe the Bicycle Principles for short form trainings in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Medicine), as well as a series of recommendations for their successful implementation.

The work is an output from a conference that took place at CSHL’s Banbury Center and online in May of 2022. The conference convened 30 experts in short form training, including CSCCE’s Director Lou Woodley and several collaborators and members of our community of practice: Melissa Burke (Australian Biocommons), Allissa Dillman (NIH Office of Data Science Strategy), Maria Doyle (Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre), Christina Hall (Australian Biocommons), Kate Hertweck (Chan Zuckerberg Initiative), Kari Jordan (The Carpentries), Lisanna Paladin (EMBL Heidelberg), Tracy Teal (RStudio, now Posit).

In this blog post, we offer a short overview of the Bicycle Principle and associated recommendations, but for more detail, please download the paper and check out bikeprinciples.org.

CSCCE Training Update – General registration courses and Mini-workshops!

General registration is now open for Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF24W), Creating Community Playbooks (PBK24W), AND some of CSCCE’s new Mini-workshops! In this blog post, we highlight some key dates and deadlines, as well as answer some questions you might have about your participation (see the FAQ section at the end).

Please note that priority access to PBK24W and all CSCCE Mini-workshops is given to participants in our Community Manager Certification Program. This means that there are a limited number of spots available (we cap participation at 25). So, if you’re interested in taking any of these trainings, don’t delay in signing up!

If after reading this post you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to reach out to training@www.cscce.org and a member of our training team will get back to you ASAP.

CSCCE collaborators publish report on supporting environmental data science students at minority serving institutions

In 2021/22, CSCCE collaborated with the Academic Data Science Alliance (ADSA), The Carpentries, the Atlanta University Center Data Science Initiative, the Native BioData Consortium, NEON, and the RIOS Institute on an NSF grant to explore ways of better supporting environmental data science students at Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

CSCCE’s role in the project, which was led by PI Micaela Parker (ADSA) and co-PIs Krystal Tsosie (Arizona State University), Talitha Washington (Clark Atlanta University), and Kari Jordan (The Carpentries), was to convene and facilitate a series of working group calls that brought together faculty from TCUs and HBCUs. The findings from this work were synthesized into a report published earlier this month in ADSA’s Zenodo Community. (An editable version of the report is open for comment until December 2024).

In this blog post, we share a little more about the work we did on this project. If you are interested in working with as facilitators for your next collaboration, please contact info@www.cscce.org, or visit our consultancy webpage.

Join us for CEF23F! Head into the new “school” year with some updates to our foundational training course

Today we opened general registration for the next offering of Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF), our foundational course on community management in STEM. This course is relevant to anyone convening communities in the STEM ecosystem, whether new to the work or more experienced.

Sign up by 4 August and enjoy a 25% early bird registration discount (use the code EARLYCEF23F at checkout)!!

CEF23F will run on Tuesdays and Fridays starting on 8 September and ending on 27 October. More information about the course can be found here.

If you have any questions about CSCCE’s professional development training courses – including about information in this post – please email training@www.cscce.org.

Planning and launching a new champions program – and online community platform – at the Michael J Fox Foundation

Over the last few months, we’ve been working with Josh Gottesman and Leslie Kirsch at the Michael J Fox Foundation to plan a new online community of practice intended to support conversations about the sharing and reuse of data related to Parkinson’s Disease Research.

As is the norm for many community projects, we’ve been taking a phased approach to the launch of this Data Community of Practice (DCoP) – working to understand the needs of the nascent community and then identifying a small group of community champions to help test the online platform and seed initial conversations before opening the community to a wider membership.

In this blog post, we share more about how we supported MJFF through member research, the selection and design of a new online community platform, resource creation and scaffolding for their new Data Community Innovators (DCIs) program, and the planning and hosting of a DCI kick-off meeting at MJFF’s offices in NYC.

Preparing for large, multi-stakeholder collaborations – a two-part CSCCE workshop

In May 2023, CSCCE’s Director, Lou Woodley, and Director of Learning, Camille Santistevan, ran a two-part workshop as part of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI)’s Central Science Training Series. The series included training and discussion on topics related to leadership, career development, science communication, and more, with a range of experts sharing their knowledge and experiences.

The workshops Lou and Camille developed, which ran for 2 hours each on 10 and 24 May, focused on preparing for large, multi-stakeholder collaborations, with a particular focus on the beginnings of projects as a crucial time for establishing collaborative relationships, understanding expectations, and defining working norms.

In this blog post, we share a little more about the workshops. If you’d be interested in taking these workshops as an individual, or contracting with us to offer them in your organization, please let us know by emailing training@www.cscce.org.