Shifting the Paradigm: Cultivating Socially Responsible Atmospheric Scientists through Leadership and Action

The atmospheric sciences have the lowest racial and ethnic diversity of all STEM fields at all levels of higher education. There is a desire and need for new approaches, new entry points and higher levels of engagement to foster a diverse community of researchers, scholars, and practitioners in atmospheric science. One challenge among many is that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are often siloed from many aspects of the scientific process, technical training, and scientific community. We have worked towards bridging this gap through the development of a new atmospheric science graduate course designed to break down traditional barriers for entry into diversity, equity, and inclusion engagement by graduate students, so they emerge better prepared to address issues of participation, representation, and inclusion challenges. This course was piloted during Fall 2021 (and has been taught annually since 2021) with the primary objective to educate and empower graduate students to be “diversity champions” in our field.

We will provide an overview of our new course focused on social responsibility in atmospheric science. and will describe (1) rationale for a course of this nature within a graduate program, (2) course design and content, (3) service-learning projects, (4) impact of the course on students, and (5) ideas for scalability to other atmospheric science graduate programs.