TAMUS - E&S AGEP

 Energy & Sustainability - Texas Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate

Advancing Interdisciplinary STEM Graduate

Education in Energy and Sustainability Disciplines

Social Science Project


The TAMUS-AGEP program also includes a social science component. Dr. Adrienne Carter-Sowell, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Africana Studies, leads the Social Science research project (see http://www.diversitysciences.org). The core research question, examined through four hypotheses, is if and how URM STEM graduate students experience their campuses’ climates differently in terms of feelings of inclusion versus isolation, than their majority status colleagues, and how this impacts commitment, persistence and success along the path to the professoriate.

The results of this research informs the Alliance’s efforts to identify and address key factors that affect success of URM STEM graduate students and their advancement to the professoriate in various institutional settings. Furthermore, under this NSF award, 1 full-time, doctoral student, 3 part-time doctoral students, and 2 undergraduate students, many of whom are URMs, have been recruited to work as research assistants on this research project in Dr. Carter-Sowell’s Science for a Diverse Society Research Laboratory. To date, outreach activities have included 1 publication (Carter-Sowell, A. R., Dickens, D. D., Miller, G., & Zimmerman, C. A., manuscript accepted for publication), 1 poster presentation at Texas A&M University’s Student Research Week (Schuetze, Miller, & Carter-Sowell, 2015) and 1 symposium, chaired by Dr. Carter-Sowell (Carter-Sowell, 2015) and presented at The National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education in Washington, DC.

We invite you to contact us, via email, for more information at acsdiversitysciences@tamu.edu or leave a message (979) 845-0378.

SOCIAL SCIENCE PROJECT DIRECTOR AND CO-PI

Dr. Adrienne Carter-Sowell
Ph.D., Purdue University
Research Affiliations: Psychology and
Africana Studies Program.



  Accepting graduate students for the next admissions cycle.

Faculty Advisor of Current Graduate Students:
  • Carla Zimmerman, TAMU Merit Fellowship recipient (Research Area: Social Psychology: Status – Senior Student)
  • Jane Carter, TAMUS AGEP-T Research Assistantship recipient (Research Area: Clinical Psychology: Status – First Year Student)
  • Jericka Battle, TAMU Diversity Fellowship recipient (Research Area: Social Psychology: Status – Arriving Fall 2016)