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Options to Increase Awareness of ULI Among Universities, Departments, and Faculty

The NASA ULI program has implemented a variety of practices to increase the publicity and awareness of the program. Some of the practices reach a broad audience—for example, published solicitation on ULI’s website and NASA’s Solicitation and Proposal Integrated Review and Evaluation System. ULI program representatives also talk at applicant workshops, professional conferences, and advisory board meetings. Others specifically target audiences according to the nature of the research thrusts of the ULI program. For example, the ULI program advertises at the professional societies such as the Engineering Deans Institute (through the ASEE), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. The ULI program also engages in direct and indirect communications with multiple selected universities for its special topics and with their female faculty.

The committee believes that there are ways to improve the current practices of ULI in order to further increase the diversity of the proposers. For example, the ULI could reach out to Advancing Minorities’ Interest in Engineering (AMIE), which represents HBCU Schools of Engineering with ABET-accredited programs. Through AMIE, the ULI program can engage directly with those HBCUs that have the talents and relevant expertise in their engineering faculty and students with regard to ULI’s research thrusts. Engineering societies such as the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) also have student chapters that could prove to be a useful resource for ULI to engage.

The ultimate goal of increasing awareness of the ULI program is to raise interest and foster participation in ULI among faculty with the appropriate research areas in departments and universities. Direct measurement of public awareness of ULI appears difficult. However, the committee found that the webpage “ULI Interested Partners List”¹ enabled potential university faculty or industry partners with relevant areas of research interest to sign up for the past three rounds of the ULI program (2017–2020). Almost all of the university awardees are on that list. However, the ULI Interested Partners List contains only a only a small percentage of HBCUs and MSIs. The committee believes that there is still a lack of public awareness of the ULI program, despite ULI’s past efforts.

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¹ NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, “University Leadership Initiative Interested Partner List,” updated April 30, 2020, https://nari.arc.nasa.gov/uli_partners.

The committee notes that NASA could sponsor a ULI-specific special session at an appropriate major conference (such as AIAA’s SciTech) to provide overviews of each relevant project. Within the conference, each of the individual research pieces could then be presented within their own discipline areas. This would provide maximum exposure to the projects, both at a higher level and within each of the discipline areas. NASA may also consider holding regional workshops (or webinars during the pandemic) for a smaller group of universities to explain the scope of ULI. The Department of Defense (DoD) has successfully held such workshops during the past several years. The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense has sponsored these regional technical assistance workshops. Participants were faculty, students, and administrators of universities in the region; representatives of all DoD departments; and some PIs who had been successful in winning and implementing DoD grants. The Office of Naval Research has also held such webinars.

NASA has a diversity outreach office. The committee believes that introducing a program liaison with proper technical background in the ULI program will strengthen the ability of the program to reach out to and communicate with potential proposers in universities, departments, and the broader NASA community to increase diversity of the participants.