INTRODUCTION

The CUNY Faculty Awards Expansion Project is designed to increase the number of awards, named fellowships, keynote and plenary talks, and other signs of professional recognition that CUNY faculty receive from professional societies, national science organizations, and local science organizations. The project aims to make the successful nomination of colleagues for awards and prizes a normative feature of CUNY science departments.

GOALS

The program aims to simultaneously accelerate the careers of research active faculty and raise the visibility of the STEM disciplines at CUNY. As a result of the program, CUNY will be strengthened as an institution overall and attract more students into STEM fields. The project seeks to change CUNY faculty culture through methods that will establish the nomination of colleagues for awards as a routine component of faculty life.

SCHOLARLY AWARDS AND RECOGNITION

Scientific awards and prizes provide validation of a researcher’s work on a personal level through recognition and job satisfaction. External recognition can advance careers and impact decisions about promotion and tenure.

There are gender disparities in the proportion of scholarly award winners. Scholarly (as opposed to teaching and service) awards in mathematics, the physical sciences, and the life sciences go disproportionately to men. An analysis of four professional societies found that men receive more than twice as many awards as women, when controlling for the number of women on the nominating committees (Lincoln, Pincus, Koster & Leboy, 2012).

Percentage of female winners by award type and field, 1991-2010 (Lincoln, Pincus, Koster, Leboy, 2012)

Click here for information on the Gender Equity Project at Hunter College.

Click here for more information on the RAISE Project – dedicated to bringing together awards from all different areas of STEM & medicine.