The Faculty Development Initiative includes multiple approaches to help new faculty balance and integrate teaching and research responsibilities, improve time management and life balance, and to foster collaboration among STEM faculty.

Key Personnel: Beverly Delidow and Marcia Harrison; partnered with John Maher and Elaine Baker.

MU-ADVANCE will fund competitive mini-grants for Individuals and Collaborative Groups.

Mu-ADVANCE helped develop the following best practices brochures:

• Search Committee Strategies and Guidelines
  The Search Committee Strategies and Guidelines brochure is a tool to reduce gender bias during the search process.  This brochure is a step-by-step navigation tool for the search committees, beginning with the selection of search committee members and ending with the hiring of a new faculty member. 

• Best Practices: For the New Hire
  Best Practices: For the New Hire provides information for new faculty, including how to make contact with administrators and colleagues; useful university resources, such as discounts on home computers and the library system; and how to ensure that their road to tenure is being paved.   

• Best Practices: Welcoming New Faculty
  Best Practices: Welcoming New Faculty encourages departments to make community-building a goal.  One way to retain faculty is to nurture and support them both academically and socially.  This guide offers tips on how to kindle new faculty assimilation and participation within the department.

• Best Practices: The New Faculty Hire
  Best Practices: The New Faculty Hire is a resource for the hiring department.  This brochure provides the Chair and Dean of the hiring unit with a detailed description of their roles and responsibilities in the interview and offer processes.  Specifically, the guide highlights important aspects of these processes, such as what information to supply to the candidates, to ensure that both parties understand each other.

• Quick Start Guide to Tenure & Promotion
  The Quick Start Guide to Tenure and Promotion offers tips and suggestions, from document collection to service commitments, to help ensure faculty members are successful in their quests for tenure and promotion.

• Best Practices: Encouraging Retention
  Best Practices: Encouraging Retention examines how the institution can introduce and orient new faculty members to such things as colleagues, grant opportunities, annual reports, and the tenure and promotion process.  Focusing on both the first few weeks and the first year of a new faculty member’s career, this guide offers tips on how to help them “fit in” and become successful at Marshall.

We now provide a listing of other funding opportunities for faculty and students with a list of those with fall 2007 deadlines. We also provide individual lists of internal, West Virginia, and national funding opportunities.

Also, MU-ADVANCE supported fellowships to support non-tenured female faculty for the 2007-08 and 2008-09 academic year.

The Faculty Development Initiative provides multiple approaches to balancing and integrating teaching and research which is vital to the success of all faculty. Marshall has a critical need to retain new faculty and involve established faculty in mentoring junior faculty. Therefore, the MU-ADVANCE Faculty Development Initiative will support mentoring projects that partner new female faculty with established Marshall faculty with an overall goal of improving retention, and increasing collegiality and collaboration among STEM faculty while offsetting potential isolation of new female faculty.

A broader impact will be the increase in female faculty at Marshall through improved retention of talented STEM female faculty.