Minnesota Partnership to Foster Native American Participation in Astrophysics

A new research and education partnership in astronomy will be developed between two University of Minnesota campuses, at Morris (UMM) and at the Twin Cities (UMTC), aimed at building a robust pathway for American Indian and Alaskan Native (AIAN) students to enter into the field of astrophysics. The program will interweave the courses and research strengths at both UMM and UMTC campuses. A series of frontier research projects in Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (MMA) will be pursued by UMM AIAN students, mentored by both UMM and UMTC faculty. The projects will be data-intensive, leveraging the UMTC astrophysics faculty’s access to the most modern astrophysics datasets and computing resources as well as UMM faculty’s expertise in data science. Both faculty and students will have opportunities for professional development, including workshops and other activities designed to develop communication skills, leadership and teamwork skills, management skills, gender and racial awareness, ethics, and others. This partnership will have a profound positive impact on the participation of the AIAN minority in astrophysics, as well as providing a successful template that could be replicated in other programs and disciplines.The past decade has witnessed remarkable advances in astrophysics, including the discovery of gravitational waves generated in mergers of binary systems of black holes and/or neutron stars, the first observations of the black hole event horizon, and the imaging of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Students and faculty participating in the partnership will take part in research in these areas, with specific projects proposed to use MMA to refine the measurement of the expansion rate of the universe, to carry out rapid searches for astronomical merger events using the UMTC TURBO instrument, to measure correlations between gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation, and to better understand the space environment in our solar system. In education, a new Astrophysics Area of Concentration at UMM will be established at the beginning of the partnership. UMM and UMTC faculty will take part in the UMM Gateway bridge program aimed at building college skills and reducing the achievement gap for AIAN students before they begin freshmen year. The project will also leverage the UMM access to the AIAN students and communities to pursue a series of activities aimed at promoting astrophysics (and science, more broadly) to the AIAN communities. Indigenous Astronomy workshops will be organized each semester, targeting the UMM, UMTC and AIAN communities. Other activities will include Astrophysics Days at UMM each semester, which will involve public lectures by UMTC astrophysics faculty, technical workshops, portable planetarium shows, and public observing nights at the UMM telescope. This award advances the goals of the Windows on the Universe Big Idea.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.