Advancing the Office of Science Mission
SC’s effective stewardship and promotion of diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces that value and celebrate a diversity of people, ideas, cultures, and educational backgrounds is foundational to delivering on the SC mission. Harnessing a diverse range of views, expertise, and experiences drives scientific and technological innovation and enables the SC community to push the frontiers of scientific knowledge for the betterment of America's prosperity and security.
A core mission of the Office of Scientific Workforce and Integrity (SWI) is advancing organizational best practices in SC's awards management policies and procedures for broadening access to SC's extramural competitive research programs, and to promote workforce diversity and inclusive workplace cultures at the SC National Laboratories. Below are a few of the initiatives that SC has launched in recent years focused on evaluating existing practices, and developing new plans and procedures focused on broadening access and promoting inclusive research environments in SC-sponsored extramural research programs and facilities.
Advancing SC Business Practices describes the systematic review that SC conducted to evaluate its processes for awards management and research related activities and describes the recommended actions SC is now implementing to broadening access to SC's extramural competitive research programs and promote inclusive research and learning environments.
SC has worked closely with its ten DOE National Laboratories to support and encourage their efforts to foster workforce diversity and inclusive workplace cultures within their organizations. In recent years, SC has instituted new processes to strengthen SC's oversight, provide expert feedback and guidance to improve their programs, processes, and activities for promoting workforce diversity and inclusive workplace cultures and increase laboratory accountability. Advancing the DOE National Laboratories describes SC’s collaborative oversight strategies, including the compendium of promising practices for DOE Laboratories' efforts, and provides links to learn more about current efforts to promote workforce diversity and inclusive workplace cultures at the DOE National Labs.
More recently, SC has focused on increasing SC engagement with and participation by faculty and students from groups and institutions historically underrepresented in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields that SC supports. Through coordination by an SC-wide working group led by SWI, the SC research program offices engaged in listening sessions with the research community, minority serving institutions (MSIs), scientific professional societies, and other members of the community to better understand the barriers to participation in SC-sponsored research programs and STEM training opportunities and to identify evidence-based practices to address those barriers. In FY 2022, SC launched the Reaching a New Energy Sciences Workforce (RENEW) effort to build capacity for establishing undergraduate and graduate training opportunities for students and academic institutions not currently well represented in the U.S. S&T ecosystem and to expand the pipeline for SC research and facilities workforce needs. In FY 2023, SC launched the Funding for Accelerated, Inclusive Research (FAIR) initiative to build research capacity, infrastructure, and expertise at institutions historically underrepresented in the SC portfolio, including minority serving institutions (MSIs) and emerging research institutions (ERIs).
