The LEAP Alliance is focused on diversifying future leadership in the computing professoriate at research universities as a way to increase diversity across the field of computing. The problem we address is stark and straightforward: a very small percentage of the faculty (tenured, tenure-track, teaching, research, instructors) at PhD-granting universities are from the following underrepresented communities: Black or African-American, Hispanic, or American Indian or Alaska Native (CRA Taulbee Report)
Our solution is equally stark and straightforward: we intentionally bring together four cohorts of universities, with each cohort having common strengths and a common agenda to diversify future leadership in the computing professoriate. The four cohorts provide a comprehensive solution that covers undergraduate students and graduate students.
The LEAP Alliance is focused on on developing strategies to increase the engagement of four communities that are historically underrepresented in computing:
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- African Americans
- Hispanics
- Native Americans/Indigenous Americans
- People with Disabilities
The LEAP strategies can be broadly applied to all doctoral students in computing.
The shared purposed and broad vision of the LEAP Alliance is to increase faculty diversity in computing by three main approaches:
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- Increase the diversity of PhD graduates from institutions that are the top producers of computing faculty (based upon data from Jeff Huang) – Cohort 1 and Cohort 2
- Increase the exposure of academic careers at institutions that already have good diversity in their PhD graduates (based upon IPEDS data) – Cohort 3
- Increase the retention of diverse undergraduate students at the institutions that send students to graduate school that go on to be faculty (based upon data from Jeff Huang) – Cohort 4
LEAP Alliance Cohorts
Cohort 1
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Cornell University
- Georgia Tech
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Princeton University
- Stanford University
- University of California, Berkeley
- University of Texas
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- University of Washington
Cohort 3
- Syracuse University
- Tennesse State University
- Texas A&M University
- University of California, Davis
- University of California, Santa Cruz
- University of Colorado, Boulder
- University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Cohort 2
- California Institute of Technology
- Columbia University
- Purdue University
- University of California, Los Angeles
- University of Maryland
- University of Michigan
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- University of Pennsylvania
- University of Southern California
- University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Yale University
Cohort 4
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Cornell University
- Georgia Tech
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Princeton University
- Stanford University
- University of California, Berkeley
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- University of Washington
The LEAP Alliance was launched with only Cohort 1 with funding from an NSF INCLUDES demonstration grant, HRD-1806229 (2017 – 2020) and a grant from the Sloan Foundation (2019 – 2022). The LEAP Alliance was expanded to four cohorts with an NSF BPC Alliance grant (2021-2024). The LEAP Alliance is led by Valerie Taylor (University of Chicago) and Charles Isbell (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign). Stafford Hood and Denice Hood (UIUC-CREA) oversaw the evaluation. The LEAP Alliance also received funding from Google (2020-2022) for dissertation fellowships.
For questions regarding the LEAP Alliance, please send us a message by selecting “LEAP Alliance” for the subject on our contact us page.