Title: Catalysts for Change: Cultivating a Culture for Chemistry Graduate Student Success
Abstract: The following Spencer Foundation funded project examines the cultural conditions that shape chemistry graduate student success centered on experience, context, and meaning-making. Drawing on scholarship on disciplinary culture, belonging, and sociopolitical perspectives on learning, the work reframes graduate education as a dynamic ecosystem in which norms, values, and practices are communicated often implicitly through milestones, mentoring structures, and everyday departmental interactions. Using graduate student and faculty perspectives as the primary interpretive anchor, the project interrogates how graduate students navigate expectations, develop research identities, and make sense of their opportunities within a system marked by ambiguous goals, uneven support, and unspoken rules of professional becoming. The first part of the talk will situate chemistry doctoral education within a body of research that highlights structural misalignments, hidden curricula, and program tensions that differentially shape students’ belonging. The second part will introduce an emergent culture construct informed by pilot survey and interview data, which will be interpreted through academic citizenship. These data illuminate how graduate students understand competence, opportunity, and community, and how these understandings cluster into patterns that reflect underlying cultural narratives rather than isolated individual traits. Finally, the last part of the talk will draw on relational theories of mentoring to illustrate how faculty and departments can intentionally redesign learning environments to cultivate clarity and meaningful belonging. By centering graduate student voice and examining culture as an interpretive system rather than a fixed set of behaviors, this work invites a reimagining of chemistry graduate education whereby students thrive because of the systems we intentionally build, not in spite of them.
Bio: Jocelyn E. (“Josie”) Nardo (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry at The Ohio State University whose research examines how disciplinary norms in chemistry are experienced by students who are discouraged from pursuing or remaining in the field. She studies how course design, assessment practices, and departmental structures shape students’ day-to-day interactions with chemistry, with particular attention to students from communities historically pushed out of the discipline. Her work on disability in chemistry learning environments, students’ help-seeking and learning ecosystems, and graduate program milestones has been published in Chemistry Education Research and Practice and the Journal of Chemical Education. She is PI and co-PI on grants from the Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation, UL Research Institutes, and The Ohio State’s Kirwan Institute and Student Academic Success Research Award program.
Student Host: Theodore Gierszal