NSF Grants 10M to “Native FEWS Alliance”

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Congratulations to Dr. Karletta Chief (UA SRC Community Engagement Core Lead Investigator) on a new, multi-institutional $10 million National Science Foundation award wherein collaboration among UC Berkeley, UArizona and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium seeks to increase Indigenous participation in higher education.

The awarded network, called the Native FEWS Alliance, aims to significantly broaden the participation of Native American and underrepresented students in Food, Energy and Water Systems (FEWS) education and careers to address critical challenges facing their communities. 

To support this aim, the Alliance brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars from a wide range of disciplines and institutions to design and deploy place based and experiential learning curricula that combine Indigenous ways of knowing with physical sciences and engineering methodologies.

University of Arizona Professor of Environmental Science Dr. Karletta Chief, a member of the DINE Nation, is the PI on the collaborative proposal from UArizona. The UC Berkeley PI is Alice Agogino, a Mechanical Engineer. Agogino and Chief have worked together for two years on projects around environmental knowledge and educational practices in Native American communities.

“We came together because we had a lot of synergy between our training programs, and we were thinking about how we can take this to the next level and really increase the reach more times than our existing programs,” Chief said about the alliance. 

They will partner with a number of other institutions and alliances representing tribal nations including Diné, Laguna, Mohawk, Lumbee, Pomo, Samish, Hidatsa, Mandan, Dakota, Nakota, and Cherokee, among others.  

Read the Tribal Business News article