Mehnaaz F. Ali, a Professor of Chemistry, will be the Program Director (PD) and Principal Investigator (PI) for this project and will guide the overall research direction. She has served as PI on a number of externally funded grants such as the NIH-SCORE, NSF SURE, Louisiana Board of Regents, and the Research Corporation’s Single Investigator Cottrell College Science Award. She is currently the Co-PI on a center grant from the NASA MUREP Institutional Research Opportunity (MIRO) program which supports training and development of student research opportunities to directly affect the number of students in STEM careers. Dr. Ali is also a Co-PI on a recently funded NSF ADVANCE grant which is focused on creating an equitable, inclusive and energizing climate for female STEM faculty members by addressing systemic barriers which currently lead to higher attrition rates of female faculty and Women of Color.

Dr. Ali is a trained analytical chemist and most recently served as the PI on a Louisiana Board of Regents Enhancement grant that was funded to transform the current analytical lab curriculum at Xavier into an inquiry based lab experience for Xavier students so they can develop critical thinking and reasoning skills and better prepare for careers in the STEM workforce. Dr. Ali also directed a service-learning program with P-12 schools and has experience directing and coordinating XULA students for this effort for over seven years. She also helped coordinate the summer professional development workshop for teachers, which helped gather preliminary data for the proposed program