This event is over. This page is an independent historical summary. It is not the official meeting site, and there is nothing to register for.
| Event | NIGMS TWD Program Directors' Meeting |
|---|---|
| Dates | June 3–5, 2015 |
| City | Chantilly, Virginia |
| Audience | Directors of NIGMS training, workforce development and diversity programs |
| Themes | Outcomes of intervention grants, mentoring, inclusion, career advising, undergraduate-to-graduate links, reproducibility |
What was the 2015 TWD meeting?
The 2015 TWD Program Directors' Meeting ran June 3–5, 2015 in Chantilly, Virginia, and was the second biennial meeting for directors of NIGMS training and diversity programs. It followed the 2013 meeting in Chicago and kept the same audience: people who ran undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, graduate and postdoctoral programs funded through the TWD division.
What did the sessions focus on?
The program, as later listed on the 2019 meeting's past-meetings page, moved through a set of themes that program directors still work on:
- Evidence from intervention grants. What NIGMS-funded studies of training interventions had found, and how programs could use that evidence.
- Mentoring. Practical approaches to mentoring students and junior researchers.
- Inclusion. Including people with disabilities in STEM, and research on how bias forms in everyday judgments.
- Careers after the PhD. Advising students about the full range of research careers, and data on how career interests differ across groups of PhD students.
- Pipelines between institutions. Building working ties between undergraduate and graduate institutions.
- Reproducibility. A session on rigor and reproducibility, two years before it became a core expectation in NIGMS training grant guidance.
- What's new in TWD. Updates from the division and breakout sessions by program type.
Why does 2015 matter now?
Two threads from this meeting became formal requirements later. Reproducibility training turned into an expected part of predoctoral T32 programs, and career development and outcome tracking became standard sections of training grant applications. Our guides on rigor and reproducibility training and program evaluation cover how programs handle both today.
This page is an independent summary. We don't republish the agenda, presenters or photographs, and there was never anything to register for here after 2015.