SERN Midcareer Fellows Program

Student Experience Research Network’s Midcareer Fellows Program supports a community of 15 fellows in collectively bridging research on the structures (i.e., practices, policies, and norms) that shape students’ experience of feeling respected as valued people and thinkers in school with current policy topics. The program is funded through grants from the Bezos Family Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and is implemented in partnership with Scholars Strategy Network and Education First. It is designed for midcareer faculty who identify as a member of one or more minoritized groups in the academy and who conduct equity-centered (e.g., liberatory or participatory, asset-based, anti-racist) empirical research on student experience.

Fellows are applying their leadership, vision, and research lens in service of constructing new narratives about federal and state policy topics that strategically target one or more policy intermediary audiences – a powerful mechanism for shifting how issues are understood and responded to within policy. Over the course of the fellowship, they will advance their knowledge about policymaking and how research is taken up in policy, provide input that influences the construction of the fellowship, network with colleagues who bridge research and policy, and develop translational and scholarly projects that target academic and policy audiences.

As part of this programming, fellows developed accessible and actionable policy briefs that draw on equity-centered research to address timely and important topics in the education sector. Several policy briefs are publicly available.

For questions about the SERN Midcareer Fellows Program, contact the SERN Research Team at research@studentexperiencenetwork.org