TRELIS is professional development for women in the geospatial sciences. Training and Retaining Leaders iSTEM - Geospatial Sciences (TRELIS) instills the concept of a human capital trellis or scaffold of support, and represents the reality of nonlinear career trajectories that move sideways, take leaps, and do not follow a single upward ladder. 

TRELIS builds leadership capacity and skills around the topics of career retention strategies, mentoring training, career transitions, technical professional development, and work-life balance. While our primary audience is academic professionals, we also recognize and support the women who move into and out of academic institutions at different career stages.

TRELIS will host three workshops during its first round of funding. These will take place in Madison, Wisconsin (May 2018), Washington DC (June 2019), and another still-TBD city in the late spring of 2020. Many online resources will also be developed and shared.

The TRELIS leadership team includes:

  • Kate Beard-Tisdale, University of Maine (PI)
  • Laxmi Ramasubramanian, Hunter College (co-PI)
  • Diana Sinton, UCGIS (co-PI)
  • Sarah Battersby, Tableau
  • Barbara Buttenfield, University of Colorado
  • Karen Kemp, University of Southern California
  • Elizabeth Wentz, Arizona State University

 

Community response for TRELIS and its goals has been positive.

This is an excellent outcome for UCGIS and the broader geospatial community. The PIs represent the very best of our discipline and will be wonderful role models. The proposed trellis approach in particular has a potential for great success, given that career paths of many women in the GIScience/geospatial data science realm is indeed non-linear. I look forward to strongly encouraging the colleagues, students, and communities that I interact with to participate in this initiative and cannot wait to see what it accomplishes.  Dawn Wright, Esri Chief Scientist

Kudos to these women leaders in GIScience for having the vision to create a future-oriented approach to achieving gender equity in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. TRELIS-GS takes advantage of the most recent research on networks and professional development to build community. I commend them for their strong focus on advancement by taking a complex approach to achieving culture change and their conceptualizing career paths not as a pipeline but rather as the multifaceted path that characterizes most of our careers. Beth Mitchneck, Professor at University of Arizona and former lead program director of NSF's ADVANCE activities

This is a very exciting award, a long-overdue effort to address the low level of participation by women in geographic information science and technology. I'm especially excited as the grandfather of a young woman who is specializing in geomatics engineering as an undergraduate.  Mike Goodchild, Professor Emeritus, UC Santa Barbara

 

TRELIS is co-managed with the University of Maine and supported with generous funding from the National Science Foundation (Grant #1660400). 

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