"The Agents of Change Award will now allow the Women of Color Project to begin building a more stable online platform that is easily accessible to students across the nation. Our first goal is to ensure the resources that are available and that students who might benefit from our network know who we are." - Lanell Williams
“The Materials Today Agents of Change Award will give us a great opportunity to intervene where we recognize to have a gap – the lack of professional role confidence of female scientists.” - Prof. Barbara Rothen-Rutishauser.

We’re delighted to announce the recipients of the Materials Today Agents of Change Award. In 2019, the awards provided financial support and exposure to initiatives that aimed to make the materials science research community more diverse and inclusive, with a specific focus on gender.

From a shortlist of seven candidates, presenting a range of different approaches, the Materials Today Agents of Change judges made the tough decision of determining which two initiatives should receive the award.

The two recipients of the $10,000 grants are:

-Lanell Williams, Harvard University, The Women+ of Color Project (WOCP). Click here to find out more.

-Prof. Dr Barbara Rothen-Rutishauser, Prof. Alke Fink and Dr Sofía Martín Caba at Université de Fribourg, Switzerland and making professional role confidence a key part of educating the next generation of materials scientists. Click here to find out more.

The judges commented that the Women+ of Color Project was unique and addressed what many of them felt was a pressing need in materials science, while the Professional Role Confidence nomination was applauded for its evidence-based approach and evaluation, clear definition of success, and strong sustainability plan.

We hope that you will join us in congratulating the recipients of the award, and closely follow the projects’ journeys over the coming years. And watch this space – we’ll be doing follow up interviews with the recipients of the 2019 Materials Today Agents of Change award, as well as announcing the criteria for next year’s award.

To see the shortlist of the other candidates, please visit here: https://www.materialstoday.com/shortlist-today-agents-of-change-awards-2019/.

The picture includes (Lavontria Aaron - Graduate Student at John Hopkins University , Juliana Garcia-Mejia - Graduate student at Harvard University, Jamila Pagues - Graduate Student at Harvard University, LaNell Williams- Graduate Student at Harvard University).
The picture includes (Lavontria Aaron - Graduate Student at John Hopkins University , Juliana Garcia-Mejia - Graduate student at Harvard University, Jamila Pagues - Graduate Student at Harvard University, LaNell Williams- Graduate Student at Harvard University).
This picture includes Prof. Alke Fink, Prof. Barbara Rothen-Rutishauser and Dr Sofía Martín Caba. Credit: @Scott Capper, AMI
This picture includes Prof. Alke Fink, Prof. Barbara Rothen-Rutishauser and Dr Sofía Martín Caba. Credit: @Scott Capper, AMI

The Agents of Change awards are supported by Materials Today and Elsevier, and follows the Gender in the Global Research Landscape report on research performance through a gender lens (https://www.elsevier.com/research-intelligence/campaigns/gender-17).

If you would like to find out more about the next iteration of the report, due to be launched in 2020, please sign up here: https://www.elsevier.com/research-intelligence/resource-library/gender-report-2020.