Building a Community of Practice Among STEM Graduate Students to Foster Academic and Professional Success

Renetta Garrison Tull is Associate Vice Provost for Graduate Student Development & Postdoctoral Affairs at UMBC and Director of the National Science Foundation’s PROMISE AGEP: Maryland Transformation, a new AGEP-T project for the University System of Maryland. She presents across the U.S. and Puerto Rico on topics ranging from graduate school recruitment, retention, and dissertation completion, to faculty development. She serves as a national coach and mentor for prospective and current graduate students at universities outside of Maryland through invited participation at STEM conferences such as GEM, NSBE, SACNAS, SHPE, and AISES. She is a former Board Member of the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools and currently serves as a Liaison for Institutional Collaboration in the Chancellor’s Office at the Universidad Metropolitana in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In addition to her affiliations in Maryland, she is a member of the ”Quality of Life Technology Center (QoLT) Engineering Research Center faculty” at Carnegie Mellon/University of Pittsburgh, an MIT MSRP advisor, and member of the MIT Deeper Engagement Working Group. She is Co-PI of the NSF ADVANCE Hispanic Women in STEM Project, and co-leads the ”Women in STEM” initiative for the Latin and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions (LACCEI).