Today UW SRP Administrator Liz Guzy heads to Washington D.C. to begin her fellowship with the 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Community Engagement Fellows Program.
The AAAS Community Engagement Fellows Program provides a rare professional development and networking opportunity for people with jobs focused on cultivating engagement and collaboration within communities of scientists. It was created in recognition of the importance of this work, and also because people who play this role often do so without formal training or professional support. As stated by AAAS, the goals of the program are to:
Professionalize and institutionalize the role of community management within scientific organizations;
Provide professional development resources to individuals who manage communities and collaborations in research organizations and scientific organizations;
Collect and disseminate knowledge about building strong collaborations and communities.
Guzy is perfectly suited to the fellowship, given her four years of experience as Administrator of two large National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences research centers at UW— in addition to serving as the UW SRP administrator she also serves as administrator for the UW Interdisciplinary Center on Exposures, Diseases, Genomics & Environment (EDGE).
After the coming week of professional development in Washington DC, Guzy will continue to engage with the other 22 members of the AAAS Community Engagement Fellows Program through monthly webinars, small group project teamwork, a mid-year training and experience exchange in DC in June, and an end-of-the-year debrief in DC in December. Along the way, she’ll develop her own community playbook to communicate her strategy and tactics for building community and collaboration among the members of EDGE and UW SRP.