Blair Schneider
University of Kansas, KS·Education Research
Much of the geosciences depends on fieldwork, where small teams of senior researchers and their students live and work together in remote places for days or weeks. Those conditions concentrate power in a few hands and remove the usual institutional oversight, which makes participants vulnerable to bullying, harassment and other exclusionary treatment based on identity.
- Fields
Education Research
Earth & Environmental Science
Social Science
- Topics
geoscience fieldwork
field safety
harassment prevention
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Create and disseminate a certificate program in field safety, anti-harassment and bystander intervention delivered through an online course platform, together with a toolkit for planning safe and inclusive field campaigns.
- Test whether a self-paced online course paired with synchronous guided debrief and reflection sessions shifts field team culture, and identify which components of the instructional sequence matter across different field contexts.
- Develop transferable research designs and measurement instruments for studying the culture and safety of fieldwork in the geosciences, a question not previously evaluated.
- Implement mentored research experiences in earth and environmental sciences plus a junior- and senior-year professional development curriculum, and measure effects on retention, graduation and research identity for undergraduates.
- Establish a mentor training program for faculty and non-academic scientists with cultural understanding threaded throughout, and produce an open-access fieldwork mentoring module covering field safety, accessibility and responses to exclusionary behavior.
More about the research
Two linked projects ask how to prepare field teams better and how to change field culture, and then study whether the training and tools actually work.
Why it matters
Hostile behavior and safety gaps in field settings push people out of the geosciences, and until now no evidence existed on whether field safety or anti-harassment training actually helps. These projects could give field teams, departments and funding agencies tested training, planning tools and measurement instruments, and could improve retention and graduation for undergraduates in earth and environmental sciences, especially those set back by the pandemic.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
R11-BEC: Mitigating COVID-19 Career Challenges with Research and Professional Development Training for Undergraduate Students and Mentors in Field-based Environmental Sciences
NSF · Sep 2022 – Aug 2027
Collaborative Research: FieldSafe - Changing the Culture of Fieldwork in the Geosciences
NSF · Jul 2023 – Jun 2027
Closest labs
Melanie Will Cole
Central New Mexico Community College, NM·Education Research
Implement and examine a hybrid undergraduate research experience that combines a course-based research class with a stipend-supported apprenticeship, enrolling ten place-bound students per year in a year-long series of special project courses.
Ross Stites
Kansas City Kansas Community College, KS·Education Research
Increase the number of STEM courses at a two-year college that use course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), in which an entire class carries out authentic research as part of the course.
Allyson Sterling
Regis University, CO·Education Research
Create a paid, faculty-mentored summer research program for students between their first and second year of college, lowering financial and experience barriers to authentic research for first-generation, Latine and working students in the life sciences.
The school
University of Kansas: 26 labs on PI Pages, $546M a year on research, 351 research doctorates a year.
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