#  New Grant for The Women+ of Color Project 

 





March 27, 2023

 

 

 Congratulations to graduate students LaNell Williams and Lauren Niu, and Prof. Robert Westervelt, co-PIs of [The Women+ of Color Project](https://thewocproject.org/) (W+OCP), on receiving a $100K grand from the Heising-Simons Foundation!

 W+OCP aims to improve the pipeline of underrepresented racial minority women+ (URRM Women+) who pursue graduate school in STEM by increasing the accessibility of graduate school applications for all.

 The project, founded in 2019, was originally designed to correct the enormous gap in representation of women+ of color in physics. Of 55,000 physics PhDs currently held in the US, fewer than 100 are by black women: less than one thousandth of a percent of PhDs in the country, even though black women make about 6% of the US population. Eventually, the projects mission has been extended to address similar imbalances in other STEM disciplines, thus becoming **W+OC in STEM**.

 The new grant will provide two years of funding to support the project and to host a conference in 2024.