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March 26, 2025 @ 9:00 am-10:00 am –

Recruiting and Retaining Scientists in the LTER: How to find and keep the best and brightest!

LTER Community Call hosted by the GSC + BP committees 

When: March 26 at 9am PT/10am MT/ 11am CT/12pm ET

Results from the LTER Network’s recent climate survey showed that sites’ personnel become more uniform as their tenure increases. This mirrors trends within the discipline of ecology – and broadly within STEM – where senior leadership often does not represent the field at large. A significant pool of early-career ecologists exists across the LTER Network, and several LTER sites have drawn from this pool to introduce new perspectives to their co-PI teams and collaborative projects. This pool of researchers presents an opportunity to broaden participation within LTER leadership at the site and network levels by adjusting our recruitment practices and retention to find and keep the best and brightest scientists in the field.

The Graduate Student and Broadening Participation Committees will facilitate a discussion-based community call to crowdsource resources and strategies to improve recruitment practices and retention across LTER sites. The discussion will focus on how to improve recruitment and retention via  official procedural changes (e.g. modifying recruitment practices) or simple, personal changes (providing resources to more widely distribute job postings). This community call will begin with a short presentation about the importance of adjusting recruitment processes to reach a broader audience and share simple steps we can all take toward this goal. Participants will then be invited to participate in breakout groups to discuss specific topics within recruitment and retention. These discussions will be used to produce a “Recruitment and Retention Handbook” to be shared across the LTER Network.

Please join us for a lively conversation – bring your ideas, success stories, and favorite resources to share how we can collectively work to recruit and retain the best and brightest across the LTER network and our broader scientific fields!