October 15, 2026

CERSE Staff Facilitate Sessions at RED Consortium Meeting 2026

CERSE Director Liz Litzler and Research Scientist Rae Jing Han recently attended the Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) Consortium Meeting that took place from September 30 to October 2, 2026, in Alexandria, Virginia. The REDCON meeting occurs annually and is an opportunity for RED grantees to learn from and share insights with other teams from across the country who are engaged in similar change efforts in their own institutions. The CERSE team enjoyed connecting with existing and new RED team members, their colleagues Eva Andrijcic and Sriram Mohan at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, NSF program officers, and other collaborators including Andrea Beach. 

Liz introduced and Rae co-moderated (along with CERSE alum Michael Beach!) a plenary panel on how organizational context shapes change-making in higher education. The panelists were three alumni from previous RED grants who have been collaborators in CERSE’s participatory action research with RED teams: Teodora Shuman (Seattle University), Isaac Sabat (member of the Texas A&M team, now at University of Houston), and Alan Cheville (Bucknell University). The panel included high-level findings from the research as well as the panelists’ experiences with how social relationships, power dynamics, and other aspects of institutional context influenced their RED projects. 

Liz and Rae also facilitated a session on planning for the long-term sustainability of change initiatives. They shared the sustainability rubric created from CERSE’s work on the evaluation of the NSF Eddie Bernice Johnson INCLUDES Aspire Alliance (learn more on our Evaluation page!). They also shared insights about project sustainability from their research with RED teams. Participants engaged in lively discussions about three case study vignettes and discussed how they might plan for the longevity of their own change efforts.