New scholarships will be offered to qualifying civil engineering and engineering management students to promote workforce development in underserved areas as part of a new grant awarded to University of the Pacific by the National Science Foundation.

Students awarded the scholarships will qualify for up to $15,000 per year for four years. The funding will support 10 students who have a demonstrated financial need beginning fall 2026 as part of the S-STEM: Cultivating Success: Career Development and Student Retention through Scholarships and Academic-Industry Partnerships project.

Students benefiting from the funding will join a five-student cohort. The project includes job training from local community partners as well as mentorship from a cohort advisor.

“One of the big pieces of this grant is cohort experience. It will build off the structured advising program we have for School of Engineering and Computer Science students. They will have regular meetings with dedicated faculty advisors, meetings with industry mentors and cohort building activities,” said Assistant Professor of Computer Science Sebastian Dziallas, who acted as co-principal investigator for the grant. “We know that from other studies, those kinds of things help with student retention and helping students feel like they belong.”

As part of the grant, Pacific is collaborating with five longtime Cooperative Education Program partners from the region that have committed to providing an industry mentor to the students and will meet with their student mentees every semester.

“This project strengthens our commitment to providing a superior, student-centered learning experience by aligning education with real-world needs, cultivating future STEM leaders who are both career-ready and lifelong learners, and deepening industry-academic partnerships,” said Assistant Provost for Research, Innovation and Sponsored Programs Mehdi Khazaeli, principal investigator for the grant.

Dziallas also will be gathering data on the benefits students gain from the experience.

“The work I'll be doing on the grant includes interviews with students, seeing the impact from the work-based interactions, understanding how they think about that, how that affects their learning experiences, how they think of themselves as engineers and then writing that up. Maybe there's some new knowledge that gets generated in that process.”

A crucial part of the project, said Professor of Bioengineering Shelly Gulati, who acted as co-principal investigator for the grant, is recruiting eligible students for the two programs.

She said the Mathematics, Engineering and Science Achievement program, which helps connect students to scholarships and offers professional development opportunities, will be an instrumental part of the process.

“We're going to be utilizing some of their structures to advertise this to students,” she said. “The industry mentors are also really excited to participate in some of those outreach activities to help paint a picture. We want to give students a sense of what that career might look like, what someone with a similar identity, maybe even from this region, can do in this field so there's this connection for the students to feel like this is a possibility for them.”

While the National Science Foundation has recently experienced significant cuts to grant funding, securing the funding is a win for the School of Engineering and Computer Science that Khazaeli says was a team effort.

“The credit for this achievement goes to the School of Engineering and Computer Science team. Its impact lies in increasing the number of low-income, academically talented students supported through a structured cohort model with dedicated faculty advisors, industry mentors, and robust social and professional development activities. We hope to expand this successful prototype to other programs across Pacific, further amplifying its benefits and reach,” Khazaeli said.