She investigates the historical and cultural dimensions of underrepresented groups' participation in science, technology and engineering and the reasons why white males still dominate these fields. Prof. Eve A. Riskin, University of Washington Eve Riskin received her BS degree in Electrical Engineering from M.I.T. and her graduate degrees in EE from Stanford. Since 1990, she has been in the EE Department at the University of Washington where she is now Associate Dean of Diversity and Access in the College of Engineering, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of the ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change. With ADVANCE, she works on mentoring and leadership development programs for women faculty in SEM. Her research interests include image compression and image processing, with a focus on developing video compression algorithms to allow for cell-phone transmission of American Sign Language.

A highly successful minority outreach and support program for incoming college freshmen in engineering is described. The University of Washington has been running ALVA (Alliances for Learning and Vision for underrepresented Americans) for 11 years and continuously tracks its participants. Partners in ALVA come from the government, education, and industry. This program targets talented underrepresented minority students and addresses four major hurdles that face minority students in engineering: lack of vision of themselves as an engineer, finances, community, and academic preparation. We will present ALVA as a model that can be duplicated at other colleges and universities.