Promoting Sense of Belonging through Student-Faculty Lunches

Motivation

Full undergraduate experience in biomedical engineering should feature cordial interactions between students and faculty as well as a good sense of belonging. However, both factors remain elusive for many students, rendering their undergraduate experience suboptimal. We designed the organized student-faculty lunches (free lunches!) to promote informal student-faculty interactions and the formation of belonging among the student participants.

Procedure of the Faculty Lunches

Current Status

This project is active and funded by an Academic Senate Large Grant. We are happy to collaborate inside and outside of UC Davis!

For students: lunches are running monthly. You can sign up for the free lunches here: https://tinyurl.com/23rmk8nm. We saw significant benefits to senses of belonging measures of students who have participated in the lunches. These lunches are more beneficial if a student participates in one early in their undergraduate career.

Five students having lunch with Dr. Jie Zheng

Would Like to Work on This?

We perform both quantitative and qualitative methods for assessment. We would like you to be comfortable speaking in public since you may need to facilitate these lunches. Ideally, you will have some leadership experience in a student organization.

  • If you'd like to work on the qualitative side, we will train you in a software called NVIVO for thematic analysis. You will need to interview the lunch participants, patiently transcribe the interview transcripts (with help from Otter.ai), and prepare to sit down for a while to sift through the core themes mentioned by participants.
  • If you will be working on the quantitative side, we request you to be familiar with the setups of t-tests, Wilcoxon signed-rank tests, and linear regression basics. You should know how to perform basic statistics in Python. Knowledge in survey design, advanced regression methods (such as multi-stage), or factor analysis methods is a huge plus.

This project probably has the lowest barrier of entry among all our projects.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

  1. T. M. Chan, A. A. Tamura, and X. Wang, "Improving sense of belonging in biomedical engineering students through student-faculty lunches," Frontiers in Education, vol. 10, 2025, doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1510872.
  2. T. M. Chan, T. L. Chatfield, and X. Wang, "Work in Progress: Investigation of Student-Faculty Micro-Interactions on Students’ Sense of Belonging through Organized Student-Faculty Lunches," 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, 2024, doi: 10.18260/1-2--48500.

Presentations

  1. T. M. Chan, A. A. Tamura, and X. Wang, "Improvement in Students' Sense of Belonging through Student-Faculty Lunches: An Equity Analysis," presented at the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Annual Meeting 2024.
  2. T. M. Chan, T. L. Chatfield, and X. Wang, "Initial Investigation of Student-Faculty Micro-Interactions on Students’ Sense of Belonging through Organized Student-Faculty Lunches," presented at Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Annual Meeting 2023.