Meet the Team
Paige Sechrest
Prevention, Education, & Communications Manager
Paige is a Ph.D. candidate in the UW Department of Political Science. She specializes in public law, comparative politics, and quantitative methodology. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in political science. Her dissertation explores how various publics interpret violent interactions between police officers and people of color in France, in order to understand the extent to which the notion of the rights-bearing citizen has transformed to include the very people it was designed to marginalize. In addition to being a graduate student, she is a poetry lover and a news enthusiast.
Sarah Sweger
EPIC Program Training Specialist (ASE)
Sarah is a Ph.D. in UW Department of Chemistry. Her research focuses on applying statistical methods to improve the uncertainty analysis of experiments probing protein structure and function. As an EPIC trainer and department steward, she has helped facilitate opportunities for graduate students to address difficult issues and build community and see this as a major factor towards promoting their success and reducing harassment.
Vern Harner
EPIC Program Training Specialist (ASE)
Vern Harner is a German-American PhD candidate in Social Welfare and an organizer with UAW 4121. Their scholarship focuses on intracommunity support within trans communities, as well as examining trans Quality of Life and improving services experiences of trans/disabled individuals in healthcare spaces.
Rebecca Bluett
EPIC Program Training Specialist (Postdoc)
Rebecca became a neuroscientist because brains are the coolest. Unfortunately, her time in academia has shown her that sometimes being a woman in academia can feel less than the coolest, even when you have incredibly supportive mentors. She believes whole-heartedly that most academics want to make the world a better place and we’ve become experts in one very particular way to do that. Sometimes, though, we need help recognizing other kinds of problems and understanding how to improve things (like academic culture) in other ways. She joined the EPIC team to learn from her incredible teammates and to help facilitate postdocs having conversations with each other about how we can build more inclusive academic communities as we build our careers.