In 1996, two Kenyan scholars were awarded Fulbright Scholarships — honors the U.S. Department of State grants to promising young academics worldwide. Fred Muyia Nafukho, who joined the University of Washington earlier this year as the vice provost for academic personnel, vividly remembers the day he was called to the U.S. embassy in Nairobi.
Joyce Yen — director of the University of Washington’s ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change, an NSF-funded body to promote female STEM faculty on campus — recently worked with the Heising-Simons Foundation to dismantle bias and promote diversity in a prominent grant that the Foundation awards to postdoctoral researchers in planetary science. In this Q&A, Yen shares the many, sometimes counterintuitive ways bias can work against goals toward greater diversity, equity and inclusion in STEM fields.
A University of Washington study finds that women authors are significantly under-represented in high-profile academic journals.
In the 15 years since the ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change opened its doors, the UW has nearly doubled the number of female faculty across 19 science, technology, engineering and math departments.
A new national program at the UW — LATTICE — aims to diversify the national engineering faculty population by building supportive communities during the critical transition from graduate studies to permanent tenure-track positions.
Pursuing scientific or engineering careers in industry, government or private research after getting a Ph.D. used to be considered a one-way ticket out of academia. But new UW research finds numerous benefits — to students, researchers and academic institutions looking to diversify their faculty — in making that return trip easier.
The University of Washington has the nation’s highest percentage of women in tenure-track engineering faculty positions. An online toolkit based on UW’s leadership workshops for department chairs could help replicate that success at other institutions.