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.
Recent recognition of the includes the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring for Joyce Yen, the election of J. Nathan Kutz as a Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics fellow and the recognition of Alexina Kublu with the 2022 Inuit Language Recognition Award.
A conversation with UW psychology professor Sheri Mizumori about the UW-based program Broadening the Representations of Academic Investigators in NeuroScience — or BRAINS for short — designed to accelerate career advancement for postdoctoral researchers and assistant professors from underrepresented populations.
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.
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.
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.