CAMPOS and CAMPSSAH Induction Ceremony Celebrates Recent Cohorts of Faculty Scholars
On March 10, members and supporters of CAMPOS and CAMPSSAH gathered in person at the Manetti Shrem Museum to welcome several cohorts of recent faculty inductees.
After nearly two years of postponements, there was much to celebrate as we formally inducted our seventeen newest members to the U.C. Davis community. Organized by the Office of Academic Diversity, the Induction Ceremony is an important place to foster a community among faculty in the two Centers. The Office of Academic Diversity works to strengthen and diversify the academic pipeline at UC Davis. It develops programming to advance the recruitment, retention, and promotion of faculty members whose research, teaching, and service advances multicultural perspectives in all fields of studies. The office has four central goals: empowering faculty equity leaders; elevating the work of diverse faculty as they solve global problems; supporting equitable ecosystems for student opportunity; modeling equity inclusion in higher education.
In a change from recent years, following remarks by Provost Mary Croughan and Vice Chancellor Renetta Garrison Tull, brief videos of each cohort allowed the scholars to introduce themselves and their important work. You can watch the videos below.
Uprooting Bias in the Academy: Lessons from the Field
This open access book by members of the CAMPOS community analyzes barriers to inclusion in academia and details ways to create a more diverse, inclusive environment. It describes what the barriers to inclusion are and how they function within the broader society; discusses the limitations of data collection that is guided by the conventional assumption that being diverse automatically means being inclusive; and highlights the importance of creating a collaborative, interdisciplinary and institution-wide vision of an inclusive community.
The Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science (CAMPOS) was launched in 2013 as a key initiative of the UC Davis ADVANCE program funded by the National Science Foundation. The center is formed by 34 STEMM faculty across 8 colleges and schools in 26 different disciplines. Together they are changing the face of science at UC Davis and beyond. CAMPOS faculty are scholars with exceptional contributions to research, teaching and service, who address issues affecting members from groups underrepresented in STEM. This vision of institutional transformation is rooted in the premise that attracting unique perspectives from diverse gender and cultural backgrounds within our faculty will change the face of STEM sciences to solve the common problems of our future.
During her remarks celebrating the new scholars, Faculty Director Mariel Vazquez, described one of the opportunities currently available to CAMPOS faculty: "Our mission is centered on the success of our faculty. In order to achieve this goal we launched the ENHANCE program with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Office of Academic Diversity within DEI and several other units on campus. ENHANCE provides professional research development support for CAMPOS faculty and makes dependent care grants available to further enhance their productivity."
CAMPOS welcomed eight new Faculty Scholars from the 2019, 2020, and 2021 cohorts:
2019
Fernanda Valdovinos, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Environmental Science and Policy
Jasquelin Peña, College of Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering
2020
Jairo Fúquene Patiño, College of Letters & Sciences, Statistics
Tiffani Johnson, School of Medicine, Emergency Medicine
Theanne N. Griffith, School of Medicine, Physiology and Membrane Biology
2021
Kristen George, School of Medicine, Public Health Sciences
Marco I. Gonzalez, School of Medicine, Neurology
Joseph Teran, College of Letters and Science, Mathematics
Modeled on CAMPOS, The Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspective on Social Science, Arts, and Humanities (CAMPSSAH) supports the recruitment, integration, and retention of faculty whose research, teaching, scholarly and creative work fosters multicultural perspectives in the arts, social sciences, and humanities. Established in 2019, CAMPSSAH represents the successful institutionalization and broadening of the 2015 Impact Recruitment Initiative, which sought to increase the representation of faculty of color within non-STEM fields. Through their work, CAMPSSAH faculty provide, in the words of Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson, Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, "evidence of our humanity, our ability to learn from our examined experience, and our ability to imagine and innovate."
CAMPSSAH welcomed nine new Faculty Scholars from the 2020 and 2021 cohorts:
2020
Kathleen Whiteley, Native American Studies
Benjamin D. Weber, African and African American Studies
Kathleen Cruz, Classics
Beenash Jafri, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
Michael V. Singh, Chicano/a Studies
Emily Celeste Vázquez Enríquez, Spanish and Portuguese
2021
Zinzi Clemmons, English
Shingirai Taodzera, African and African American Studies
Ariana Valle, Sociology