Advancing Faculty Excellence
UCI’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion truly animates our mission as a public research university. We are proud to be a Minority Serving Institution and one of two member campuses of the American Association of Universities to be both a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and an Asian American, Native American, and Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI). The New York Times ranked UCI #1 in the nation for doing the most for the American Dream by making higher education accessible for first generation and low income families. We are no less engaged in recasting the professoriate of the future.
An Equity Advisor is a senior faculty member, appointed as Faculty Assistant to the Dean in their respective schools. Equity Advisors participate in faculty recruiting by approving search strategies and raising awareness of Best Practices. Additionally, they organize faculty development programs, with both formal and informal mentoring, and help address individual issues in relation to equity and inclusion.
Professor Kathleen Johnson, Ph. D, Earth System Sciences, is the School of Physical Sciences Equity Advisor.
In 2019, the School of Physical Sciences was awarded a grant from the University of California Office of the President to advance faculty diversity within STEM.
UCI Wellness Ambassadors are volunteers at all UCI and UCI Health locations (including virtual) that help create a culture of whole-person wellness within the workplace by promoting awareness and co-worker participation in Wellness programs, services, and events.
Professor Aomawa Shields, Ph. D, Physics & Astronomy is the School of Physical Sciences 2024 UCI Wellness Ambassador. She plans to host a 10-week workshop in the fall for faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate students in the School of Physical Sciences for an exploration of the practice of yoga nidra - a sleep-based guided meditation carried out lying down. For more information email aoips@uci.edu.
The Institute for Meaningful Engagement (TIME) is designed to facilitate institutional transformation by addressing environmental factors that negatively influence STEM degree completion for minoritized students (MS). TIME offers an innovative approach to address degree completion disparities between MS and non-MS students by offering programming that contextualizes their lived experience, through an intersectional lens, and provides STEM faculty and administrators with activities, exercises, and literature to help them identify their social and cultural location, and the social/cultural location of their students, while also leveraging existing efforts on campus to create more inclusive academic spaces.
Cohort 1: Joe Patterson, Professor of Chemistry and Judit Romhanyi, professor of Physics & Astronomy
Cohort 2: Michael Ratz, Professor of Physics & Astronomy and Alessandra Pantano, Professor of Mathematics