2018 CoNECD - The Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity Conference

Recruiting a Critically Diverse and Inclusively Excellent Faculty through STRIDE Peer Education

Presented at Faculty Track - Technical Session IV

This paper shares our institution’s adaptation of the work of the University of Michigan’s peer education Committee on Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence (STRIDE) to advance our efforts to recruit a more diverse and inclusively excellent faculty. In our iteration of STRIDE, six highly respected faculty fellows facilitate conversations and activities with search committees and departments to help them identify and implement actions to reduce implicit bias throughout the lifecycle of faculty searches. This paper details the institutional context of our committee’s creation, describes our four-part recruitment-focused conversation series, and reflects on our progress and lessons learned. Through this review of STRIDE’s peer education activities and approaches, we hope to support the efforts of other institutions to design and implement their own recruitment practices to foster faculty diversity and inclusion.

Authors

Dr. Autumn Marie Reed University of Maryland, Baltimore County [biography]

Dr. Autumn M. Reed is Director of UMBC-STRIDE Coordinator for ADVANCE and Faculty Diversity Initiatives. In this role Dr. Reed develops educational-awareness programming and initiatives, maintains a clearing house of resources on faculty diversity equity issues, collects and reports data, coordinates program evaluation efforts, and provides support for the Executive Committee on the Recruitment, Retention and Advancement of Underrepresented Minority Faculty, the ADVANCE Executive Committee, and the UMBC Postdoctoral Fellows Program for Faculty Diversity. She is bilingual in Spanish and English and specializes in intercultural and gender communication, and implicit bias, as they relate to the recruitment, retention, and advancement of underrepresented minority faculty.
Dr. Nilanjan Banerjee University of Maryland, Baltimore County [biography]

Nilanjan Banerjee is an Associate Professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is an expert in mobile and sensor systems with focus on designing end-to-end cyber-physical systems with applications to physical rehabilitation, physiological mon
Dr. Elsa D. Garcin University of Maryland, Baltimore County [biography]

Dr Elsa Garcin is an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UMBC. She obtained her PhD in France and was a postdoctoral fellow at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. Research in her lab uses structural biology to study how proteins work via conformational changes, posttranslational modifications, and protein:protein interactions. Her research areas include proteins in the nitric oxide/GC-1/cGMP pathway crucial to the cardiovascular system, non canonical protein:RNA interactions, ligand:protein interactions and novel methods to detect protein:protein interactions. At UMBC, Dr Garcin is a member of the Women in Science and Engineering faculty group (WISE) and the Committee on Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence (STRIDE).
Dr. Wayne G. Lutters University of Maryland, Baltimore County [biography]

Dr. Wayne G. Lutters is the director of the multi-disciplinary Interactive Systems Research Center and an Associate Professor of Information Systems in the College of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Dr. Lutters serves as one of the inaugural STRIDE fellows in addition to a role on the ADVANCE Executive committee and advisory boards for the Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) and the Honors College. Dr. Lutters’ research interests are at the nexus of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), social computing, and social informatics. He specializes in field studies of IT-mediated work, from a socio-technical perspective, to better inform the design and evaluation of collaborative systems. Recent projects have included cyberinfrastructure for e-Science, visualization tools for system administrators, virtualized help desk systems for small businesses, and reflective social media systems. He has served as a Program Director for Human-Centered Computing at the National Science Foundation. He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine and his B.A. in both Cognitive Science and History from Connecticut College.
Dr. Susan McDonough University of Maryland, Baltimore County [biography]

Susan McDonough is Associate Professor of History at UMBC. She is a historian of gender and her research and teaching focus on the culture of the medieval Mediterranean. She serves as a STRIDE fellow from the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.
Christopher Murphy University of Maryland, Baltimore County [biography]

Dr. Murphy is Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at UMBC. He is a member of the founding cohort of the UMBC STRIDE team. His research focuses on interventions to prevent and reduce gender-based and intimate partner violence.
Prof. Kevin Erling Omland http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3863-5509 University of Maryland, Baltimore County [biography]

Dr. Omland is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at UMBC. He obtained his PhD from the University at Albany, SUNY and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota and the Smithsonian Institution. His research interests include avian evolution, behavior and conservation. Dr. Omland is the 2016-2019 UMBC Presidential Research Professor and since 2015 has been a member of UMBC's STRIDE committee to address faculty diversity and inclusion.

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