paraDIGMS Fall 2020

Plenary Speakers

Workshop for graduate program leaders

Fundamentals: Equity in Graduate Admissions

Facilitators: Dr. Julie Posselt and Dr. Casey Miller

This session presents data and research about the role of typical admissions criteria and practices in maintaining racial/ethnic inequalities in graduate education. Suitable for a wide variety of audiences, practical strategies for rethinking typical admissions criteria and processes are introduced, with a focus on equity-based holistic review and embedding attention to equity throughout the admissions and recruitment process. All aspects of this session are rooted in current research. Participants will learn how common admissions mindsets & practices tend to inhibit access for underrepresented groups, and they will be introduced to strategies to improve diversity & equity through holistic review processes.

Panels

Panel #1: Representatives from public and private funding organizations

Dr. Lorelle L. Espinosa serves as program director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, where she is responsible for developing and implementing evidence-based strategic priorities for the Foundation’s grantmaking to effectively advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in STEM higher education. Her portfolio includes oversight of the Foundation’s Minority PhD program, which supports nine University Centers of Exemplary Mentoring (UCEMs) nationwide. UCEMs provide fellowships, peer and faculty mentoring, and networking and professional development resources aimed at helping graduate students from underrepresented groups successfully complete graduate study in STEM fields. Dr. Espinosa also oversees the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership, a Sloan initiative that partners with eight U.S. campuses to help meet the specific needs of American Indian and Alaska Native students, enabling them to pursue advanced degrees in STEM while continuing to participate meaningfully in tribal life. 

Prior to joining the Foundation in 2020, Dr. Espinosa was Vice President for Research at the American Council for Education. In this role, she was responsible for building the organization’s research portfolio with special emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion; for promoting innovation and data use to close equity gaps; and for helping shape the national conversation around issues of access to and success in higher education for diverse populations. Dr. Espinosa began her career in student affairs and undergraduate education at the University of California, Davis, Stanford University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Dr. Espinosa earned her PhD in higher education and organizational change from UCLA.

Dr. Karen Marrongelle is the head of the Directorate for Education and Human Resources at the National Science Foundation. EHR supports fundamental research that enhances learning and teaching, and broad efforts to achieve excellence in U.S. science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education, at all levels and in all settings. Dr. Marrongelle previously served as a program director in the Division on Research and Learning within EHR. With Ping Li, she is the author of the book Having Success with NSF: A Practical Guide. Dr. Marrongelle earned her doctorate in mathematics education from the University of New Hampshire. Prior to her position at the NSF, she served as a professor of mathematics and statistics at Portland State University as well as dean of the university’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. During her tenure as dean, she worked to implement student inclusivity measures, establish public-private partnerships to support research, and optimize the school’s use of grants from NSF and other funding organizations.

#2: Representatives from initiatives in other STEM fields with innovative program models aimed at improving access to higher education for marginalized communities

Dr. Theodore Hodapp is the Director of Project Development and Senior Advisor to Education and Diversity for the American Physical Society (APS) in College Park, Maryland. Dr. Hodapp led the development of the APS Bridge Program, which is erasing the achievement gap for underrepresented minority students at the PhD level in physics. He now serves as Project Director of the Inclusive Graduate Education Network (IGEN). Dr. Hodapp is Principal Investigator on several grants that support the APS Conferences for Undergraduate Women in Physics, which bring together nearly every undergraduate woman studying physics in the United States. Prior to working at the APS, Dr. Hodapp was a professor and chair of the Hamline University Physics Department in St. Paul, Minnesota and a Program Director at the NSF Division of Undergraduate Education. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the AAAS.

Dr. Lloyd Munjanja, Associate Director of Graduate Diversity and Program Climate, leads the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign with the recruitment, retention, and advancement of graduate students, with a specific focus on traditionally underrepresented groups in chemistry. He also serves on multiple department committees, including the Diversity Committee and the Climate Committee, and leads the Annual Women in Chemistry Retreat planning committee. He also develops, implements, and runs lecture series, workshops, including the Stoesser Lecture, and instructs two professional development courses for first and third-year graduate students. He also serves as an advocate for faculty, postdocs, and graduate students on climate and equity-related issues. Also, he consults with the broader community on inclusive excellence challenges and opportunities in STEM.

Dr. Munjanja received a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Rochester, NY. While at the University of Rochester, he developed a strong interest in advocating and supporting students of color’s professional development and advancement. His interest in diversity, equity, and inclusion in the chemical sciences took him to the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Selective C-H Functionalization (CCHF) based out of Emory University, as Director of Education, Outreach, and Diversity.

Dr. Corey Welch is the Director of the STEM Scholars Program at Iowa State University. He is a Biologist by training, but after a postdoc, he transitioned to full time student development as a program coordinator of the Biology Scholars Program at UC Berkeley, an innovative nationally recognized program for minority and low income students. In 2016, he established the STEM Scholars, modeled after this program. Corey uses the latest STEM Education research and his own experience as a first generation, low income, Northern Cheyenne Tribal member to train the next generation of underrepresented scientists. He frequently gives talks around the country on diversifying the fields of ecology/evolution, he spoke in Washington DC at the March For Science, and is wrapping up his last years serving on the National Board of Directors of SACNAS (Society for the Advancement of Chicano/Hispanics & Native Americans in Science). He co-advises the ISU SACNAS Chapter. As possibly the first & only N. Cheyenne to earn a Biology PhD, he gives back to his tribal community through an annual N. Cheyenne scholarship.

Panel #3: Faculty who work with undergraduate math students from minoritized groups, especially at HBCUs, HSIs, and community colleges

Dr. Jessica De Silva has been at California State University, Stanislaus since 2018 where she is currently an Assistant Professor of Mathematics. She earned her BS from CSU Stanislaus, and her MS and PhD from the University of Nebraska. Dr. De Silva’s research background is in combinatorics in graph theory, and her current interests lie in applications of discrete mathematics in data science and image processing. CSU Stanislaus is a designated Hispanic-Serving Institution, with the student population being 55% Hispanic/LatinX, 62% Pell eligible, and 74% first-generation. In serving this diverse population, Dr. De Silva has the opportunity to mentor research students through various campus programs such as CSU-LSAMP (Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation). She serves on the conference committee of the Pacific Math Alliance, a regional branch of the National Math Alliance. Through this leadership, Dr. De Silva is able to mentor and create opportunities for mathematics students in the larger Pacific region.

Dr. Belin Tsinnajinnie (he/him/his) is Diné and Filipinx from Na’ Neelzhiin, New Mexico. Belin received his PhD in Mathematics at the University of Arizona with a doctoral thesis focused on notions of mathematical identity in the context of Indigenous and Latinx students. He is now a Full-time Faculty of Mathematics at Santa Fe Community College. Belin is interested in identifying and articulating issues pertaining social justice and equity in mathematics education through Indigenous perspectives.

Joycelyn Wilson has been at Spelman College since 2007 and is currently a senior instructor in the Department of Mathematics. Before coming to Spelman, she was an instructor at Howard University and American University, both in Washington, DC. While at Spelman, she worked with several federally funded grants, including the Program Director of the Spelman/Salem STEM (S³) Mentoring Program and the Women in Science, Technology, Mathematics and Engineering (WiSTEM) Program.  Most recently, she served as Co-PI and Program Director for the Mathematics Research and Mentoring Program (Math RaMP), an NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences funded program. The overall goal of Math RaMP is to increase the number of African American women who pursue advanced degrees or careers in the mathematical sciences with an enhanced understanding of the broader career options available in pure and applied mathematics, as well as statistics and mathematics education. She loves that she is able to impact women of color in various ways at Spelman College and beyond, in particular in the field of mathematics. In her spare time, she enjoys working math logic puzzles, watching baseball and being adventurous. 

Panel #4: Leaders of entryway and mentoring programs that support undergraduates from underrepresented groups as they choose and make the transition into graduate programs

Dr. Rebecca Garcia is a Professor of Mathematics at Sam Houston State University and a Co-Director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Undergraduate Program. A native Chamorro, born and raised in Guam, Dr. Garcia earned her bachelor’s degree from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA, her masters degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and her doctoral degree from New Mexico State University. Her research interests are at the intersection of computational and commutative algebra and combinatorics. Her record of service is a reflection of her love for her community and her commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion: from running math circles and preparatory programs for local middle school students to directing national undergraduate research programs that aim to increase the number of underrepresented students attaining advanced degrees in the mathematical sciences. 

Dr. Candice Price  is a mathematician and an assistant professor at Smith College in Northampton, MA. Born and raised in California, Candice has a bachelor’s degree (2003) in mathematics from California State University, Chico, and a master’s degree (2007)  in mathematics from San Francisco State University. She earned her doctoral degree (2012) in mathematics from the University of Iowa under the advisement of Isabel Darcy. Her area of mathematical research is in the application of mathematics to biology primarily in DNA topology, knot theory applied to the structure of DNA. She is an advocate for greater representation of women and people of color in the STEM fields and is a founder of the Underrepresented Students in Topology and Algebra Research Symposium (USTARS) and the website Mathematically Gifted and Black.

Panel #5: Current and recent graduate students who have worked to create and advocate for space and support within their departments for graduate students

Sarah Salmon is a doctoral candidate at University of Colorado Boulder and her research is in algebraic combinatorics. She spent several years on her department’s Diversity Committee hosting a variety of events designed to build community and social engagement among graduate students and has done work as an individual toward the same goals. Events that she has led and/or organized include CHATs on big and small social justice topics, team building through a low ropes course, Bystander training, and Safe Zone training. She is also an active member of a labor union which provides additional structure for building a conscious community.

Dr. Simone Sisneros-Thiry earned her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in August 2020. As a graduate student, she was a co-organizer of the math department’s Teaching and Diversity seminar, an officer in the graduate AWM chapter, and was involved in a variety of formal and informal mentoring relationships. She is committed to the forever work of listening, growth, and action towards equity and justice, within and outside the mathematics community. She brings this focus to her professional interests, which include lower-division undergraduate course development, graduate teaching assistant training, higher education in prison, and combinatorial number theory. She is an assistant professor of mathematics at California State University, East Bay. 

Dr. Dwight Anderson Williams II is a postdoc research associate at Iowa State University. His research interests are in (super)algebraic structures and their physical applications, as well as challenging and improving graduate math programs. He completed his PhD at The University of Texas at Arlington in the areas of Lie superalgebras and representation theory. During graduate school he was the founding president of his department’s AMS Graduate Chapter.

Panel #6: Current and former graduate program leaders from programs that have been recognized for their diversity efforts

Dr. Marcia Gumpertz is professor of Statistics at North Carolina State University. She specializes in applied statistics, statistical consulting and design of experiments. She is coauthor of the textbook Planning, Construction and Statistical Analysis of Comparative Experiments. Dr. Gumpertz is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and is a recipient of the Statistics Department’s Cavell Brownie Award for outstanding mentoring and NC State’s Outstanding Academic Advising Administrator Award.  From 2006 to 2017 she served as Assistant Vice Provost for Faculty Diversity at NC State. From 2008-2012 she served as PI for NC State’s NSF-funded ADVANCE Developing Diverse Departments project. This project developed women, underrepresented minority faculty and department heads as leaders and change agents promoting diversity and inclusion throughout the university. From 2007 to 2017 Dr. Gumpertz managed NC State’s Building Future Faculty Program, a 3-day professional development workshop for diverse doctoral students and postdocs seriously considering an academic career. The objective is to increase the number of students from underrepresented groups entering the faculty and to better prepare them for academic careers. About 320 graduate students and postdocs from all over the US participated in the Building Future Faculty program from 2007-2017, and 60 to 70% of them have gone on to academic careers..  Currently Dr Gumpertz is PI of an NSF-funded Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) project, an alliance of North Carolina State University, North Carolina A&T State University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The North Carolina AGEP Alliance promotes change in STEM doctoral programs to further the success of underrepresented minority students. Twenty-eight STEM departments at the three Alliance institutions have committed to identifying issues affecting diverse students in their doctoral programs and developing and adopting formal plans to enhance URM doctoral student completion and preparation for faculty careers.

Dr. Susan Hermiller is a Willa Cather Professor of Mathematics at the University of Nebraska. In her research she studies connections between computational, geometric, and combinatorial properties of infinite discrete groups. She has served as the director of the graduate program in mathematics at UNL since 2011, which is known for its consistently high percentage of women doctoral recipients. Dr. Hermiller’s work on UNL’s team implementing an NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grant focused on dissemination of best practices for recruitment, evaluation, and retention of faculty and students from under-represented groups. Her work to improve the representation of women in mathematics nationwide includes co-organizing the initial Nebraska Conferences for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics and serving on the AMS-ASA-AWM-IMS-MAA-NCTM-SIAM Joint Committee on Women in the Mathematical Sciences.

Dr. Rick Laugesen earned his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 1993 in complex analysis. That field was not exactly a growth area, and so he started learning partial differential equations by teaching and writing papers in the area during his postdoctoral positions. To this day, PDEs are his main topic of research. Around the middle of his career, though, he felt it was time to make an impact beyond research and classroom teaching (both of which he enjoys very much, and continues to do). So he took the graduate director’s job in his department (2012-2017), responsible for about 150 PhD students and 50 Master’s students. Two challenges demanded immediate attention: the need for career options in industry and government for graduates, and the obvious lack of diversity among our US student population. He didn’t know how to solve either problem, but figured it was better to try and fail than not try at all. The careers effort led to a handbook for students and a new internship network. The diversity effort opened his eyes to the historic and current day obstacles faced by students of color, and led his department to re-think how they recruit, admit, assess and support graduate students in our program. In this effort they benefited from the ground-breaking research of Julie Posselt, and the resources provided by organizations including SACNAS, MSRI-UP, the Sloan Foundation and the Math Alliance.

Panel #7: Leaders of professional networks and organizations dedicated to advancing diversity in the mathematical sciences

Dr. Emily Butler is a principal statistician at GSK who supports cell gene therapy oncology assets. Her experience is primarily with early phase compounds and is a member of a cross industry estimands working group. Aside from her statistical work, she is very involved in inclusion and diversity initiatives at GSK, including leading departmental initiatives. She is heavily involved in recruitment, training sessions for non-statisticians, and the department’s engagement team. As a statistician, her true passion is around engaging with her clinical colleagues to ensure the statistical validity of all trial designs, interpretations and publications. She is the Co-Vice Chair of the American Statistical Association’s Committee of Minorities in Statistics and is a Member-at-Large of the Biopharmaceutical Section Executive Committee.  Emily graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2016 with a PhD in biostatistics and Carnegie Mellon University in 2011 with a bachelors in statistics.

Dr. Carla Cotwright-Williams serves as a Senior Data Scientist with the Department of Defense (DoD).  Prior to working with the DoD, she began her public service in academia – serving over 10 years in research and teaching. She has conducted research with both NASA and the U.S. Navy. In 2012, she was awarded the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) /American Mathematical Society (AMS) Congressional Fellowship. During her time on Capitol Hill, she worked as a staffer on the majority staff of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. In addition to covering a number of policy areas, she worked on the congressional hearing examining emergency preparedness surrounding the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings.

Dr. Cotwright-Williams has served as a Hardy-Apfel Information Technology (IT) Fellow at the U.S. Social Security Administration in Baltimore, MD. As an IT Fellow, she worked on a variety of high-profile IT projects including creating fraud analytics in the Office of Anti-Fraud Programs and the launch of SSA’s cloud infrastructure (Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW)) whose primary goal is to improve accessibility to a critical asset, its data. 

Dr. Cotwright-Williams is the Outside Academia member of the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) Board of Directors. She is also a member-at-large and incoming chair of Policy and Advocacy for the Executive Committee of the Association of Women in Mathematics (AWM). Dr. Cotwright-Williams has been an invited speaker and panelist across the nation speaking to diverse audiences about her research, career transitions, and mentoring. Dr. Cotwright-Williams holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics.

Dr. David Goldberg was born in Boston, and grew up in several different locations in the U.S. as well as spending two years abroad. He graduated from public high school, Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, as well as its alternative sub-school, the Cambridge Pilot School. He attended Reed College in Portland, OR, and after taking some time off and working in an automotive brake factory in Boston, received a B.A. in Mathematics. After spending two years as a pension actuarial administrator, he decided to pursue a graduate degree. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1991 under the direction of Rebecca Herb. He joined the faculty of Purdue in 1991 as a postdoctoral appointee, continued at Purdue as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, and was appointed as a tenure track Assistant Professor in 1994. He was awarded an NSF CAREER Grant in 1995. Dr. Goldberg’s research concerns representations of p-adic groups, and connections with algebraic number theory. He was the Graduate Chair in the Purdue Mathematics Department from January 2013 through June 2019, and for many years before that has been part of a group of faculty within the department working to address issues of underrepresentation. He was a contributing author to four successful Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) grants, serving as co-Project Director on one and Project Director on another. Through some coincidence with his research interests, he became familiar with the National Alliance for Doctoral Studies in the Mathematical Science, more commonly known as the Math Alliance in 2007, and he joined as a mentor in 2009. In 2014, he guided the creation of a Math Alliance Graduate Program Group in the Purdue Mathematics Department. He became the Executive Director of the Math Alliance in 2016, as it relocated its administrative home to Purdue. Under his leadership, the Alliance has grown in size and scope, and received the 2017 Programs that Make a Difference Award from the American Mathematical Society.