Advancing Faculty Diversity Grant for Blackness and STEM

Advancing Faculty Diversity Cluster Hire Initiative: Strengthening STEM Research and Teaching for the Black/African American Diaspora

UC San Diego is forging a new paradigm for engagement and collaboration between STEM/Public Health/Health Sciences and the Social Sciences/Arts & Humanities. The Black Diaspora and African American Studies Major (BDAAS) and the African American Studies Minor (AASM) programs are partnering with EIGHT different UC San Diego campus units to hire THIRTEEN brilliant scientists who desire to work within, outside, and across disciplinary boundaries to explore relationships between Black and African American experiences and issues in biological and physical sciences, engineering, medicine, health, and the environment.

• Division of Physical Sciences
• Division of Biological Sciences
• Jacobs School of Engineering
• Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
• Scripps Institution of Oceanography
• Wertheim School of Public Health
• Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute
• UC San Diego School of Medicine

The UC San Diego Advancing Faculty Diversity (AFD) Cluster hire is an inventive program that goes beyond hiring new faculty. UC San Diego seeks to build and strengthen Black professional communities and intellectual spaces through innovative campus programming, faculty collaboration, and instructional and mentorship support. The goals of the AFD are to

• Cultivate Black intellectual spaces on campus,
• Model excellence and increase support for Black undergraduate and graduate students,
• Utilize interdisciplinary collaborations to address issues of race and racism, and
• Integrate knowledge about race and racism within all campus divisions.

AFD faculty will conduct research among nationally and internationally renowned and award-winning faculty, research centers, departments, and UC San Diego divisions.

While AFD faculty become affiliated members of the AASM and BDAAS, AFD faculty do not have additional teaching or service requirements connected to their department workload. Courses designed and taught in the AASM/BDAAS will fulfill departmental teaching assignments and/or expected leadership in service activities focused on underrepresented racial minority students.

Opportunities for AFD Cluster Hire faculty include:

• Connecting with Black faculty within multiple professional community spaces as opportunities for networking and mutual support.
• Collaborating with faculty across UC San Diego to address issues of race, equity, and access in Black communities, in the USA and globally.
• Designing and teaching courses, or directing programs and internships, that focus on STEM, Health Sciences, Earth and Sea, Public Health, and the histories/ experiences/outcomes related to African Americans and/or the Black Diaspora.
• Automatic admittance to the highly sought-after National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity Faculty Success Program.
• Working with high-achieving students in the African American Studies Minor and/or Black Diaspora and African American Studies Major.
• Working with graduate students focused on intersections of Blackness and STEM.

We welcome candidates whose multifaceted experiences have facilitated their understandings of traditionally underrepresented racial minority communities.

Strong candidates will have a research agenda easily related to factors of race/ethnicity, as well as previous experiences teaching, mentoring, and supporting the advancement of underrepresented racial minority students, and a record of service that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion.