Fall/Winter 2022 Alumni Magazine

DEI NEWS

TAYLIZ RODRIGUEZ AND CHANCELLOR'S SCIENCE SCHOLARS PROGRAM AWARDED 2022 DIVERSITY AWARD

By UNC Chemistry Communication

Tayliz Rodriguez

Tayliz Rodriguez, and the Chancellor’s Science Scholars (CSS) program, directed by Thomas Freeman, received the 14th Annual Diversity Award presented by the UNC University Office for Diversity and Inclusion. This award recognizes individuals and collaborative groups who have demonstrated outstanding leadership in furthering diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the Carolina community. Both Rodriguez and the Chancellor’s Science Scholars have put their time and effort into creating and developing different initiatives that have had a positive impact on departmental culture.

Thomas Freeman

Freeman joined the UNC Department of Chemistry in 2014 after a three-year postdoc position in the UNC SPIRE program. As the Executive Director of CSS, his responsibilities include managing and setting the program’s goals, supervising daily operations, establishing connections with other campus groups and various other tasks that keep CSS inspiring the next generation of leaders. Additionally, Freeman serves as a Biochemistry instructor in which he employs inclusive and evidencebased teaching practices. CSS was awarded under the “Intergroup Collaboration” category, highlighting group efforts to further diversity practices by bringing together different perspectives to address critical issues.

“The UNC Chancellor’s Science Scholars program serves as a national model for leveraging a holistic wrap-around support system to drive student success. This effort facilitates and enhances social, economic, and cultural diversity across all STEM fields,” said Freeman. “This success really is a team effort. The CSS staff does a fabulous job working with the Scholars, and we have a very broad network of campus partners who support our mission.”

Rodriguez joined the UNC Department of Chemistry in 2017 after graduating from Florida International University with a BS in Chemistry. She served as the co-president of Allies for Minorities and Women in Science (AM_WISE) and as the chair of the Chemistry Graduate Committee for Professional Development (GCPD). In her role with AM_WISE, she developed and launched a peer mentoring program for incoming graduate students to facilitate their transition to graduate school and distributed the second iteration of a departmental climate survey, which provides valuable feedback on departmental initiatives and areas of improvement.

2022 Chancellor's Science Scholars Graduates

“My roles have allowed me to collaborate with people across the department and broader UNC to develop and execute meaningful and long-term initiatives that ultimately have a positive impact on departmental culture,” explained Rodriguez. “Without the support of the amazing students, postdocs, faculty, and staff that I’ve had the opportunity of working with in AM_WISE, GCPD and the chemistry department, this work wouldn’t be possible… I hope the department and University continue to support these efforts and celebrate those contributing to this work.”

Rodriguez won under the “Graduate/Professional Student/Post Doc” category and CSS under the “Intergroup Collaboration” division. Since receiving this award, Rodriguez graduated and now works at BASF.

DEI Committee Updates

Nita Eskew

Marcey Waters

The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee has expanded this year, with new members and new co-chairs. Nita Eskew and Marcey Waters took over from Jerry Meyer and Leslie Hicks at the start of the 2021 Fall semester. Focuses for the committee for the 2022-2023 academic year include identifying evidence-based methods to increase and support diversity throughout all areas of the department, maintain a Diversity Strategic Plan for the department as a whole, and to organize and promote the Slayton Evans Memorial Lecture and Slayton Evans Student Development Initiative (SESDI). SESDI's goal is to facilitate the transition into our graduate program during the summer prior the first year of entry into the Ph.D. program for students who identify as underrepresented and first generation students.

NCCU and UNC Chemistry build a Bridge Program

UNC Chapel Hill and North Carolina Central University (NCCU) have been jointly awarded a $250,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which through its Pathways to STEM Graduate Education Program is investing millions of dollars in minority-serving institutions (MSIs) to boost the numbers of students of color entering science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Because of this NCCU and UNC are establishing a program enabling students to enroll at UNC-Chapel Hill or other doctorate-granting institutions to obtain a Ph.D. degree in chemistry or a related field after earning their master’s degree in chemistry at NCCU. Students will be jointly mentored by faculty and students from both institutions with opportunities to rotate between different research laboratories and classrooms. By establishing the Bridge Program infrastructure, we hope to increase the pool of highly trained minority students with M.S. and Ph.D. Chemistry degrees.

UNC Chemistry joins ACS Bridge Program

UNC Chemistry has been selected to join the American Chemical Society Bridge Program as a partner department. The ACS Bridge Program is a concerted effort minority-serving and doctoral-granting institutions to provide support for underrepresented students seeking doctoral degrees. The Program also seeks to establish links between these communities through research activities, collaboration, and personal interactions. The overarching goal of ACS-BP is to increase the number of chemical science PhDs awarded to students who may not have had an opportunity to pursue such a degree otherwise, using this scaffolding of support for these students during their studies.

Chemistry staff go to NCORE

From left: Marc ter Horst, Kathleen Nevins, Mandy Melton

In June, the annual National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education (NCORE) was held in Portland, and the department was able to sponsor three staff members to attend using Say Yes donations. Marc ter Horst, Kathleen Nevins, and Mandy Melton in 2020 and 2021 worked to involve the staff at large within the department's DEI plan, and to find out where the staff felt the culture regarding DEI work was. They presented their work at NCORE this year, under a talk entitled "Engaging STEM Staff in DEI Planning". Currently, they are working to incorporate what they learned and the connections they made to foster a better culture of diversity, equity, inclusion and respect within the department.