Ruth Elizabeth Burks

Leonard Brown

Carroll Blue

Breakout Session: Moderator-led

Breakout Session: Moderator-led

Breakout Session: Moderator-led

Breakout group: Facilitator-led

Breakout group: Facilitator-led

Breakout group: Facilitator-led

Harvard University

Dr. Robbin Chapman is Associate Dean of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Adjunct Associate Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. She is faculty co-chair for the professional education course, “Bravely Confronting Racism in Higher Education” at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dr. Chapman was Associate Provost and Academic Director of Diversity and Inclusion, and Lecturer in Education at Wellesley College, and Assistant Associate Provost for Faculty Equity at the MIT. In 2016, MIT established the annual Dr. Robbin Chapman Excellence through Adversity Award to honor MIT students who have demonstrated excellence in leadership. She has taught learning technology design and educational leadership.

Dr. Chapman earned her S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the MIT and her B.S. in Computer Science at Brooklyn College of CUNY. Research interests include computational tools for learning in public spaces and frameworks for supporting scholar activism. Her publications include the book, The Computer Clubhouse: Constructionism and Creativity in Youth Communities and chapters in Counter-narratives from Women of Color Academics: Bravery, Vulnerability, and Resistance, and Injecting Multidisciplinary Perspectives of Race and Gender for Diversification in STEM. Dr. Chapman is Massachusetts regional liaison for the Ford Foundation Fellowship Program and past-president of the Society of Senior Ford Fellows.

Princeton University

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is the Doris Stevens Professor in Women’s Studies and Professor of Sociology and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. She is an ethnographer and scholar of gender, labor, migration, and economic sociology. Her latest book Unfree: Migrant Domestic Work in Arab States was recognized with the 2023 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award by the American Sociological Association. In 2019, she was also recognized with the highest award given by the American Sociological Association to scholars of gender, the Jessie Bernard Award, for her research on women migrants from the Philippines. A recognized scholar, Prof. Parreñas has given more than 80 keynote and named lectures across the globe. Two of her books were made into documentaries by VPRO-TV in the Netherlands, The Chain of Love and Mama, Please Call Me. She is currently conducting a study on the Philippine nurse migration industry. She has a book forthcoming with Norton Press, The Trafficker Next Door: How Domestic Employers Abuse Forced Labor. Her research has received support from the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and National Science Foundation.

The Folger Institute

Dr. Patricia Akhimie (she/her/hers) is Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She also serves as Director of the RaceB4Race Mentoring Network and is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark.  She is the author of Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Race: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World editor of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race and co-editor of Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World. Dr. Akhimie is currently working on a new edition of Othello for the Arden Shakespeare, fourth series, and a monograph about race, gender and editing early modern texts.  Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the John Carter Brown Library and the Ford Foundation.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Alfonso Morales, PhD (Northwestern, MS University of Chicago, University of Texas Dallas, BS New Mexico State), is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture at the UW-Madison. He is Department Chair. He co-founded the American Bar Foundation ‘The Future of Latinos in the U.S., the Wisconsin Organic Initiative, as well as farm2facts.org which is used by farmers market managers in the U.S. and Canada, and a participant in the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative. He is originally from rural New Mexico with roots in family farming, there and in West Texas. He is a researcher, advocate, practitioner, and consultant on food systems and public markets, inclusive of entrepreneurial, organizational, gender, racial, and regulatory aspects of these activities. He has been invited to speak on these topics internationally. He is PI or CoI of $50m, most recently from NSF creating ICICLE Institute for artificial intelligence/cyberinfrastructure (Dr. Patricia Akhimie (she/her/hers) is Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She also serves as Director of the RaceB4Race Mentoring Network and is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark.  She is the author of Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Race: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World editor of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race and co-editor of Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World. Dr. Akhimie is currently working on a new edition of Othello for the Arden Shakespeare, fourth series, and a monograph about race, gender and editing early modern texts.  Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the John Carter Brown Library and the Ford Foundation.), and Rodale’s climate smart award from USDA. His work has helped shaped policy in New York City, Kansas City, Denver, and elsewhere. He has also contributed to our understanding of business organizations, public health, and social theory. He has six books on these topics. His 100+ other publications are found in Spanish and English and have appeared in the top journals of six different disciplinary associations, including Aztlan, the American Journal of Sociology, Economic Development Quarterly, the Journal of the American Planning Association, and the Law and Society Review. He has extensive experience with students in community-based outreach and research.

Rice University

Alex Byrd is associate professor of history and vice-provost for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Rice University.

He earned a B.A. from Rice (‘90), and received his Ph.D. from Duke University (’01). Byrd began his career as a student of free and forced transatlantic black migration in the era of the American Revolution, and his book Captives and Voyagers was awarded the 2009 Wesley-Logan Prize for outstanding book in African diaspora history. He was also the recipient of the 2010 Douglass Adair Award for the best article published in the William and Mary Quarterly in the preceding six years.

Byrd’s current research is focused at the intersection of urban history and the history of education.

Byrd is a four-time recipient of the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching (2006, 2013, 2015, and 2018), and in 2010 he was the recipient of the Presidential Mentoring Award. In 2020, the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation recognized Byrd as one of the year's 10 Piper Professors. With Caleb McDaniel he co-chaired Rice University’s Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice.

Byrd has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.

Gonzaga University

Dr. Deena J. González is interested in the social histories of invisible figures and in the creation of a sub-field of Chicano/a/x Studies, that is, Chicana history. One of many second-generation feminist scholars, she tackled the difficult work of archival exploration, telling stories through the eyes of a Chicana lived experience and of racial and cultural past embodied by Spanish-Mexican-Native women in her home state of New Mexico. Her life’s work and passion has contributed to understandings by students of sexuality, class, race, and gender in the four decades that span her academic career at Pomona College (1983 – 2001), Loyola Marymount University (Chair, 2001 - 2011; Associate Provost, 2011-2018), and Gonzaga University (Provost, 2019 -2021; Sr. University Fellow and Professor of History, 2022-2024). Her administrative career has provided opportunities to recruit and retain faculty of color, to shape higher educational policies that bend toward social justice concerns, and to lead by empowering others. Retiring this summer, 2024, to New Mexico, she plans to complete a book about a defiant young woman whose life she examined recently as Davis lecturer at Gonzaga University, and to spend time with her sister renovating the 1935 family farmhouse built by her paternal grandfather and local architects. She is grateful for the opportunity to share the story of their part of the world in works published in the US, Spain, and Mexico. That the field of Chicana and Chicano Studies endures and grows is a reward for the scholarly efforts of so many.

Yale University

C. Brandon Ogbunu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is a computational biologist whose research investigates complex problems in epidemiology, biomedicine, genetics, and evolution. His work utilizes a range of methods, from experimental evolution, to biochemistry, applied mathematics, and evolutionary computation all towards a refined understanding of complex systems and disease phenomena.

In addition, he runs a parallel research program at the intersection of science, society, and culture. In this capacity, he examines the social forces that drive scientific phenomena, and measures the impact of science on social institutions.

SUNY Geneseo

Dr. Mark Broomfield, Associate Professor of English, Founder and Director of Performance as Social Change at SUNY Geneseo, is a London-born award-winning scholar and artist of Jamaican heritage with numerous publications in the areas of race, gender, sexuality, dance performance and ethnography. Broomfield has performed nationally and internationally, and danced with the repertory company Cleo Parker Robinson Dance, performing in leading works by some of the most diverse and recognized African American choreographers in the American modern dance tradition. An innovative educator and facilitator, Broomfield has lectured, choreographed, and directed widely across the U.S.

Broomfield’s book Black Queer Dance: Gay Men and the Politics of Passing for Almost Straight, a first of its kind in the field of dance and performance studies, is a groundbreaking exploration of black masculinity and sexual passing in American contemporary dance forthcoming by Routledge in August 2024. His next project and soon to be released documentary Danced Out is the visual companion to Black Queer Dance. Among Broomfield’s awards and recognitions are the Institute for Citizens and Scholars Career Enhancement Fellowship (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), the SUNY Faculty Diversity Award, the Ford Foundation Fellowship and is featured in the 2001 Emmy Award winning Ailey Camp "Chowdah" Production.

University of Michigan

Ashley Lucas is Professor of Theatre & Drama, the Residential College, the Penny Stamps School of Art & Design, American Culture, and English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. She is the former Director of Latina/o Studies, Former Director of the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), and a founding member of the Carceral State Project. Lucas is also the author of an ethnographic play about the families of incarcerated people entitled Doin’ Time: Through the Visiting Glass, which she has performed as a one-woman show throughout the U.S. and in Ireland, Brazil, and Canada. Her book Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration (Bloomsbury, 2020) examines the ways in which incarcerated people use theatre to counteract the dehumanizing forces of the prison. The book was also translated into Portuguese by Vicente Concilio and published in Brazil (Editora Hucitec, 2021). In 2023, Lucas, a group of UM students, and formerly incarcerated performers Mary Heinen McPherson and Cozine Welch formed the Dropped Keys Theatre Company. Along with various incarcerated collaborators, the Dropped Keys devised a play entitled With Love, From Inside about the lives of people in prison. With Love was performed on the UM campus in March 2024 and toured to nine other venues throughout the state of Michigan in May 2024. Lucas had a Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2008, and it changed her life. She will be forever grateful.

Northern Illinois University

Simón E. Weffer-Elizondo is Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Northern Illinois University and an Associate Professor of Sociology and Latino Studies. Born and raised in Chicago, he has a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Chicago, MA and PhD in Sociology from Stanford (where he was a Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellow) and was a National Science Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow at Harvard University. Simón was the founding Sociologist at University of California, Merced, where he helped build the Sociology program. At NIU he teaches courses on Race, Urban Sociology, Latinx in the U.S., Latinx and Latin American Studies, Social Movements and Protest, and the Sociology of Sports. His research includes understanding immigration protest, Latinx social movement organizations, Latinx adolescent obesity, urban inequality, race and museums, race and COVID-19, and the link between protest and voting. He has published widely and is currently working on 2 book manuscripts, one on Latinx Immigration Protest in the 21st Century, and another with David Embrick on race in museums.

In addition to his work at NIU, he is a member of the Society of Senior Ford Fellows, serves on the Board of Directors of the ACLU of Illinois, was a member of the Strategic Planning Committee of the Illinois Board of Higher Education, and recently completed serving on the Illinois Legislative Commission on Equitable Public University Funding.

He currently lives in Chicago with his wife and 4 children.

Ithaca College

Belisa González is Professor of Sociology and Dean of Faculty, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging at Ithaca College. Originally from San Antonio, TX, Dr. González earned her PhD in Sociology from Emory University in 2006. After completing her degree Belisa held a one-year postdoc at the University of Georgia, before accepting a position in the Sociology department at Ithaca College (IC) in 2007. Dr. González is an applied sociologist who believes that scholarship should be used to make the world a more just and equitable place. Her current work focuses on inclusive hiring and retention practices in higher education, inclusive teaching practices, and facilitating difficult dialogues in the workplace. She is active the Ithaca community, co-chairing the City of Ithaca’s Workforce Diversity Advisory Committee, serving as a steering committee member for the Dorothy Cotton Institute, serving as the methodologist for Ithaca’s Reimagining Public Safety Working Group and coaching her daughter’s 4th grade basketball team. Belisa is the founder of Beyond Equity LLC., a consulting practice that provides workshops, one-on-one coaching, and facilitation for organizations looking to implement their commitment to equity and justice.

Arizona State University

Dr. Angela Gonzales is an enrolled citizen of the Hopi Nation and a Professor of Justice Studies at ASU in the School of Social Transformation, where she currently serves as the Interim Director of the Center for Indian Education. In July 2024, she will become the new Director of American Indian Studies, leading the development of ASU’s new School of American Indian and Indigenous Studies. As a community-engaged scholar, her research cuts across and integrates the fields of Sociology, Indigenous Studies, and Public Health. She does this through theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions in two focal areas: 1) the social construction of race and the social process through which racial meaning is ascribed, and 2) the social determinants of health and health inequities. Her contributions within and between these areas center Indigenous epistemologies, perspectives, and needs, inform public policy, advance community-engaged research, and build the field of Indigenous sociology. Her research has been supported by numerous grants, including the National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Russell Sage Foundation. She is a 1992 Ford Predoctoral Fellow and a 2009 Ford Postdoctoral Fellow. From 2019-2021, she served on the SSFF Executive Board and as SSFF President in 2022. She currently serves as President of the Board of the Colorado Plateau Foundation, a Native-led foundation that supports the protection of water and sacred places, the preservation of Native languages, and sustainable community-based agriculture. Dr. Gonzales holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University, an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a B.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Riverside.

Seattle Central College

Valerie F. Hunt (postdoctoral fellow: 2005) is an educator, policy analyst, scholar, community leader, African Diasporic cultural custodian, and poet. She earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of Washington. Her research and community praxis address the politics and public policy dynamics of being and belonging; race, citizenship, and immigration; wealth and income inequalities; race and housing policy; Black and Indigenous relations; and health disparities.

For the past 36 years, Valerie has devoted her career to collective liberation through educational and career advancement in the professoriate for underrepresented communities. To that end, she has mentored many students, faculty, and administrators in various stages in their respective careers. She is proud of her service as Social Sciences panel reviewer for Ford Foundation Fellowships. Dr. Hunt is currently tenured faculty in the Healthcare and Human Services Division at Seattle Central College and where she served as the Associate Vice President of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Dr. Hunt is a Faculty Affiliate at the University of Washington’s Department of Political Science and Department of Communications.

Valerie is co-founder and president of the Center for Equitable Policy in a Changing World. She is an Ambassador for the OpEd Project, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to increase the number of underrepresented expert voices in the media. She works closely with: Le Sens de l’Elite Africaine” (SEA), an organization of educators in Benin Republic (Danxome) dedicated to empowering African youth through education, community service and the arts; Community Healing Network; and Sankofa Impact.

University of North Carolina - Charlotte

Dr. Yvette M. Huet is Executive Director of the UNC Charlotte Center for ADVANCing Faculty Success and Professor of Applied Physiology, Health, and Clinical Sciences. She is the UNC Charlotte PI of the 2018 NSF AGEP-NG award and the UNC System Lead for RISE UPP, a 2022 NSF INCLUDES award. Her current research interests generally include health disparities and faculty of color in the academy. Previously, she has published on the role of estrogen in immune function and liver disease, the effects of neonatal exposure to environmental estrogens on adult disease, and the roles of estrogen and nitric oxide in early pregnancy. She earned B.A. degrees in Human Biology and Microbiology from the University of Kansas; her Ph.D. (with Honors) in physiology from the University of Kansas Medical Center (First Latina graduate and recipient of National Science Foundation Minority Graduate and Ford Foundation Predoctoral {declined} and Dissertation Fellowships) and did her Postdoctoral Fellowship with Monsanto Company. She has served in various leadership roles, including Co-Interim Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development, Interim Chair of Kinesiology, and Graduate Director for the doctoral programs in Biological Sciences and Health Services. Dr. Huet provides consultation to academic institutions and societies on transformative leadership, mentoring, cultural competency, communications, negotiations, and programming for faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and students to be both successful and thrive in higher education environments. She is currently the Past President of the Society of Senior Ford Fellows and the State Chair of the NC ACE Women's Network.

Vanderbilt University

Stassun holds the Stevenson chair in Astrophysics at Vanderbilt University, where he has been the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, an RCSA Cottrell Scholar award, and an HHMI Professor award. Stassun is a deputy lead investigator for NASA’s Ultraviolet Explorer mission, serves on the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Space Studies Board, and recently served on the NAS Decadal Steering Committee for Astronomy & Astrophysics. An elected Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), the American Astronomical Society (AAS), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, his research on stars and exoplanets has appeared in more than 600 peer-reviewed journal articles. Stassun served as founding director of the Fisk-Vanderbilt Masters-to-PhD Bridge Program, which has become one of the nation’s top producers of PhDs to underrepresented minorities in the physical sciences. He has served on NSF’s Committee for Equal Opportunity in Science and Engineering, chaired the AAS Committee on Minorities, is a recipient of the APS Nicholson Medal for Outreach, has been named Mentor of the Year by the AAAS, and has been honored with a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. Stassun currently serves as founding director of Vanderbilt’s Frist Center for Autism & Innovation, focused on advancing science and engineering through the engagement and workforce development of autistic individuals and those with other forms of neurodiversity. In 2023, Stassun was appointed to a six-year term on the National Science Board by President Joseph R. Biden.