The SEA Change Departmental Awards Framework Drafting Group served to craft the core the self-assessment criteria that is common across all Departmental Awards.
Abbe Herzig
Dr. Abbe Herzig served as the Director of Education in the Division of Government Relations of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), overseeing the AMS education portfolio, with a focus on undergraduate and graduate education in the mathematical sciences. has extensive experience as a mathematics educator, researcher in higher education, and statistician in the private sector. She has also worked as a statistician in the non-profit sector, a leader of software engineers building healthcare quality metrics in a commercial corporation, a consultant to the United Nations and the Legal Defense Fund, a mathematics education researcher, and a teacher at the K-12, undergraduate, and graduate levels. While working in the private sector, she has maintained a long-standing commitment to education and ties with the academic professional community.
Ann Gates
Dr. Ann Q. Gates is Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at the University of Texas at El Paso. Previously, she served as Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department. Her areas of research are in software engineering and cyberinfrastructure with an emphasis on workflows, ontologies, and formal software specification. Gates directs the NSF-funded Cyber-ShARE Center that focuses on developing and sharing resources through cyber-infrastructure to advance research and education in science. She was a founding member of the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyber-infrastructure. Gates served on the IEEE-Computer Society (IEEE-CS) Board of Governors 2004-2009. In addition, she chairs the IEEE-CS Educational Activity Board’s Committee of Diversity and External Activities and has established a model for specialized student chapters focused on leadership, entrepreneurship, and professional development. She is a member of the Computer Science Accreditation Board (2011-2013). Gates leads the Computing Alliance for Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI) and is a founding member of the National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT). She received the 2015 A. Nico Habermann Award, the 2010 Anita Borg Institute Social Impact Award, the 2009 Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science, and Diversifying Computing and was named to Hispanic Business magazine’s 100 Influential Hispanics in 2006 for her work on the Affinity Research Group model.
Arlene Modeste Knowles
Arlene Modeste Knowles is the American Institute of Physics TEAM UP Project Manager. Ms. Knowles selected and convened the TEAM-UP members to execute their charge and complete this project. Additionally, Ms. Knowles co-led initial efforts on the development of the SEA Change Physics and Astronomy Departmental Awards and is the 2020 Chair of the American Association of Physics Teachers Committee on Diversity in Physics (CoDP). Formerly, Ms. Knowles spent more than two decades managing and coordinating diversity programs for the American Physical Society including the now retired, Scholarships for Minority Undergraduate Physics Majors, and the National Mentoring Community, a mentoring program to increase the number of minority physics bachelor’s degrees. She advocated for the creation of the APS ad-hoc Committee on LGBT+ issues and worked with them to elevate the presence of LGBT+ physicists within the APS community and produce the first ever, LGBT Climate in Physics Report. Ms. Knowles also served on the Program Management Team of the multi-million dollar grant-funded, APS Bridge Program, and has been instrumental in establishing and advancing several APS diversity initiatives.
Dana Crawford
Dana Crawford, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences and Associate Director for Population and Diversity Research in the Cleveland Institute for Computational Biology. She also has a secondary appointment in the Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences. Dr. Crawford received her PhD at Emory University in genetics and molecular biology in 2000 and then trained as a post-doctoral fellow as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2000–2002) and as a senior fellow at the University of Washington’s Department of Genome Sciences (2002–2006). Prior to her most current position, Dr. Crawford spent eight years as tenure-track faculty in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics and Investigator in the Center for Human Genetics Research at Vanderbilt University. As a genetic epidemiologist at CWRU, Dr. Crawford’s broad research interests include applying genetic variation data to large-scale epidemiologic and clinical cohorts to better understand human genotype-phenotype associations with an emphasis on diverse populations. She also has an interest in mentoring, training, and promoting STEM, particularly for women and other groups underrepresented in science. Dr. Crawford is currently serving as a board member and chair of the Diversity & Inclusion Task Force for the American Society of Human Genetics.
Ed Bertschinger
Ed Bertschinger is Professor of Physics and affiliated faculty member in the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT. A faculty member since 1986, Ed served as MIT Physics Department Head for almost six years and as MIT’s senior equity and community officer for five years. He is a theoretical astrophysicist and is equally passionate about cosmology and black holes, education, mentoring, and diversity and inclusion in all their aspects. His current research aims to identify factors that support enhanced equity, diversity, and inclusion within university departments. Ed is a Fellow of the AAAS and the American Physical Society and the recipient of the MIT MLK Leadership and Outstanding Freshman Advisor Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and many other awards.
Jesus Pando
Dr. Pando earned his PhD under Prof. Li-Zhi Fang at the University of Arizona. His thesis centered on the development of the wavelet transform for use in the study of large-scale structure. He received the Chateaubriand post-doctoral, followed by an NSF international post-doctoral fellowship to continue his work at the Observatoire de Strasbourg, France. In general, his research focuses on the uncovering of structure from a noisy background. Originally, he focused the formation of large-scale structure formation in the universe, using higher order correlations to uncover the clustering patterns of matter in the universe. Along with continuing to study large-scale structure, he is also now investigating secondary structure detection and prediction in proteins. Dr. Pando has long been involved in efforts to increase the number of underrepresented groups in the sciences. He has been a member of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) for 15 years and is a board member of the National Society of Hispanic Physicists. He has served on numerous committees and panels dealing with the issues faced by underrepresented students and professionals in STEM fields. Dr. Pando currently serves as the Chair of the Physics Department at DePaul University.
Karla Haack
Dr. Karla Haack is a Lecturer of Anatomy and Physiology at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating equal access and opportunity for everyone interested in STEM and is involved in the efforts of the College of Science and Mathematics’ Inclusion and Diversity committee at KSU. Dr. Haack currently serves as the chair of the Diversity & Inclusion Committee for the American Physiological Society. She earned her PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology in Molecular Biology and conducted her postdoctoral work at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Mary Anne Holmes
Mary Anne Holmes, a geologist, partners with social scientists to address inequity in the geosciences. She is a former Director and co-PI of ADVANCE-Nebraska at University of Nebraska-Lincoln (ADVANCE is a National Science Foundation (NSF) program to increase the number of women on STEM faculty), PI on two geoscience ADVANCE awards, former ADVANCE Program Officer at NSF; past President of the Association for Women Geoscientists; co-editor of “Women in the Geosciences: Practical, Positive Practices towards Parity” (Wiley, 2015) and serves on half a dozen advisory boards for ADVANCE programs across the U.S., a Fellow of AAAS and AWIS.
Petra Dekens
Dr. Petra Dekens’ primary research interest is understanding the mechanisms which sustained a warm climate in the early Pliocene, the most recent period of time when Earth’s temperatures were warmer than they are today for a sustained period of time. Her records of sea surface temperatures (SST) in the tropical and sub-tropical oceans have demonstrated that the worlds upwelling regions, which are very biologically productive and characterized by cool temperatures in the modern ocean, were significantly warmer during the early Pliocene compared to today (water off of California was 9°C warmer!). As she establishes her lab at SFSU, she plans to pursue several research questions to further improve our understanding of the warm pliocene: Are warmer upwelling regions during the early Pliocene associated with major changes in biological productivity? Are global upwelling regions linked through changes in the ventilated thermocline? What are the meridional and zonal SST gradients off the California Coast?
Sastry Pantula
Sastry G. Pantula, is the Dean of the College of Natural Sciences at California State University San Bernardino. Previously, he served as the Director of Data Analytics programs and as the Dean of the College of Science at Oregon State University, after serving a three-year term as the Director for the Division of Mathematical Sciences at NSF. Dr. Pantula spent more than 30 years as a statistics professor at North Carolina State University. At NCSU, he also served as the Director of Graduate Programs and the Head of the Department of Statistics. Dr. Pantula is a Fellow of the AAAS and the American Statistical Association (ASA). He has served as ASA president and received the ASA Founders Award. Dr. Pantula received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in statistics from the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, India, and a Ph.D. in statistics from Iowa State University.