The UCLA Academic Senate and its committee on diversity, equity and inclusion has announced the recipients of the 2017–2018 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Awards. Each year, one staff, up to four faculty members and two students are honored for their contributions to furthering a diverse, impartial and inclusive environment at UCLA.

The faculty winners were Denise Chavira, Chandra Ford, Heather Maynard and Victoria Sork. The staff winner was Erin O’Leary Sanders. Undergraduate sociology student David Nguyen and environmental engineering graduate student Cristina Echevarria were the student winners.

Denise Chavira, Faculty Community Service and Praxis Award

Chavira, professor of psychology, has devoted her career to improving mental health care access and effectiveness for underserved populations, particularly Latino families in Imperial County through partnership with communities.

She partnered with the local county mental health crisis unit in Imperial County to find methods to reduce hospitalization rates among Latinos by improving their social support system. In addition, Chavira developed a telephone-based intervention designed to detect childhood anxiety. All intervention materials were translated into Spanish and health care workers were bilingual and bicultural. The innovative “delivery” method resulted in a reduction of psychiatric hospitalizations among Latino youth and adults.

Most recently, she became co-investigator on a project aimed at providing cognitive behavioral therapy for anxious and depressed pregnant women from disadvantaged and highly diverse areas in northern California.

Chandra Ford, Faculty Research on Diversity Award

Ford is professor of community health sciences and a nationally recognized scholar for her research on racism, discrimination and health. In particular, her research focus on the relationships between selected racism-related factors, neighborhood factors, and health care inequities.

Ford is a member of the UCLA Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Equity that takes a public health approach to reducing disparities in incidence, prevalence, mortality and burden of disease experienced by disadvantaged and underserved populations. She is also a recent awardee of the Kaiser Permanente Chris Burch Minority Leadership Development Program, which supports commitment to social justice and the promotion of social justice and health equity for underserved communities.

Recently, Ford has established the center for the study of racism, social justice and health at UCLA. The center aims to examine the effects of racism on health and to provide others with tools to improve scientific rigor for the study of racism and health. An example of the center’s current effort is the publication of a special issue of the refereed journal Ethnicity and Disease focused on empirical application of critical race theory in research on health inequities.

Heather Maynard, Faculty Student Development Award

Maynard is a professor of chemistry and biochemistrya and the director of the chemistry biology interface, a cross-campus graduate training program at UCLA that trains students from different departments in the languages and techniques of chemistry and biology.

In the time she has been director, Maynard has developed chemistry biology interface into a model program with regards to diversity and inclusion. She has made sure that there is equal female to male representation and has also considerably increased the representation of underrepresented minorities to consistently 25 to 33 percent of the program.

Maynard also does outreach work in the community. She started the Maynard Science Traveling Road Show, which consists of a collection of chemistry demonstrations targeting elementary students that include fake snow and gooey gak. These demonstrations have encouraged scientific interest in children across Los Angeles.

Victoria Sork, Faculty Career Commitment to Diversity Award

Sork is the dean of the division of life sciences in the UCLA College and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. Among her many efforts aimed at promoting diversity, several years ago, Sork launched a broad search for outstanding scientists who also had a commitment to mentoring underrepresented minority students. The goal was to recruit these scientists to UCLA to be “mentor professors.” This search led to the recruitment of three African-American, five Latina or Latino, and a white female faculty, all of whom are exceptional scientists and have been transforming the experience of underrepresented students in the life sciences at UCLA.

Early in her term as dean, Sork also recognized that there was a serious disparity in the retention of undergraduates from underrepresented backgrounds compared to their white and Asian peers. Out of concern, Sork decided to host workshops with professional facilitators to help faculty explore best practices for building inclusive learning environments. In more than three years, nearly 150 faculty in the life and physical sciences have participated in these workshops and reported a change in their attitudes and practices.

Sork has initiated and developed the nationally recognized center for educational innovation and learning in the sciences to help faculty, postdocs and graduate students access support for implementation of best practices in teaching and mentoring students from all backgrounds. She recently implemented a formal process whereby dossiers submitted for academic review specifically comment on the individual’s contributions to diversity.

Erin O’Leary Sanders, Staff Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Award

Sanders is an adjunct professor and director of the center for education, innovation and learning in the sciences at UCLA. In just four years, Sanders, in collaboration with science faculty and others across the university, has served a critical role in helping to procure several grants to improve classroom teaching and student learning, and in particular to work toward the elimination of the disparity gap for students from traditionally underrepresented groups and the increased use of evidence based inclusive teaching practices.

One of the projects is changing introductory life science and math courses using teaching practices proven to enhance student learning and engagement, which has helped launch a unique course that was largely Sanders’ idea. The new course, Career Exploration in the Life Sciences, is a two-unit class designed to provide students with a systematic approach to career development and enlighten them about the many rewarding and satisfying careers in life sciences beyond medicine and academia.

Sanders has also established through crucial partnerships at UCLA with the center for educational assessment, center of education and information studies and the office of equity, diversity and inclusion. As a result of these partnerships, the center for education, innovation and learning in the sciences is able to provide access to data, which allows faculty to track disparities in student success and document improvement and critical assessment of larger initiatives.