RECEPTION AND DIALOGUES

A campus reception for Josephine Moreno and Steve Lee, our new graduate diversity officers, is scheduled from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 3, in Meeting Room D of the Student Community Center. Hosts: Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Ralph J. Hexter, and Vice provost and Dean Jeff Gibeling.

A discussion of diversity at a quarterly meeting with the dean of Graduate Studies in November has led to a series of winter quarter discussions on the topic. The Diversity Dialogues, organized by Amandeep Kaur, the graduate student assistant to the dean and chancellor, will be held from noon to 1:30 p.m. in Meeting Room D of the Student Community Center.

• Tuesday, Jan. 28 — Understanding the needs of women graduate students in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
• Thursday, Feb. 13 — Understanding the needs of international graduate students and students with disabilities.
• Monday, March 17 — Understanding the needs of graduate students of color and undocumented students.

Two recent UC Davis hires, one an alumna, are setting out to help the campus recruit more graduate students from diverse backgrounds and ensure those students successfully complete their degrees.

Josephine Moreno and Steve Lee are experienced in helping build a more diverse graduate student body — Moreno at UC Berkeley and Lee at Northwestern University in Chicago.

“I’m very passionate about the ability to make a difference in students’ lives,” Moreno said. “I want to do that here at UC Davis.”

Diversity of the student body is considered an important measure of excellence in graduate education, and the 2012 report of the Joint Administration/Academic Senate Special Task Force on Graduate Education, recommended that UC Davis do more to recruit and retain students with diverse backgrounds.

Moreno and Lee have been charged with focusing on diversity in its broadest sense including U.S. students who identify themselves as African American, Native American, Chicano/Latino or Pacific Islander; first-generation students; former foster youth; and those with disabilities.

Among UC Davis’ more than 2,450 doctoral students from the United States, 14 percent identify themselves as African American, Native American, Chicano/Latino, or Pacific Islander, compared with 11 percent in 2009 and 8.8 percent in 2004. About 15.4 percent of academic master’s students are from these ethnic groups.

The budget to support the new graduate diversity officers is provided by Ralph Hexter, provost and executive vice chancellor; Jeff Gibeling, vice provost for Graduate Education and dean of Graduate Studies; and all other deans.

Moreno and Lee, who started in October and November, respectively, are getting to know the campus and meeting the people with whom they’ll work. “We want to throw the doors open to diverse students and let them know we’re here,” Moreno said.

To introduce Moreno and Lee more broadly, Hexter and Gibeling will host a public reception from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 3, in Meeting Room D of the Student Community Center.

How they will increase diversity

Moreno will concentrate on the arts, humanities, social sciences and education, and Lee on the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Together, they will help faculty develop specific recruiting strategies for individual graduate programs; represent UC Davis to prospective graduate students at colleges, universities and conferences; facilitate workshops for prospective, admitted and continuing graduate students; and apply for grants to support graduate diversity programs and activities.

Key among their duties will be participating in graduate admission committee meetings and helping faculty to expand their understanding of which applicants could be successful in a graduate program, including transfer students and graduates of lesser-known universities.

Lee said both he and Moreno are committed to using research and analysis to understand the challenges and translate ideas into effective practices.

Get to know Moreno and Lee

Moreno, who grew up in the Central Valley, said she had to find her own way through education. A transfer student from San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, Moreno earned a Bachelor of Science degree in textiles and clothing from UC Davis in 1984. She went on to earn a master’s in home economics education from California State University, Fresno (1991) and a doctorate in textiles and clothing from Iowa State University (1995). Moreno returned to UC Davis as a postgraduate researcher and lecturer in 1995-96 and was a tenure track faculty member at the University of Rhode Island for five years.

Then, in a 12-year career at UC Berkeley, Moreno served as a graduate diversity director for arts and humanities and co-director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, a mentoring program for humanities and social sciences undergraduates with potential for academic careers that would contribute to diversity in the academy. She also led a multiuniversity collaboration — involving UC Berkeley and another research university, and a consortium of 20 liberal arts colleges — aimed at bringing new scholarly and academic career options to UC Berkeley students of diverse backgrounds.

Lee, whose family immigrated to the United States from Korea, grew up in Chicago, where he said he experienced racist attitudes. Lee’s older siblings blazed a path through university, and he had a good mentor in graduate school. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (1990) and a doctoral degree in organic chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1996).

Before becoming a graduate diversity officer at UC Davis, Lee worked for six years at Northwestern University, where, as an assistant director of a professional development program, he focused on enrollment and retention of underrepresented graduate students in the biological sciences. Earlier, he was at Chicago State University, Roosevelt University and Wheaton College, all in Illinois.

Lee said his work to improve diversity in higher education and supporting students from different backgrounds is rooted in his own spiritual commitment to seek justice. “There is some inner moral responsibility,” Lee said.

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