Othering/belonging

Sonia Katyal

I have served as an Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development for several years (both here and elsewhere) at the Law School and can advise colleagues regarding mentoring, campus leadership and collaboration, work/life balance, and how to design research projects that engage with various communities.

Grace O'Connell

I am joining as a core advisor because I benefited greatly from my own faculty advisor as an assistant professor.

Amani Nuru-Jeter

The most important thing I bring to my role as a Core Advisor is my passion for mentoring and for cultivating and helping to create an environment where ALL faculty can thrive. I have had good mentoring, bad mentoring, and at times no mentoring; and have both experienced and witnessed the inequities in mentoring among faculty in higher education which fuels my commitment to ensuring that faculty have what they need to develop into their full potential, particularly women, faculty of color, and women faculty of color. I have experience mentoring across the academic pipeline from students, to junior and mid-career faculty both in formal and informal capacities, and am excited to partner with OFEW to help support the mentoring needs of my UCB colleagues.

Rebecca Heald

I have entered a career stage in which mentoring has become as important to me as research. By engaging in the Life Sciences Initiative to enhance faculty diversity and inclusion, and as Associate Dean of the BEST Region, I hope to improve the situation for new faculty and make the Berkeley campus more inclusive and supportive of all our constituents.

SanSan Kwan

In both my former job at a Cal State and over the past twelve years here at UC Berkeley, I have learned a bit about navigating academic institutions as a woman of color faculty in the arts and humanities. I would be really excited to connect with my peers across campus to share insights and challenges.

Lok Siu

Experience matters, but listening is paramount when it comes to mentoring. As a woman of color and a first generation scholar, I have more than 20 years of experience navigating complex institutions like UC Berkeley and the academy, more generally. I bring my own insights, but I am most interested in helping colleagues define their goals, develop strategies, build community, and achieve a sense of belonging and fulfillment.

Laura Kray

As someone who has benefited enormously throughout my 25-year career from mentors who have been extremely committed to my career development, I am eager to “pay it forward.” I am proud to have mentored undergraduate and graduate students, post-docs, junior and mid-career faculty. As chair of the Management of Organizations group at Haas, I have developed both formal and informal channels for supporting the diverse needs of our community. My approach to mentoring is flexible in the sense that I tailor it to the specific needs of individual mentees. I appreciate that each person’s journey is unique and therefore a one-size-fits-all approach is insufficient. Upon establishing a trust-based relationship with mentees, I share stories about my own experiences, good (and bad) advice that I have received along the way, and observations about broader trends in academia and beyond. Working with mentees, we jointly discover new solutions to old problems and old solutions to new problems.

Kris Gutiérrez

I believe mentoring the next generation of scholars, particularly first generation faculty and students, is one of the most important responsibilities and commitments I have. I have had the privilege of mentoring and apprenticing both students (graduate, undergraduate, and postdocs) and faculty (particularly early and mid-career faculty) at my institutions and in professional arenas since I was an early career scholar myself. Presently, I am also a mentor for dissertation, postdoctoral, and mid-career fellows for the National Academy of Education & the Spencer Foundation.

Noah Whiteman

I am thrilled to be on the faculty in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California. Because of my personal history, I am interested in encouraging those from all backgrounds to join and enrich the scientific enterprise with their perspectives--this includes, of course, those with liberal and conservative political perspectives, those who hold religious views and those who do not, those from big cities or those from rural areas. I am a first-generation college student. I was the first openly gay faculty member in my department at the University of Arizona and I am also the first in my new department at the University of California, Berkeley. I have found academia to be an oasis: at each university where I have worked I came to believe that I belonged there. I look forward to the day when none of us is judged by non-merit based criteria, where none of us has to talk about rising above societal perceptions of income, ethnicity, religion, physical traits, accents, sexual orientation or gender, political opinions and where human diversity is embraced in all of its forms, at all levels in our society and in every place. Until that day comes, we need to talk about it.

Lisa García Bedolla

As a core advisory I bring my twenty years of experience navigating the UC system as a woman of color. I have expertise in understanding complex institutions and ensuring that your needs are met within those institutions. When mentoring junior faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates I have focused on helping them to find their voice, their joy, and the career path that best meets their professional and personal needs.