2020 saw many people awaken to, or rediscover, the long and living history of racial injustice in our country, sending waves of national social unrest throughout the country and into our classrooms. As students, staff, and faculty in the Bioengineering Department engaged in this reckoning, the need for our community to come together on these issues was clear.

Dr. Fraley was tasked with leading the establishment of a Bioengineering Diversity Council that incorporated student, staff, and faculty voices and served as the Council’s Chairwoman. The Council leadership included faculty (Francisco Contijoch), staff (Mariella Saldano, Irene Hom, and Carol Kling), graduate (Maya Rowell), and undergraduate (Luis Gonzalez-Barranca) representatives.

The council began hosting quarterly town halls for all members of the department to have open discussions, learning more about each others' experiences, EDI resources, and existing department efforts aimed at promoting EDI.

They also worked with the department to establish a strategic plan for inclusive excellence in BioE. As a part of this process, they met with various organizations within BioE to gather information, and to learn about synergistic efforts. They then surveyed faculty, staff, and students to identify key focus areas.

To share what they were learning, they worked with the editorial board of the undergraduate Bioengineering Newsletter (BEN) to include a quarterly feature on the past and ongoing EDI activities in the department with the student population.

In addition, a new BE Diversity webpage was established to communicate the department’s EDI efforts (https://be.ucsd.edu/edi) and highlight resources (https://be.ucsd.edu/edi/resources) available to the BE community.

COVID-induced remote learning has made community building even harder. A new BE Diversity Slack Workspace was created to enable faculty, students, and staff to share everything from announcements, activities, EDI-focused data-driven studies, personal experiences, outreach opportunities, seminar series, and anything else EDI related that members of our BioE community were interested in discussing, even while remote from each other.

In collaboration with IEM, the council organized a panel discussion on the challenges facing women in science, guided by a screening of the movie “Picture a Scientist”.

Moderated by Dr. Fraley, the panel of highly successful women scientists spanning different career stages discussed their unique experiences and opinions on topics raised by the film including the minority time tax and work-life balance challenges.