Service, Mentorship and DEI

Over the past year, I’ve co-led the Rackham Aspiring Fellows program under Partnerships for Access, Community, and Excellence (PACE) within the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan. This program addresses research and graduate school opportunity inequities for students from Minority-Serving Institutions by pairing them with U-M faculty for year-long projects. 

Throughout the year, I have designed and led academic, research, and professional development workshops in-person during our student campus visits and virtually during our monthly cohort meetings. Some of these topics include: Leveraging Social Media, Mentor-Mentee Relationships, Research Plan Development, Designing Research Presentations, etc.

The results have been incredibly rewarding, especially as all six of our students in the 2024-2025 cohort have chosen to pursue advanced degrees, with half continuing their research in the Summer Research Opportunity Program (SROP) this summer!

I had the pleasure of coordinating training for several projects for our summer research interns: Meera Gupta, Navin Rana, & Madison Brown. It was an incredible experience to see their growth over the summer culminate in an end-of-summer research presentation, and even more-so to see Meera and Navin present at their first research conference–The Human Factors & Ergonomics Society International Symposium!

• Gupta, M., Kanji, F., Zamudio, J., Gewertz, B., & Cohen, T. (2023). Identifying Contributing Factors to Sentinel Events in the Labor and Delivery Unit - A Human Factors Approach. Poster presented at the International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care.

• Rana, N., Kanji, F., Zamudio, J., Gewertz, B., Burch, M., & Cohen, T. (2023). Investigation of Setup Time in High-Technology Surgery: Opportunities for Improvement. Poster presented at the International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care.