Change in the Air

Sharon Tettegah has spent a good chunk of her career advocating for greater diversity in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields. A professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Black Studies and director of the campus’s Center for Black Studies Research (CBSR), she’s at the center of three national initiatives that aim to benefit faculty and students alike. Among them are the Aspire: The National Alliance for Inclusive & Diverse STEM Faculty program; the Neuro-Computational Center established with Kenneth S. Kosik, the campus’s Harriman Professor of Neuroscience; and, with computer science professor Timothy Sherwood, a Google AI Award for Inclusion Research. “Diversity and excellence have always been cornerstones of our UC Santa Barbara community, and the past year has brought heightened reflection and action on issues of equity and justice across our campus,” said UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Henry T. Yang. “UCSB is committed to creating a community of students, faculty and staff that embraces the rich cultural, racial, geographic, economic and social diversity of the state of California,” Tettegah said.

In the first initiative, UCSB joined 18 other universities across the nation in a three-year effort to develop inclusive faculty recruitment, hiring and retention practices. “I think it’s really important to in these times to address some of these issues,” said Tettegah, who will be co-lead the initiative with Belinda Robnett, UCSB’s executive vice chancellor for diversity, equity and inclusion. As part of the Institutional Change Initiative (IChange), UCSB will perform a comprehensive self-assessment of current practices and assets. As Tettegah noted, IChange is a comprehensive program that involves the contributions of many key faculty and administrators across the campus. UCSB is part of the third cohort to join the Aspire Alliance, bringing the total number of institutions participating in the institutional change effort to 54.

Tettegah has teamed with Kenneth S. Kosik, Harriman Professor of Neuroscience in UCSB’s Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, to establish the Neuro-Computational Center in the CSBR. In their proposal to establish the center, Kosik and Tettegah noted that while neurocomputation has become “a fundamental skill and investigative tool for gaining insights in many disciplines,” UCSB has lagged behind comparable universities in the field. The Neuro-Computational Center is intended bring Black students at UCSB into the field of neurocomputation, which requires expertise in such diverse disciplines as statistics, programming, computer science, linguistics as well as molecular cellular and cognitive neuroscience. In a letter of support from Kosik and Spencer LaVere Smith, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, the co-directors of the UCSB Brain Initiative said the center “will cultivate a talent pool in the black community to repair the current demographic skew among graduate students and beyond.” Tettegah has already reached out to scholars in the field to serve as mentors. Members of one group, Black in Neuro, are already on board. “We’re trying to bring in people that the students are going to feel comfortable with,” she said.

Tettegah and co-PI Timothy Sherwood, a professor of computer science, were awarded a 2020 Award for Inclusion Research from Google AI. The award, which comes with a one-year grant of $60,000, will help establish collaboration of UCSB’s Department of Computer Science and the CBSR. The “flipped research” model, Sherwood and Tettegah wrote in their proposal, is intended to put “student scholars in the position of identifying and refining computing research topics that connect directly to their lived experiences and then proposing those ideas for topics of research by the broader community. The interdisciplinary computing research, they said, would bridges Black Studies and Computer Science to create a new and student-driven foundation for understanding issues of personal significance through a diverse lens. Read the Full Article