NiCole Buchanan

Associate Professor, Department of Psychology,Michigan State University

Dr. NiCole Buchanan researches the interplay of race, gender and victimization and how they impact the nature of harassment, its impact, and organizational best practices. She also studies faculty of color and ways in which their research is marginalized (i.e., epistemic exclusion). She has been highlighted in hundreds of media outlets, is a featured speaker including TEDx and National Public Radio (NPR), and provides bias and diversity-related training and consultation (e.g., medical professionals, faculty, clinicians, human resource managers, and police departments). NiCole is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, four divisions of the American Psychological Association (Society of Clinical Psychology, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues, and Society for the Psychology of Women), and has received national and international awards for her research, teaching, and professional service.

Chris Castro

Program Director, Madison Teaching and Learning Excellence (MTLE), University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dr. Christian Castro has been with Madison Teaching and Learning Excellence since the fall of 2015; he assumed the role of program director in January 2019. In his time with MTLE, Chris has worked as a core-facilitator and mentor for eleven of the most recent cohorts, including over 100 faculty fellows. He has taught in a variety of academic fields (English as a second language, medical education, music, psychology, theology) and has been an expert-facilitator and educational consultant in higher education for the past 13 years. In his current research, he is examining the relationships between instructor self-efficacy, professional identity development, and student learning.

Levon Esters

Professor, Department of Youth Development and Agricultural Education, Purdue University

Dr. Levon T. Esters is a Professor in the Department of Youth Development and Agricultural Education at Purdue University. Levon’s faculty appointment focuses on graduate education whereby he teaches courses on learning theory, statistics, and research design. Levon serves as the Director of the Mentoring@Purdue (M@P) program which is designed to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities (URMs) receiving advanced post-secondary STEM-based agricultural and life sciences degrees in Purdue University’s College of Agriculture. Over the past seven years, the M@P program has become known within the College and across campus as a support mechanism that positively impacts student transition, academic adjustment, persistence, retention, degree completion and professional success for graduate students, especially those from URM backgrounds.

Levon also serves as a Senior Research Associate at The Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions. Levon has established himself as a scholar within the field of mentoring and is a nationally recognized scholar on equity and diversity within the STEM-based agricultural and life sciences disciplines. Levon’s research focuses broadly on issues of educational equity and access of underrepresented minorities with a concentration on the mentoring of graduate students of color; STEM career development of racial and ethnic minorities attending Historically Black Land-Grant Colleges and Universities; and educational and professional mobility of graduate students and faculty of color. Levon is among a few African-American scholars in the United States who conducts research in these areas, and has been able to serve as a national role model for other African American graduate students who are committed to broadening participation of URMs in the Ag+STEM disciplines.

Ebony McGee

Associate Professor, Diversity and STEM Education, Vanderbilt University

As an associate professor of diversity and STEM education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, Dr. Ebony McGee investigates the racialized experiences, along with social, material, and health costs that adversely affect the education and career trajectories of underrepresented groups of color. With funding from six NSF grants, she cofounded the Explorations in Diversifying Engineering Faculty Initiative or EDEFI (pronounced “edify”). Ebony also cofounded the Institute in Critical Quantitative and Mixed Methodologies Training for Underrepresented Scholars (ICQCM).

Robin Parent

Assistant Director, STEM Education, Association of Public & Land-grant Universities

Dr. Robin Parent is the Assistant Director of STEM Education at APLU. She serves as the Project Manager for the NSF INCLUDES Aspire Alliance aimed at diversifying the nation’s STEM college educators and expanding the use of inclusive practices. Dr. Parent is primarily responsible for coordinating the “backbone” of this national change effort to accomplish project goals and objectives.

Prior to joining APLU, Robin was the Director of Student Engagement of the Davidson Honors College at the University of Montana where she focused on recruitment, retention, and advising for the College and served as the Co-Chair of the Diversity Advisory Council. Previously, she was the Inclusive Excellence Instruction Specialist at California Polytechnic State University – San Luis Obispo. While at Cal Poly she worked with the campus community on inclusive pedagogy and teaching practices and taught courses for Women & Gender Studies. She began her career in higher ed at Utah State University where she taught English, Women & Gender Studies, and Education courses. Dr. Parent received her Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction with an emphasis in cultural studies, M.S. in American Studies/Folklore, B.S. in Anthropology, and a Graduate Certificate in Women & Gender Studies all from Utah State University.

Christine Pfund

Director, Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER), University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dr. Christine Pfund is a senior scientist with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and the Department of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW). Chris earned her Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology, followed by post-doctoral research in Plant Pathology, both at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work focuses on developing, implementing, documenting, and studying interventions to optimize research mentoring relationships across science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM). She co-authored the original Entering Mentoring curriculum and co-authored many papers documenting the effectiveness of this approach. Chris is the principal investigator of the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) Coordination Center. She is also director of the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experience in Research at UW-Madison (CIMER). She is a member of the National Academies committee that recently published the consensus report and online guide, The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM.

Lucas Hill

Associate Researcher & Evaluator, Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dr. Lucas B. Hill is a researcher and evaluator investigating multi-sector and multi-institutional higher education collaborative reform initiatives from a systems perspective. In particular, his work focuses on how collaborative dynamics within reform projects affect their change activities, which influence desired outcomes. He is a member of research and evaluation teams of the NSF Aspire Alliance and two other large projects: (1) the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), a network of 37 universities dedicated to improving STEM education through graduate student teaching professional development; and (2) a NSF-funded initiative to build an open-access multimodal inclusive teaching course for future and current STEM faculty. Lucas earned his Ph.D. in Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education from Michigan State University.