It has been a challenging and exciting year for work on diversity issues. Named in honor of former faculty member Dr. Brian Sarata after his untimely passing in 1996, the Sarata Diversity Enhancement Committee is charged with promoting diversity enhancement efforts within the Department of Psychology. We strive to continue the work that began and has evolved since the original formation of the “Minority Recruitment Committee” in the 1970s. During the past year, the Committee has established several new initiatives to enhance diversity research, recruit underrepresented students, and provide support for members of the Department.

One new initiative includes the “Diversity Brownbag,” a research outlet for faculty and students to discuss various research products and enhance our diversity research profile. Several faculty and students have already presented grant proposals that received funding, conference presentations, and manuscripts that have been submitted for publication. We have also been revising the diversity content on the website. The official launch will be coming soon, likely in the summer of 2018, and the new content will reorganize our diversity information to better advertise our research success, teaching efforts, and diversity-focused resources. We will also be starting a “Spotlight on Diversity” that will highlight the ways in which diversity enriches our department. This will include acknowledging the amazing faculty and graduate students from underrepresented backgrounds or whose research focuses on diversity topics. These initiatives reflect our beliefs that diversity improves our science and our science confirms the indispensability of diversity.

These efforts are great initial steps for satisfying our ambitious plans that have been outlined during this year’s Academic Program Review (APR), in which external reviewers visited our department and we completed a thorough self-study with a large portion focusing on diversity. In the self-study, we outlined several goals as part of our strategic plan. These goals include 1) improving instruction on diversity-related teaching methods, 2) enhancing recruitment and retention of graduate students from underrepresented backgrounds in academia, 3) promoting graduate and undergraduate research on diversity topics, 4) facilitating faculty diversity research and recognition and 5) sustaining momentum for enhancing diversity-focused teaching, research, and service.

In addition to the initiatives that I have noted above, further actions will require long-range planning and effort, such as creating robust structures that enhance the pipeline of underrepresented graduate students through our department’s ground-breaking graduate programs. We outlined several action steps to help us achieve the goals from our APR self-study. I’m confident the committee will meet these goals, particularly with the invigoration of multiple new faculty members and student members who recently joined the committee. I am grateful for their service and the support of the Department as we move forward.