Sylvia Hurtado, Ph.D.
Sylvia Hurtado is Professor, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, in the Division of Higher Education and Organizational Change. She is currently Director of the Higher Education Research Institute, which houses the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP). CIRP is the longest-running empirical study of higher education involving data collection on students and faculty. Her numerous publications focus on undergraduate education, student development in college, and diversity in higher education. She is past President of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), and served on the boards of the Higher Learning Commission and initiatives of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Recent national projects include research on how colleges are preparing students to participate in a diverse democracy (U.S. Department of Education), the pathways of underrepresented students’ in scientific research and professional careers (National Institutes of Health/National Science Foundation), and student and institutional outcomes of diverse and broad access institutions in higher education (Ford Foundation). She obtained her degrees from UCLA (Ph.D.), Harvard Graduate School of Education (M.Ed.) and Princeton University (A.B.).
Richard McGee, Jr., Ph.D.
Richard McGee is Professor of Medical Education and Associate Dean for Professional Development at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. His primary research and academic interests are in the development of young scientists. His work in this arena spans the continuum including: the ‘basic science’ of how students and postdocs fine tune career decisions; factors differentially affecting career decisions of women and minority scientists; application and study of new coaching-based models to support success of early career scientist, from Ph.D. students through junior faculty; creation of new models to teach culturally aware mentoring skills.
John Matsui, Ph.D.
Dr. Matsui is the co-founder and director of the nationally renowned Biology Scholars Program (BSP) at the University of California, Berkeley. He has spent over two decades making science more accessible to all individuals. BSP is an undergraduate diversity program in Berkeley’s Department of Integrative Biology. Funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the California Wellness Foundation and, most recently, the National Institutes of Health, its goal has been to enlarge and diversify the pool of Berkeley students who succeed in biology majors and related careers. There have been 2,080 BSP graduates over the past 20 years, and Dr. Matsui has personally mentored 1,183 of them. BSP students are diverse; 60% minority (African American, Hispanic, and American Indian) and 70% women. As well, 80% of BSP students come from low-income backgrounds and/or are the first in their family to attend college.
Dr. Matsui’s mentoring model includes customary activities such as tutoring, advising, paid research, and community building. However, he and his staff go beyond the usual model by:
- Requiring his students to take ownership and responsibility for their activities and develop their own extracurricular experiences;
- Assigning older students to mentor younger students about science, and university culture; and
- Creating customized plans to help them develop individualized plans for success.
John Matsui has expanded his influence across the Berkeley campus through his leadership as Chair of the Coalition for Excellence and Diversity in Mathematics, Science and Engineering. The coalition is developing a campus-wide effort involving five STEM fields (in four colleges) to recruit and retain low income, first generation, and underrepresented ethnic minority students. In addition, Dr. Matsui has disseminated his BSP model statewide and nationally, and has helped to establish similar mentoring programs at 11 colleges and universities in eight states, including three other University of California campuses.
George M. Langford, Ph.D.
George M. Langford is Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience and Professor of Biology at Syracuse University and served as dean of SU’s College of Arts and Sciences from 2008-2014. Prior to SU, he served as dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Distinguished Professor of Biology. In 1991, he was appointed the inaugural Ernest Everett Just Professor of Natural Sciences at Dartmouth College and professor of Biological Sciences until 2005. Professor Langford also served on the faculty of the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. He was appointed in 1998 by President Clinton to a six-year term on the National Science Board, the governing board of the National Science Foundation. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letter by Beloit College in 2001 and in 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). A longstanding advocate for supporting underrepresented minority students in the sciences, Professor Langford was named inaugural chair of the Minority Affairs Committee of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB), and the first recipient of the ASCB EE Just Award for his seminal work on the actin cytoskeleton and molecular motors. He currently serves on the Science Education Advisory Board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and was former chair of the Board of Directors of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.