New directions for WISELI

The past year has been a time of exciting reflection and change for WISELI, a research center supporting faculty diversity and inclusion, housed in the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering. The center has a new name, new personnel and plans for new initiatives and programming.

In summer 2022, Erika Marín-Spiotta joined WISELI as a new co-director, joining Amy Wendt, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, in this role. Marín-Spiotta is professor of geography and lead principal investigator of the ADVANCEGeo Partnership, a National Science Foundation-funded collaborative project to improve workplace climate conditions by developing bystander intervention education for department heads, chairs, faculty and grad students to appropriately respond to and prevent harassment, bullying and other exclusionary behaviors in research environments. Marín-Spiotta looks forward to bringing some of the ADVANCEGeo work into WISELI’s portfolio. She is also on the leadership team of the Mellon-funded Humanities Education for Anti-Racism Literacy in STEMM at UW-Madison, and is excited to think about how to integrate perspectives from HEAL into WISELI’s work.

Dessie Clark is WISELI’s new director of curriculum development and implementation. She joins WISELI from the ADVANCE program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Clark brings a wealth of experience and expertise in social science and diversity research, including studying COVID-19 impacts on faculty well-being and productivity. The center is excited to have Clark infuse WISELI’s curriculum with new ADVANCE work happening across the United States.

To better reflect current and future directions of WISELI, the center recently changed its name to be more inclusive of all persons who are underrepresented and have been historically excluded from science and engineering. WISELI has worked on issues of inequities more broadly for many years, incorporating research on racial/ethnic bias and ableism into hiring workshops since 2004, and on discrimination against LGBTQ persons into the Breaking the Bias Habit workshops in 2010. The name change also reflects WISELI’s desire to expand its work on gender inequities to be more inclusive of transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming persons.

On Feb. 16, the University Academic Planning Council approved WISELI’s name change to “University of Wisconsin-Madison Inclusion in Science & Engineering Leadership Institute.” The well-known acronym will remain the same, but the name will now acknowledge the much broader set of issues for all persons underrepresented in faculty and leadership in STEMM fields at UW-Madison.

WISELI will continue to provide the programming the UW-Madison campus relies on for faculty hiring committees and implicit bias workshops, and it expects to offer more in the future. WISELI also plans to broaden its partnerships across campus and embark on new research to better serve the campus community.

To read more about WISELI and its new directions, go to wiseli.wisc.edu/wiseli/new-directions-for-wiseli/