Health, Equity and Wellness Vision Statement
Our goal is to empower voices within the UC Davis Biomedical Engineering community and create an environment of health, equity, and wellness where social justice is celebrated. Our community thrives and achieves excellence when we actively listen and promote varied outlooks and diverse social experiences in research, teaching, service, and leadership.
Our goals include:
- Fostering a diverse and inclusive environment in our BME community with opportunities to learn and engage with topics in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). We will invite a diverse pool of BME seminar speakers, work with other groups on campus to provide DEI training and promote equity and wellness resources via the BME website.
- Fostering a diverse and inclusive graduate program which promotes educational and professional development and enables our students to feel respected, safe, valued, and empowered to achieve their goals. We support and advocate on behalf of graduates students, creating lines of communication between students, the BMEGG, BESA, and the BME Department. We encourage our members and community to challenge their own implicit biases, strive toward anti-racist actions, and develop practices which create equity for our diverse community.
- Cultivating a diverse and inclusive environment that enables our undergraduate students to feel respected, safe, valued and empowered by supporting and advocating on behalf of the undergraduates, creating a line of communication between them and the department.
- Cultivating the core values of diversity, inclusion, and wellness in our faculty, professional researchers, and staff community. Diversity boosts performance through introducing a varied outlook and social experience. Inclusion is necessary to leverage diversity and foster full engagement of stakeholders. Wellness ensures a happy, productive, and sustainable workforce. We seek to promote these values through activities that inform training, hiring and retention. Our community is healthy, thrives, and achieves excellence when we actively listen and promote marginalized voices in research, teaching, service, and leadership.
A Brief History: The Health, Equity and Wellness (HEW) Committee was founded in the summer of 2020 and initiated their efforts in the 2020-2021 school year. The HEW Committee plans events, workshops, and seminars to increase education, retention, and awareness for UC Davis Biomedical Engineering community, including undergraduate students, graduate students, staff, postdocs, researchers, and faculty. HEW utilized Climate Surveys to identify community needs and inform the planning of activities and educational opportunities.
HEW Committee
- Eleonora Grandi; Co-Chair HEW
- Sophie Orr; Co-Chair HEW, Chair of Department Climate Sub-Committee
- Roshni Shetty; Co-Chair HEW, Chair of Grad Student Sub-Committee
- Alba Alfonso Garcia; Chair of Faculty, Researchers, and Staff Sub-Committee
- Tiffany Chan; Chair of Undergraduate Sub-Committee
- Anis Askari
- Sharon Aviran
- Olivia Carbajal
- Blaine Christiansen
- Alita D'Almeida
- Katjana Ehrlich
- Steven George
- Aidan Gilchrist
- Vicki J Gracia
- Eli Guzman
- Abigail Humphries
- Sheri L Kuslak-Meyer
- Kylie Lin
- Neona Lowe
- Isha Maisuriya
- Haibo Ni
- Hannah O'Toole
- Eri Ogata
- Albany Roberts
- Leonor Saiz
- Angelika Tamura
- Pranuthi Thota
- Xianglong Wang
- Adam Weiner
- Chrsital Wintersmith
- Erika Wheeler
- Langston Wu