Athens, Ga. – Four faculty members and two graduate students were honored by the University of Georgia’s Office of Institutional Diversity for “exemplary efforts to advance the university’s mission of promoting diversity and maintaining academic excellence.”
Receiving awards at a recognition luncheon held on campus were Kecia Thomas, associate professor of psychology and African-American Studies; Anthony Capomacchia, a faculty member in the College of Pharmacy; Jenny Penney Oliver, director of educational innovation in the College of Education; and Leara Rhodes, a faculty member in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Graduate students Vedas Burkeen and Jeremy Peacock in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences were honored for their work with students at Columbia High School in Decatur, which is 99 percent minority and 96 percent African American.
The College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences also received an award for its Young Scholars Program, which recruits talented high school students with an interest in pursuing careers in science and technology, with a particular emphasis on groups that are underrepresented in these fields.
“We were very pleased with the quality and quantity of nominations received for this new awards program,” said Keith Parker, UGA’s associate provost for institutional diversity. “It’s clear that many members of the UGA community are dedicating significant efforts toward promoting diversity on campus and beyond.”
Thomas came to UGA immediately after earning her Ph.D. and has developed several diversity classes, including a popular upper-level course on the psychology of prejudice and a new doctoral seminar on black and white identity. She has published extensively on the psychology of workplace diversity, including a recent book titled Diversity Dynamics in the Workplace. The Applied Psychology Ph.D. program at UGA has benefited from her expertise in diversity recruitment: 20 percent of their students are ethnic minority or international in a field in which fewer than five percent are ethnic minority.
Capomacchia has helped the College of Pharmacy recruit, retain and graduate minority doctoral students and has been successful in obtaining extramural funding for minority graduate education, including a “Bridges to the Doctorate” grant from the National Institutes of Health. The goal of the grant, awarded in 2002, is to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in the biomedical sciences. In his home department, Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Sciences, there are now 14 minority students, representing about 20 percent of the total, where a decade ago there were none.
Oliver worked to establish a multicultural initiative as part of the College of Education’s strategic agenda and then facilitated advancement of that initiative. She has functioned as the coordinator, clearinghouse and organizer for college-wide activities and planning related to multicultural education and, at the institutional level, has served on the President’s Council for Minority Affairs. She also has served on the board of the National Association for Multicultural Education and was instrumental in starting a Georgia chapter.
Rhodes chairs the diversity committee in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication and was the principle author of the college’s diversity plan, which aims to increase minority faculty and students. She developed the “Bridge to Grady” program, a student group that mentors potential minority students, and is personally involved in recruiting and advising minority students in journalism. She is also active as a faculty member of UGA’s African Studies Institute and an associate member of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program.
Burkeen and Peacock work closely with Columbia High School, a magnet science and mathematics school for grades 9-12, as fellows for a National Science Foundation-funded program. During the past school year, they spent at least 7-8 hours each week in the classroom, supporting teachers by planning special lessons, experiments and long-term projects for the students. They also organized after-school experiences, which included trips to UGA labs. Science fair projects created by their students were honored at the regional and state level.
The Young Scholars Program, developed in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, involves high school students from Athens, Griffin and Tifton in a summer program that pairs them with faculty mentors and places them as full-time assistants in research laboratories throughout the university to gain exposure to science and engineering majors. The program is coordinated by the college’s Office of Diversity Relations and has become one of UGA’s leading pre-collegiate programs. It is under review by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for regularization into the Land Grant College System of America.