2018 Rising Tide Professors announced
The 2018 Rising Tide Professors are Jennifer Perry, University of Maine assistant professor of food microbiology in the School of Food and Agriculture, and collaborators Dan Sandweiss and Carlos Villacorta, director of the School of Policy and International Affairs and assistant professor of Spanish, respectively.
The faculty will implement two-year projects focused on enhancing diversity and advancing equity at UMaine with support from the College of Natural Sciences, Forestry, and Agriculture, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Perry seeks to promote a climate of acceptance and respect at UMaine by establishing a diversity-focused book club intended to facilitate positive discussion of issues surrounding inclusion in science and education.
Sandweiss and Villacorta will lead UMaine Unido to recognize the contributions of the Latinx community at UMaine and nationally, with the goal of promoting visibility, participation and integration of this underserved minority group.
Both projects will be initiated in September 2018.
Rising Tide Professorships were introduced in 2016 to further the mission of the Rising Tide Center through implementation of equity initiatives focused at the unit or campus level. The initial cohort of Rising Tide Professors completed projects that include establishment of an advocacy group for women in STEM and medical disciplines, development of policy proposals to facilitate effective working relationships between faculty and staff through exploration of cultural and economic issues related to gender equity, review and revision of the UMaine Faculty Recruitment Handbook to support development of faculty recruitment training, and development of a multisession workshop series focused on implicit bias and the impacts of bias in academia.