Strength through Equity & Diversity (STEAD) 

What is STEAD?

The STEAD Committee is comprised of UC Davis faculty members who provide information and advice about practices for achieving excellence, equity, and diversity in faculty recruitment at the University of California, Davis.  The committee leads workshops for faculty and administrators involved in hiring.  The STEAD workshop aims to identify factors that can introduce bias into the faculty recruitment process and to provide evidence-based approaches that will maximize the likelihood that excellent and diverse scholars will be identified, selected for offers and recruited onto the UC Davis faculty. 

Workshops offered by STEAD

The STEAD committee developed two interactive workshops designed to equip all participants in
the faculty hiring and merit and promotion processes with research-informed strategies for increasing
equity, diversity, and inclusion.  The two workshops are STEAD Faculty Search Committee Workshop and STEAD Setting the Stage Workshop.

• STEAD Faculty Search Committee Workshop
• The STEAD Faculty Search Committee Workshop is offered 10-12 times each year and completion of this interactive workshop is required (by the Provost) for all members of faculty search committees at UC Davis.  It is also attended by staff, students, clinicians, and administrators serving on a wide variety of hiring committees and Recruitment Advisory Committees.  The content, which is updated regularly to incorporate new empirical studies and to address emergent issues, identifies factors that may bias faculty hiring and many evidence-based approaches to promote equity at each step of the hiring process.
  
  As outlined in the Annual Call, anyone participating as a faculty recruitment committee member is required to take either STEAD within four years.  Only those who are serving as search committee members of School of Medicine and School of Nursing searches are eligible to receive certification from the Enhanced Training for Faculty Search Committee Members.  Committees and search committee chairs must be STEAD-certified, before the evaluation of applicants ends.  Search Committee Chairs should ensure that all recruitment committee members who will be serving on faculty recruitment committees sign up for this workshop as early as possible.  Please review required training guidance here. 
• STEAD Setting the Stage Workshop
• The STEAD Setting the Stage Workshop is offered each Spring and is designed to provide department chairs and staff, recruitment committee chairs, and college administrators with research-informed insights, tools and strategies they can incorporate into the search plan for each faculty recruitment.

If you have any questions regarding the various workshops, please contact steadsupport@ucdavis.edu. 

STEAD Committee Members

(Top left to right: Diane Beckles, Jeff Sherman, Aldrin Gomes, Robert Irwin. Bottom left to right: Mitchell H. Singer, Sanjeevi Sivasankar, Dawn Sumner, Cassandra Tucker)

Diane Beckles - Professor of Plant Sciences

Aldrin Gomes - Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior and Physiology and Membrane Biology (co-chair)

Robert Irwin - Professor of Spanish and Portuguese

Jeff Sherman - Professor of Psychology 

Mitchell H. Singer - Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics

Sanjeevi Sivasankar - Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Dawn Sumner – Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences (co-chair)

Cassandra Tucker - Professor of Animal Science