 Now we will hear from Aradna Tripati who has recently been promoted to full professor at the Departments of Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences, Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences and is in the Institute of Environmental Sciences sustaining sustainability. She is the founding director of the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science at the University of California at UCLA. Aradna, please. Thank you. I hope I can honor the contributions of my fellow panelists and really want to thank the next generation, Cody and Fatima for their wisdom. I know that this is a space where there are a lot of power differentials and hierarchies expressed, given everybody's positionality. And I want to thank Lydia and Jose for their leadership with this workshop as well. So my name is Aradna Tripati and my pronouns are she-they. I'm a professor at UCLA. And I want to acknowledge that UCLA is on the hands of a ton of people who are still present here today and who've been impacted by the three waves of colonialism that have affected the indigenous peoples of California. And I'm a climate scientist. So my calling is to work on the environment and also to make sure that the next generation can too. When I was an undergraduate at a minority serving institution at Cal State LA, I didn't realize what a lonely journey this path would be. Now I've been in higher education for about 30 years. As a faculty member when I came to UCLA about 12 years ago, as I looked at our students and my faculty colleagues, I began to appreciate just how exclusionary our institutions are. And I worked with Sylvia Hurtado and several other colleagues at UCLA to design and build the Center for Diverse Leadership and Science. So what I want to do is just show a little bit of my journey, some of my perspectives on institutional change and the work that the Center is doing with this broader collaborative group I show on here to develop leadership. Now, Mary Jackson experienced being the first in 1958 when her story and contributions were shared in hidden figures. And a set data from Bernard and CooperDoc from show that in 2002 when I received my PhD, I was one of three Asian Pacific Islander women in the whole of the US that got a doctorate in earth science or geological sciences. One Latino woman that year, no indigenous or black women in the whole country. And that was out of 240 PhDs granted in my field. In 2013, there were still only three Asian Pacific Islander women in the whole country. No indigenous women, one black woman, out of more than 300 PhDs awarded. My experience has been from graduate school onwards in the geosciences, really being the only dark-skinned woman in the room. As a faculty member, all of my three STEM departments out of 50 professors, I was the first woman of color faculty member. Now, the national academies have shown that our lack of representation in academia, it is the norm. We're virtually absent from leading STEM departments despite our being one of the largest demographic groups in the country. And it's not representation that's lacking, the climates that we encounter, they're bleak. So to understand why I'm here, you need to know how my family shaped me. My parents are immigrants from the Fiji Islands with some ancestry from India as both countries are former colonies of Britain. And I show up photo on the left of my mom's parents, my grandparents in Fiji and one of my mom's brothers. My mom's parents were sharecroppers, they grew sugarcane, and she was the first generation in her village to be literate. In Fiji, and after she and my father immigrated to this country, they experienced a number of challenges and barriers that affected my family. Here in the US, we experienced colorism, racism, sexism, incarceration, poverty, homelessness, medical issues. And this was just as my sister and I were growing up. So I show in the upper middle picture and my sister and mom and I at my PhD graduation from UC Santa Cruz. And they're both intensely strong women who have had to be resilient. So with that, my mom really showed me how to lead with compassion and empathy through the work that I do and all aspects of my life. And her perspective certainly shaped me. The upper right is my father, photo of him, and he's incarcerated and his fight to reduce humanity in an intensely disempowering and dehumanizing environment and his work to challenge systems of oppression against all the odds, really. Well, that was also a major influence on me. At the bottom, I show my mother-in-law and husband, myself, are Don Barney and her cats. And I really wanna emphasize the importance of the relationships that I hold and really being in relationship with those who are intensely committed to social justice and then also just beings that we can be in relationship with. And really their presence and patience has been important. So in higher education, there's been a lot to navigate, but at critical times in my socialization, I had a few professors who were mentors in role models. They were human-centered. They saw me as a whole person with potential. Dr. Novak on the left, who taught me mineral physics, but also showed my family some support when times were tough. Dr. Ramirez, who I show in the middle, who taught me how to infer processes from the properties of rocks, but he also shared that as the child of immigrants from Mexico, with parents who are farm workers in the Central Valley, he related to some of the challenges my parents faced as immigrants from Fiji. And in graduate school, a professor, Dr. Angela Davis, a social scientist who reached out across disciplines to support women of color of different generations in higher education, including some. So we were in community together in an academic space. I also benefited from a diverse group of peers, counterspaces, from that women of color research cluster that Dr. Davis led, to being part of other groups. And this was really important as I navigated historically white institutions from my health. Those experiences at formative times in my socialization made me think that people like all of us actually belonged in higher education and in STEM and that inclusive diversity should be an achievable ideal. And so as I navigated settings where I was the only person who looked like me where I experienced being the first, I then thought that there was an issue with the environment, perhaps not with me and not with some of my peers. And then finally, I was also able to persist because of financial support that I received, which meant that I didn't have to drop out when times were tough and that I was able to through that support and also through working multiple jobs, helped to support raising my sister during graduate school. And this really taught me about what equitable access meant. Well, so after graduate school, I was at Cambridge University and at Cal Tech as a postdoc and visiting scientist. And then as a faculty member at UCLA, 12 years ago, I encountered a number of kind of classic experiences associated with being a woman of color who's a trailblazer in an environment, the expectation to assimilate. Now, in reflection in higher education, when our society went from apartheid to desegregation, we went from having within our institution's exclusion to having this expectation that when people who were not from the norm joined departments, there would be the expectation that they would assimilate and that they should change. Assimilation is really a dominant expectation associated with those who navigated institutions that were historically white institutions during the second wave of reconstruction. It was a mode for safety and persistence instead of in the academies. This was often the advice that we as people of color of my generation would get. Now, we would navigate a dominant culture of supposed merit. We needed to keep our heads down until tenure. We should work to assimilate. And this is despite the fact that the norms that we would see in our institutions were scaffolding this dominant culture of white supremacy, where traits associated with white masculine patterns of behavior were reinforced. So our choices really were to assimilate or to work to make the environment hospitable or to leave. And in all of those cases, we put energy in. And particularly if we try to make the environment hospitable, we put energy into terraforming the spaces we're in. In all three of those cases, there are cascade of impacts, including on our health, on our families, that those from predominant groups don't have to encounter. Sherman James writes about John Henryism, the health impacts, the impacts on mortality. Ruth Univs and Brana, she discusses the health impacts of being in the academy. Now, what we experience as faculty in these spaces, the women of color, well, that's been well studied, well documented from the classical studies of Dr. Shirley Malcolm, the survey by Joan Williams, where she, the leader survey from Joan Williams, where she shared that every single one of the 60 women of color she encountered, she surveyed the encountered bias and discrimination. And our stories, they're shared in a number of volumes. They're not the same, they differ, but they've been well studied. Now, in my case, as a lab-based scientist, from being an assistant professor to even now as a full professor, there's a whole cascade of effects in my work. Isolation, because of what we look like, what we value, what we think the norm should be, whether we're seen as an interloper if we disrupt the status quo. A lack of access to networks of privilege, whether we're able to be in community in our departments, have a say in hires, whether we can access facilities and resources be treated similarly to our colleagues or not. We have to prove ourselves many times over and we're often having to fight narratives set by those who are more senior, who are steeped in those other norms. It may mean that people feel uncomfortable putting their files in for promotions, be discouraged from doing so. And there's often a lack of institutional courage to address issues, histories of poor behavior that continue, people who set problematic norms, being able to continue in powerful gatekeeper roles. And that has very real costs. We can use formal offices and yet, even when there are findings, they will, in our favor, they can in fact, not lead to the outcomes that we would hope for. And often these processes are ones that simply are meant to distract us or wear us down. Now, often the issues are ones that could have been resolved by academic leadership, even at times when there are dozens and dozens and dozens of reports, nothing happens. And now I speak from some of my experiences, but there are over 10 women of color I know in the UC system in STEM with experiences similar to mine. I created a network of mentorship for the next generation from us to support us and to support our health. And I show up at the top here, something that a mentee at Harvard is she just wrote to me this week and what she describes, including the responses of leadership, well, that's the norm. And unfortunately, it's not enough to wait for funerals because institutions do harm. What happened to Nicole Hanna-Jones? It happens to people of color in STEM all the time. And so as we enter the third wave of reconstruction, what should the Academy look like? Well, we need to move from a culture of gatekeeping to a culture of groundskeeping when looking at the higher education ecosystem, as Miranda Montgomery says. With systems change, it's important to see that in our higher education ecosystem, organizational level change cannot occur without individual efforts. Leaders can make a difference and enough individual acts of leadership can push systems. They can create a culture and readiness for systemic change at an institution and across academia. The behaviors that we see continuing described on the last slide, those are all learned behaviors and they're learned by the next generation. Norms get modeled and get reproduced again and again. A major failure that academic leadership encounters, it's something that Eddie Green talked about in campus color lines. He describes when there are real change agents within big university systems, like our students, like those of us who persist in fight, often bureaucracy is used against change. He describes how often there's real, really intentionality around being slow with institutions is owning up to these issues. To use some of his words, power likes to pretend as if it's staring at the face of a problem for the first time. Power likes to play dumb and say that we don't stand for this. He also describes how general counsel can sometimes run a university and will say to administrators, you can't do that. That needs to change. To transform our institutions, we have to have great leaders who'll commit to reimagining what our departments and universities can be, even if counsel, even if donors are not for it. Because it's right, because it serves our mission and because it's in the vital interest of the long-term health of our institution, the health of science, the health of our workforce and the health of the people in it. How leaders analyze the problem, that matters deeply. If we need to move from assimilation from expecting individuals to change and being comfortable excluding people for cultural differences, to instead having our institutions change themselves so that they accept people. So that's the dominant culture. To ensure that they can be whole, they can be fully present with their multiplicity of identities. To move from a culture of supposed merit, to instead putting rewards into fostering and rewarding a culture of care and health, being trauma-informed, supporting reparative principles with what we do. We need to have a belief that if we really deeply reckon with the issues at hand and make structural changes, so our students, postdocs, assistant and associate professors thrive and we center on the ecologies of the marginalized, our institutions will too. This is through things like changing criteria for tenure and promotion, to not just give people more time to reach milestones in this assimilatory culture, change resource distribution, really deeply grapple with a cumulative advantage. Have labor associated with mentorship, with care, be resource, because actually changing culture, the human dimension of what we do, it's the most important part of our institutions. And we also need to have a culture where people can share their stories, where they're accepted and where they can claim their narratives. We need to do this for the next generation who I showed here, because otherwise they're gonna have the same experiences and they're gonna leave. We need to be human centered and relational. And so to close out, I wanted to share, we developed from our experiences a model for cultivating leadership, a network leadership model, the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science, which I found it indirect. It cuts across departments, so we don't have to swim upstream across the culture of a department in fight, but we can have our own counter space. And we develop a network change agents at different levels in the institution. We view ourselves as a reparative organization within our institution, across institutions and within the places where we live and study and work. We have an ecosystem of fellowship programs, early career fellows, who are students in postdocs, faculty fellows and honorary fellows. They are the mycelium network for change. Our resources sustain and support those who are doing the work to terraform spaces so we can be in community and be healthy as we are in these institutions and trying to change them. We also work to train the moderate and support them so they can become activists, they can see the convergence of interest, they can be the leaders that we also need who are committed to service and change and carry this work with us. Our work's not just limited to our institution, although it is largely in the broader LA area, but we've been planting seeds across the country. We now have supported more than 200 early career fellows, two dozen faculty fellows and a dozen honorary fellows. And so I'll say and open it up for questions. Thank you.