Dr. Regina Baucom is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair for Graduate Studies in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at UM. She is an NSF and USDA-funded ecological geneticist whose interdisciplinary work dissects the evolutionary and genetic mechanisms underlying plant persistence to global change. She teaches a large undergraduate genetics course and has led the EEB graduate program during the covid19 pandemic. She has served as primary mentor to 11 women graduate students or postdoctoral researchers and has provided research experiences for over 50 undergraduates in her lab.

In addition to her scholarship, teaching, and service, she has been a strong and vocal advocate for women and other systematically marginalized scientists in ecology and evolution. In collaboration with Meghan Duffy, she co-created DiversifyEEB, a publicly available database of >1800 women and/or other marginalized scientists to help search committees, award committees, and editors of journals build a diverse candidate pool for critical career-building opportunities. Many sister sites were inspired by DiversifyEEB, including DiversifyMicro, DiversifyImmuno, DiversifyChem, DiversifyEarth, and DiversifyPlantSci, highlighting DiversifyEEB’s influence on many scientific subdisciplines.

Dr. Baucom served as inaugural chair of the American Society of Naturalist’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, which performed a demographic study of the evolution tri-societies (Society for the Study of Evolution, American Society of Naturalists, and Society for the Study of Biodiversity), and improved inclusion for historically excluded scientists at the yearly evolution meetings. She helped to develop SafeEvolution, which includes a code of conduct, reporting structures, and consequences for harassment at conferences. As ASN DEI chair, she conceived of the new tri-society Inclusiveness, Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA) Award for evolutionary biologists who have made critical DEI contributions.

Her advocacy for women and other marginalized scientists has included formal scholarship on gender bias in publishing and the promotion of women and underrepresented plant biologists at national symposiums and in special journal issues. She has engaged in advocacy via social media, including highly viewed blog posts and podcast interviews on gender bias in the sciences, and by providing commentary on gender discrimination for outlets such as The Scientist.

L. Monique Ward is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, where she has been on faculty for the past 26 years. She is a developmental psychologist whose research examines parental and media contributions to gender and sexual socialization for U.S. youth, with a special focus on gendered sexual scripts and sexual objectification. Her work also explores intersections between gender ideologies, body image, race, and sexuality. She uses a range of methods, including content analyses, surveys, and experiments, to demonstrate that heavier media exposure is associated with greater acceptance of stereotypical gender and sexual roles. Endorsing these roles and scripts has significant implications for young people’s well-being, and is linked to greater psychological distress, diminished sexual agency, and greater acceptance of rape myths and sexualized aggression.

Although her work on these topics has been published in more than 30 different academic journals, she has also worked to compile and disseminate findings to parents, educators, and other stakeholders. She served as a member of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls and helped produce their widely distributed report. She also worked with Common Sense Media to review and summarize research on media and children’s gender beliefs and as a consultant for their report on media and children’s racial attitudes. She has delivered invited presentations on these topics for policymakers, including a program for Fisher Price and a summit at the Obama White House. She is the recipient of many prestigious national awards including the Distinguished Leader for Women in Psychology Award from the APA Committee on Women in Psychology, APA’s Carolyn Wood Sherif Award for substantial contributions to the psychology of women and gender, and two Ford Foundation fellowships.

Her service to the field covers numerous issues relevant to the lives of girls and women. She serves as Associate Editor of Psychology of Women Quarterly and was Associate Editor of the APA Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology. Dr. Ward is also a distinguished mentor and teacher. She has chaired 21 dissertations, 32 honors theses, and was the 2020 recipient of the APA Raymond D. Fowler Award for excellence in graduate mentoring.

Jessica Tischler is an associate professor of organic chemistry in the Department of Natural Sciences at the University of Michigan-Flint. Dr. Tischler started at UM-Flint in 2001 and is the primary instructor of organic chemistry lectures and labs as well as capstone seminar courses. She has held numerous service roles within the department and University including six years as Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

In 2002, she reinstated the Chemistry Club as a Student Affiliate Chapter of the American Chemical Society (ACS). Since then, the club has been continuously recognized by the ACS with a Chapter Award and has received their top award of Outstanding ten times–the level awarded to only the top ~5% of Chapters in the country. Dr. Tischler has proudly served as their advisor for over 20 years and actively works to support students and promote science outreach in their community.

As a faculty advisor, Dr. Tischler has helped the officers find their voice and confidence as leaders as they work to inspire and motivate their members. It is not by accident that over half of the officers in the club have been women!  This is higher than the number of female officers typically in student government and is higher than the percentage of female chemistry and biochemistry majors.  Several officers have also won recognition from the University as Maize and Blue scholars or Student Involvement and Leadership Awards.

In 2012, Dr. Tischler was asked to participate in the Michigan ACE Women’s Network discussion group on campus. This group requested Chancellor Persons to create a Women’s Commission (WC) similar to groups that existed on the Dearborn and Ann Arbor campuses. She was asked to be the founding faculty Co-Chair of the UM-Flint Women’s Commission in 2014.  n this role, Dr. Tischler and Rushika Patel, the Staff Co-Chair, served as the Institutional Representatives of the MI-ACE Women’s Network for UM-Flint.

Dr. Tischler is also an organic chemistry module developer for the ACS-Green Chemistry Institute and currently serves on the Green Chemistry Commitment Advisory Board for Beyond Benign. Therefore, one of her goals is to help spread a greater understanding of science and green chemistry while inspiring others to find their passion for it. She regularly volunteers at science outreach events on campus and in the community so that all kids see women and a diverse group of UM-Flint students represented as scientists. Dr. Tischler highly encourages Chemistry Club members to participate in science outreach through their Demo Squad. This has been an exceptional program to reach out to the community and schools and show all kids that they too can be scientists.

Technically, UM-Flint is a part of the Detroit Local Section of the ACS, and Dr. Tischler serves as the liaison for the Flint Sub-section to the Detroit Executive Board. In 2017, Dr. Tischler was asked to be a part of an initiative to create an event that could bring together the Detroit and Midland’s ACS section’s Women’s Chemist Committees. They created the Skills Beyond the Bench discussion panel and networking event. Dr. Tischler has continued to host Skills Beyond the Bench, and she is currently planning the 6th annual luncheon to be held in June 2023. The themes of these events have encompassed the following: How to Advance your Career in Industry; Leading with Passion; Mentoring for your Career; Balancing a Scientific Life, Getting to your Goals with Grit; and Diversity in Chemistry. Because of the event’s success in the first year, she was recognized with a Salutes to Excellence Award from the Detroit section of the ACS.

Jenna Wiens, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Co-Director of Precision Health, and Associate Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (U-M). She joined the faculty at U-M in 2014, after completing her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology within the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Dr. Wiens heads the ‘Machine Learning for Data-Driven Decisions’ group at U-M, consisting of nearly a dozen PhD students. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, data mining, and healthcare.

Dr. Wiens is a pioneer in leveraging machine learning (ML) and health data for predicting adverse outcomes or events (e.g., infections). Based on collaborations with dozens of clinicians and several hospital systems, she has identified key characteristics for the safe and meaningful adoption of ML in healthcare. This has led to new methodological contributions, impacting the field of ML and new solutions impacting healthcare. As a result, she has published in both high-impact ML and AI venues e.g., ICML, NeurIPS, AAAI, and prestigious journals e.g., The British Medical Journal, Nature Medicine, and the Lancet Digital Health.

Dr. Wiens’ work in machine learning provides theoretical, as well as practical, foundations for actionable, robust, and intelligible models. In healthcare, there is potential for models to learn to not just replicate but amplify existing biases in clinical care, which could in turn harm women and others from marginalized groups. With respect to learning robust models, she has focused on developing novel approaches for mitigating model bias, based on incorporating domain expertise and causal reasoning. Though these techniques can apply broadly across many different tasks, Dr. Wiens is inspired by clinically relevant problems including infectious disease, diabetes, acute respiratory failure, and Alzheimer’s disease among others. Her work in infectious disease has led to the development of accurate models for identifying patients at risk of acquiring infections during their hospital stay and which patients are at greatest risk of complications or deterioration. These models are currently integrated into clinical workflows at Michigan Medicine and are being used to guide clinical care and target interventions.

Beyond her research, Dr. Wiens has also worked to encourage more women and people from underrepresented groups to pursue undergraduate and graduate studies in computer science, a field in which fewer than 25% of Bachelor’s and PhDs are awarded to women. She helped develop Explore Graduate Studies in CSE at U-M, a program that helps undergraduate students navigate the process of applying to graduate programs in computer science. In addition, she has worked with a number of programs that aim to broaden participation in computer science, including CS Kickstart, an annual week-long introduction to computer science for Michigan first-year students who are new to the field; the Big Data Summer Institute, in which over 50% of undergraduate trainees have been women; AI4All; and AI4Good, among others.

Dr. Wiens was named to the MIT Tech Review’s list of Innovators Under 35 in 2017 and recently was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship in Computer Science. She also serves on the board of Machine Learning for Healthcare, a 501(c)(3) organization, which she helped establish.