CIAN Diversity Strategic Plan

CIAN's goal is to provide comprehensive diversity programs to ensure that the gender, race, ethnicity, and disability composition of the leadership, faculty,

CIAN Team Visiting Pascue Yaqui

Our mission is to play a role in establishing a critical mass of diversity in the demographics of engineering at the UA and our partner institutions. Over time these changes are designed to create legacy initiatives, leading to sustained opportunities in these disciplines that attract candidates based solely on their abilities and potential for success.

Our Diversity Goals

1. Implement strategic and focused recruitment efforts.
2. Successfully recruit and retain students through community building.
3. Provide training for awareness of unconscious-bias to CIAN members.

CIAN members with Lynn Preston at 2008 Annual ERC Meeting

CIAN will focus its efforts on personally interacting with students and advisors by visiting their campuses in addition to attending national recruitment conferences that are created for underrepresented students.

A strong, welcoming, diverse community has been shown to result in improved retention of all students, including those from underrepresented demographics. The CIAN-ERC will take the lead in creating new community building activities and mentorships for incoming students and summer researchers.

CIAN will partner with well-established programs leading the way in diversity initiatives to provide training for CIAN members to be knowledgeable about changing the diversity structure of engineering disciplines, especially with regard to identifying unconscious bias.