Taylor Randall is the 17th president of the University of Utah, the state’s flagship institution of higher education. He joined the U in 1998 as a professor of accounting and led the nationally ranked David Eccles School of Business for 12 years prior to his appointment as the president in 2021. President Randall has set a bold goal for the University of Utah to become a top 10 public university with unsurpassed societal impact. He believes the U can revolutionize the student experience, change the world through research, and serve our state to improve the lives of all 3.4 million Utahns.

Dr. Brenda Bowen is an interdisciplinary geoscientist whose work focuses on how changing environmental conditions influence the composition of sediments, authigenic minerals, and fluids in both modern dynamic systems and ancient lithified strata.

Ramón Barthelemy is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Utah. Previous to his faculty position Ramón was a Fulbright Scholar in Finland, a Science Policy Fellow in the U.S. Department of Education and a private sector consultant. His work focuses on the lives, educational experiences, and career paths of marginalized students in physics and STEM. This has included work on LGBT+ people, graduate Students of Color, and women in physics. He was the 2020 recipient of the Fulbright Finland Alumni Award, the 2021 recipient of the AAPT Doc Brown Futures award, the 2022 WEPAN Research recipient, and became a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2022.

Claudia Geist, an associate professor jointly appointed in the Department of Sociology and the Division of Gender Studies, studies the intersection of gender, family and inequality. Geist’s examinations of constructions of family and gender, life-course decisions about pregnancy and family planning and gendered division of labor come at a time of transition and expansion of genders. Her ongoing research analyzes ways to appraise nuance in gender expression in survey research and help future health care providers understand gender and incorporate gender identity in their interactions.

Myra Washington holds a faculty position as Associate Professor in Ethnic Studies. She received her doctorate in communications research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012, and has substantial experience with the design and leadership of professional development and support organizations for faculty of color, including the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies, where she is a founding member. Her research includes analyses of race and gender in popular culture—across television, film and digital media.

Dr. Mercedes Ward is a design thinker and facilitator who collaborates with individuals and organizations to develop impactful projects, programs, and policies to advance sustainable development. Mercedes believes in the importance of creating enabling environments to support human flourishing. She accelerated her professional evolution from ecological anthropologist to design thinker when she joined an interdisciplinary, multicultural team to establish a research center for water security in Pakistan. Over a five-year tenure with the USAID-funded U.S.-Pakistan Center for Advanced Studies in Water, she led a Pakistan-based research team to deliver policy recommendations to improve participatory irrigation management, facilitated workshops to support community-based research and policy impact, and designed and managed quality assurance mechanisms for international education and capacity strengthening programs.

Camila Manni has experience with the analysis of Social Networks of women and LGBT+ physicists and brings this expertise to the Social Science Research team on this project. Combining her academic and professional background in the social sciences and physics, Camila is currently part of the Physics and Astronomy department, where teach courses and research in the area of physics education.