Skip to content

DEI Strategic Plan and Reports

The DEI Strategic Planning Process 

Department-wide change in DEI requires input and leadership from the many stakeholders that make up our community. From Summer 2020 – Summer 2022, a dedicated group of faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students drafted the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s (ME) DEI Strategic Plan and Roadmap using input shared by our broader community at town halls, faculty meetings, and in feedback forms. The result? A collectively-designed strategic direction in DEI and accompanying aspirational goals for our department to build a more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and socially just world of mechanical engineering.

ME’s Strategic Direction in DEI:

We seek to serve the common good by striving for social justice and building a welcoming, equitable, and inclusive environment for all students, faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and staff to create, learn, and innovate. We seek to put in place and assess activities to educate our entire community, creating a common basis for inclusive and respectful dialogue. We will initiate, cultivate, and sustain groups that support members of the Mechanical Engineering community. We aim to identify departmental processes that perpetuate injustice and replace them with ones that move our community and discipline toward social justice. To achieve this strategic direction, we commit to the following five goals:

Five-Year DEI Goals

01

Recruit and retain a diverse ME community

  • Create equitable methods for recruitment, hiring/admissions, and onboarding
  • Identify ways to improve the experiences of and equalize success for our students, faculty, postdocs, and staff
02

Build and value DEI skills

  • Equip students, staff, faculty, and postdocs with knowledge of systemic injustices and the skills to promote equity and inclusion in their work.
  • Honor the dedication and contributions that our community members make to DEI
03

Communicate transparently

  • Design safe ways for sharing concerns and ideas about improving department climate
  • Provide updates to department progress in DEI
04

Develop an inclusive, healthy, and safe environment

  • Sponsor affinity groups and community gatherings around DEI
  • Improve accessibility of buildings, events, and courses
  • Support the physical and mental health of our students, faculty, postdocs, and students
05

Achieve inclusivity and social justice as core values in engineering education, practice, and research

  • Develop case studies and activities about social (in)justice for undergraduate and graduate courses
  • Integrate inclusive and just practices into department research, community norms, and leadership.

Strategic Plan Updates

Stay tuned to learn more about what we have accomplished during Year 1 of our DEI Strategic Plan.