Lee Selected as UMass ADVANCE Fellow
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Assistant Professor Sunghoon Ivan Lee of the UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) has been selected as one of 46 UMass Amherst ADVANCE program faculty fellows for 2021–2022. Funded through a five-year, $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation, UMass ADVANCE is designed to transform the campus by cultivating faculty equity, inclusion, and success.
As a faculty fellow, Lee will act as a liaison for UMass ADVANCE within CICS, promoting ADVANCE initiatives while keeping ADVANCE program members up to date on equity and inclusion initiatives within the college. The theme for this program year is “Shared Decision-Making and Equity in Faculty Governance.”
“We look forward to collaborating with this year’s fellows and learning from each other,” said Laurel Smith-Doerr, principal investigator for the grant. “Our research shows that transparent shared decision-making is critical for faculty inclusion and career equity. The ADVANCE theme this year also relates to our continuing work to mitigate the unequal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, which threaten to increase barriers to gender and race equity among faculty if left unaddressed.”
According to Lee, he has faced a variety of prejudices and microaggressions as a person of Asian descent, even in his role as a professor at UMass Amherst. From ADVANCE, he hopes to gain a deeper understanding of systematic gender and racial inequality at UMass Amherst, and find ways to promote a more equitable, diverse, generous, and inclusive campus.
“As an educator, I feel that I am obligated to foster an academic community where differences in individuals are praised and accepted,” he explains. “I believe that diversity is particularly important in our community, where we are eager to innovate with novel solutions, and often novelty comes from diverse backgrounds and opinions.”
