The Office of Faculty Diversity & Development has established a Departmental Diversity Leaders initiative to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) across UT Southwestern’s departments.

Each department chair will appoint a diversity leader – a faculty member who will serve as an adviser on DEI issues – to sit on the department’s executive leadership team. Members will also meet regularly with each other to share ideas and expertise and promote best practices to advance DEI at UTSW, said Quinn Capers IV, M.D., Associate Dean for Faculty Diversity, who will guide the effort.

“The leaders will be the local champions that help diffuse DEI initiatives across campus,” Dr. Capers said. The goal, he said, is to make UT Southwestern “a national exemplar of diversity, equity, and inclusion” in academic medicine.

“This includes not only enhancing the compositional diversity of the faculty and trainees,” he explained, “but promoting a climate of inclusion, and ensuring that principles of equity are upheld in our clinical, research, and education missions.”

The 33 leaders appointed to the group from UT Southwestern departments will be given protected time to work on the effort, with dedicated funding set aside by President Daniel K. Podolsky, M.D.; W. P. Andrew Lee, M.D., Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, Provost, and Dean of UT Southwestern Medical School; and UT Southwestern departments.

Appointed diversity leaders will meet regularly as a collaborative group to discuss challenges and opportunities they have identified around DEI, then guide the development and implementation of initiatives to address them, Dr. Capers said. This approach to DEI recognizes that enhancing diversity in medicine and science is an effort that requires strategic planning, cross-departmental engagement, and institutional support to succeed, he said. Research shows that developing DEI competencies improves the quality of health care delivery and science, he said.