Yvette Moore is director of the EXCEL program in Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering, where she works to recruit and retain undergraduate scholars in engineering disciplines. Through her career, Yvette has held several roles in higher education at various universities and has worked with diversity, equity, and inclusion based programs in the Pittsburgh metropolitan community.   She has earned various diversity awards at Shippensburg University and the University of Pittsburgh for her community engagement among the undergraduate scholars, staff, faculty, and community stakeholders.   ..read more

Ron Idoko (A&S ’05, GSPIA ’07) serves as director of the office of social innovation in honors education in the Frederick Honors College, associate director of the Center on Race & Social Problems, and founding director of the Racial Equity Consciousness Institute.   He recently was presented with the University’s 2024 Martin Luther King Jr. Creating a Just Community Award. The award includes a $5,000 prize.   “To fully address the systemic inequities in our community and society at large, we must recognize and confront it in all of its complexity,” said Idoko, who thanked t ..read more

Feminista Jones is a feminist writer, public speaker, community activist and retired social worker. She is an award-winning writer and the author of the critically acclaimed "Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World From the Tweets to the Streets" (Beacon). Her work centers around diversity, equity and inclusion, critical race theory, intersectionality, mental health, queer identity and social work. She teaches courses on race, gender and LGBTQ experiences at Temple University. Jones will be delivering the closing remarks Jan. 24 at the University of Pittsburgh's 2024 D ..read more

Lisa Strother Upsher is director of health sciences diversity, equity, and inclusion. She came to the University of Pittsburgh after leading DEI efforts at the Center for Organ Recovery and Education, where she was instrumental in having CORE declared a site of the Minority Organ Tissue Transplant Education Program, promoting positive health behaviors through public education by focusing on diseases and behaviors that lead to the need for transplantation in minoritized communities. Bee Schindler is assistant director of health sciences diversity, equity, and inclusion and program manager for t ..read more

Tessa Provins is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Provins is also one of the organizers of the 2023 Indigenous Cultural Festival at the University of Pittsburgh.  Her primary research examines the impact of legislative institutional design on the behavior and outcomes for groups divided by party status, gender, and race/ethnicity. She utilizes the variation in institutional designs across American legislative institutions — at the state and local level — to explain how institutional features effect the relationships between party leaders and the ..read more

Rory A. Cooper is the founding director and VA senior research career scientist of the Human Engineering Research Laboratories at the University of Pittsburgh. He has been a member of the Pitt faculty since 1994 and chaired the Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology from 1997 to 2018. A bioengineer, Dr. Cooper was inducted into the National Inventor Hall of Fame in 2023. He has authored or co-authored more than 370 peer-reviewed journal publications and has been awarded dozens of patents. Dr. Cooper is the author of "Rehabilitation Engineering Applied to Mobility and Manipulation ..read more