Virginia Tech® home

Research + Faculty Development

sylvester johnson

Research + Faculty Development

With an investment in faculty endowments and dedicated funds, we have the ability to encourage research that advances equity and social justice, recruit and retain underrepresented faculty, and support career development for faculty who are advancing inclusion and diversity.

Photo: Sylvester A. Johnson, Assistant Vice Provost for the Humanities and founding director of the Virginia Tech Center for Humanities, is a nationally recognized expert on technology, race, religion, and national security. Through the Tech for Humanity initiative, his award-winning scholarship is advancing new approaches to understanding the human condition and social institutions of power in an age of intelligent machines and other forms of technology innovation.

FACULTY SPOTLIGHT

It is exciting to design quantum control techniques that our experimental collaborators go on to demonstrate in the lab. We not only get to see our theoretical predictions come to life, but also know that they could have an impact on groundbreaking future technologies.

Sophia Economou, Ph.D, Professor of Physics and The Hassinger Senior Fellow of Physics, is charting a new path in quantum physics, focused on theoretical research in quantum information science, including quantum computing, quantum communications, and quantum simulation algorithms.

SOPHIA ECONOMOU

The gender gap persists in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM) fields–physics has one of the largest. Faculty endowments support professors like Dr. Economou, allowing Virginia Tech to recruit and retain top-tier underrepresented faculty knowing they will have the resources to support their teaching and research initiatives. Additionally, underrepresented students have the opportunity to engage with a diverse array of faculty in leadership positions.

FEATURED PROGRAMS

Faculty Women of Color in the Academy

The Faculty Women of Color in the Academy conference is a unique educational and professional opportunity for indigenous and women of color in higher education to network, engage, and learn with colleagues from around the country. Conference sessions explore topics of leadership, career advancement, personal well-being and scholar activism.

Future Faculty Diversity Program

The Future Faculty Diversity Program is an exciting and rewarding four-day program designed to increase the representation of faculty traditionally underrepresented in strategic priority populations in the United States, including American Indian/ Alaska Native, African American/Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and Native Hawaiian/ Pacific Islander.

Inclusive Excellence at Virginia Tech

Improving the learning environments for students from underrepresented regions of Virginia and all students in the Virginia Tech sciences. We work to foster inclusion and success through inclusive pedagogy, addressing implicit biases and issues of climate in STEM classrooms and creating curricular paths that are flexible and embedded with high impact practices.

Juneteenth Scholars Program

Initiated in response to recent momentum in the Black Lives Matter movement, the program will support research by faculty members on topics such as emancipatory movements, structures of oppression, institutional silence about violence, the courage of activists, and the need for systemic structural change in the United States and globally.

RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT

Broderick Turner Headshot

[With this research, my hope is to] unravel and uncover the theoretical underpinnings of issues that impact the lives of marginalized and vulnerable consumers: surveillance, gender identity, and poverty.

Assistant Professor of Marketing, Broderick Turner, commenting on his groundbreaking research focused on video surveillance of police actions and how people interpret different types of police footage.

Inspired by our land-grant identity and guided by our motto, Ut Prosim (That I May Serve), Virginia Tech is an inclusive community of knowledge, discovery, and creativity and thus we need a diversity of thought leaders teaching our students and directing our world class research.

Contact LINK today to discuss how you can impact inclusion and diversity at Virginia Tech.

linklicenselaunch@vt.edu |  (540) 231-1782