UCI ICTS Black Thriving Initiative Strategic Plan
The UC Irvine Institute for Clinical and Translational Science (ICTS) has added a set of objectives, metrics, and milestones to our strategic plan that are aligned with the Black Thriving Initiative created by the Office of Inclusive Excellence at UCI.
This new element of our strategic plan reflects our longstanding commitment to supporting inclusive excellence across all of our programs and services and continuously engaging in self-evaluation to adjust our course as necessary to achieve our aims. In brief, we are committed to the following actions, organized under the headings of the three pillars established by the Black Thriving Initiative.
First Pillar: Leveraging the Mission: Harness research and teaching to accelerate the understanding of the black experience and drivers of well-being.
• The ICTS will seek to recruit diverse trainees for our T, K, and medical student research programs.
• ICTS faculty will participate in campus-based funding applications designed to increase the number of black trainees who apply for the Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.
Second Pillar: Culture change through personal, professional, and institutional accountability
• The ICTS Steering Committee will embed a quarterly speaker series within our weekly steering committee meetings to engage our members in a process of culture change.
• A quarterly speaker will be integrated into the Brown Bag meetings attended by T and K trainees to engage them in the process of culture change.
• A session will be integrated into the ICTS Translational Science Day to address how race has been incorrectly used in science and medicine as a biological construct to infer causality of disease.
Third Pillar: Engage Black Communities: Linking the future of UCI to the success of black people and communities.
• The ICTS Evaluation Team will prepare and disseminate an annual report of progress toward these milestones.
• A statement of our commitment to diversity and inclusion will be released to the UCI community and posted on the ICTS website.
• The ICTS Steering Committee will host Vice-Chancellor Doug Haynes at our ICTS Steering Committee to review our plan to address diversity and inclusion.
• The ICTS will establish an outreach program to increase diverse applications to the California State Summer School for Mathematics & Science (COSMOS) program and links to diverse mentors in the California State University system.
These objectives have been discussed and adopted by the ICTS Steering Committee in consultation with Vice-Chancellor Doug Haynes and have been added to the ICTS Strategic Plan. The first annual report evaluating our progress towards these aims will be issued in the spring of 2022 and will be posted to our website. In this way, we are making a public commitment to join those throughout the UCI community who have come together in this moment of cultural awakening to address existing inequities and strive toward greater diversity across all of our programs.
