ADVANCE-Nebraska Initiative Award Recipients

Department of Mathematics - 2012/2013

Dr. Judy Walker and Chancellor Harvey Perlman

On February 1, 2013, Chancellor Harvey Perlman awarded the Third Annual Advance-Nebraska Initiative Award to the Department of Mathematics.

Dr. Judy Walker, Chair of the Department of Mathematics, accepted the award on behalf of the department.

Read more about this award, and Dr. Walker's acceptance speech in our February 15 newsletter

The Annual Advance-Nebraska Initiative Award is awarded to a STEM department that has creatively furthered the objectives of the ADVANCE initiative.



School of Biological Sciences - 2011/2012

The School of Biological Sciences successfully built a faculty that is more representative of female-male ratio in the discipline by implementing a proactive hiring policy in the 1990s. Some 37 percent of the school’s faculty are women, up from 10 percent 20 years ago. The school has aggressively pursued a dual-career hiring strategy and half of its female faculty have dual-career partners. The school also has utilized the opportunity-hire strategy to recruit female partners of faculty hired in other disciplines. Currently 16 of the school’s 45 budgeted or partially budgeted faculty are women. The school’s new director, Valery Forbes, is the first woman to head a STEM department in the history of the College of Arts and Sciences.

The school also has worked to help increase the visibility of women scientists by inviting women scientists to present at departmental seminars. Several faculty have leadership roles in Advance-NE initiatives. Several faculty actively mentor junior female faculty and the department’s women have been recognized for their efforts in promoting women in science. For example, Alexandra Basolo, professor, received an “Outstanding Contributions to the Status of Women” award; Eileen Hebets, associate professor, and Sabrina Russo, assistant professor, received Edgerton Junior Faculty awards from UNL; Basolo, Hebets, Forbes and Zoya Avramova, professor, have served on journal editorial boards. Avramova, Russo, Hebets and Gwen Bachman, associate professor, have served on National Science Foundation grant panels.


Electrical Engineering - 2010/2011

Electrical Engineering proactively and creatively recruited women to their applicant pools. Through active recruitment, the number of women on the faculty grew from zero to three in three years. To increase retention, EE instituted a formal mentoring program for all faculty and strongly promoted and encouraged their faculty to avail themselves of UNL’s family friendly policies. Finally, faculty were consistently made aware of and supported to take advantage of professional leadership opportunities.