Research Projects

This project launches a new collaboration focused on college student mental health, well-being, and success. The collaboration will focus on the intersection of mental health, climate issues, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, including collection of new survey data regarding mental health and college experiences, with a focus on students of color and students from immigrant families. The data collection will involve the University of Michigan as well as other diverse schools nationwide, leveraging the existing infrastructure of the Healthy Minds Study. Primary goals are to obtain a detailed picture of how students of color from various backgrounds are faring in terms of mental health (depression, anxiety, and other common issues), how mental health relates to factors such as sense of belonging and experiences of discrimination in campus communities, and how we can create more supportive programs and climates.

This project is led by the U-M Healthy Minds Network, in collaboration with NCID and the U-M Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

As student and scholarly communities become more diverse, there is a need to hire faculty who will provide inclusive educational experiences and contribute to our understandings of diversity, equity, and inclusion in research and scholarship. A strategy that has been adopted across the nation to identify such faculty has been through the requirement of a diversity statement during the hiring process. This study illuminates the critical characteristics of a diversity statement; how academic leaders are adopting the use of diversity statements in their evaluation processes, and how this practice impacts departmental diversity. 

This project is a partnership with Dr. Fiona Lee, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Psychology and Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Professional Development at the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

This project involves the development and articulation of a new leadership model, with an explicit focus on forms of leadership that are socially conscious and aimed at positive social transformation.

CLICK HERE to read more about the SALT Model.

This project is a partnership with Dr. Samuel Museus, associate professor of higher education and student affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington and project director of the National Institute for Transformation & Equity.

MVisible Voices is an intergenerational media series centering the voices on the margins. Narratives are hardly straightforward or unanimous; rather, they are contested, negotiated, multiplicitous, and embedded in structures of power and histories of oppression. The university is a site of narrative negotiations and struggles as people and ideas come together to share social and intellectual space. Yet, not everyone will experience the university space as welcoming, collegial, or as promoting fellowship and belonging. Some bodies are more accepted, able to pass through the space as a familiar, while others are marginalized, relegated to the social and historical periphery. 

History as told through lived experience can help illuminate what's been forgotten, decentered, moved to the periphery, and excluded. It can also serve to relocate particular narratives to the center. MVisible Voices is about recognizing the lived experiences of people whose narratives are not always visible, heard, or centered, but whose stories are very much a part of the university's history.

Lead collaborators for this project includes our Scholarship-to-Practice Fellows, Elizabeth James (Department of Afroamerican and African Studies) and Shelly Conner (U-M Alumni Association). Additional NCID collaboration partners include faculty, staff, and students from the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, U-M Office of Academic Innovation, the U-M Alumni Association, and the U-M Bicentennial Committee.