The Graduate School has recently appointed two new staff members to its Office for Graduate Diversity and Inclusion (OGDI).
Dr. Zita Nunes (left) has assumed the position of Director and Senior Faculty Advisor at OGDI, and Christopher Perez the position of Associate Director. Both joined OGDI during the summer as part of the Graduate School’s commitment 1) to enhancing and expanding our efforts to recruit, retain, and support underrepresented and underserved graduate student populations and 2) to initiating a campus conversation on diversity and inclusion in graduate education at UMD and nationally.
Zita Nunes is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies. She teaches and conducts research in the areas of African American/African Diaspora literature, the literature of the Americas, and literary theory. She has received numerous awards, including Fulbright Fellowships to Brazil and Mozambique. On campus, she has been a fellow in the ADVANCE Leadership Program and served as research mentor in the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program.
Christopher Perez (right) is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies. 
He has held positions in the Rawlings Undergraduate Leadership Fellows program in the School of Public Policy, as well as in the Colleges of Journalism and of Arts and Humanities. His research focuses on cases in which LGBTQ individuals have successfully petitioned for political asylum in the United States.
OGDI will continue to advance such current major initiatives as the NSF-Funded PROMISE: Maryland’s Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP), the Ronald E. McNair Graduate Fellowship Program, and the new NIH-funded National Research Mentoring Network – CIC Academic Network (NRMN-CAN), which provides professional development for underrepresented graduate students, post-docs, and junior faculty in the biomedical sciences. In addition, ODGI will sponsor a series of workshops over the course of the academic year, beginning in October.
The Graduate School, through OGDI, also will be stepping up its initiatives to recruit a diverse graduate student body. We will partner with other campus units to represent UMD at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS), the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program conferences, and other fora.