Page 2 - CEMS News Summer 2020

MESSAGE FROM THE HEAD
Determination in the face of challenge
CEMS confronts racism & the pandemic in first half of 2020.
C. Daniel Frisbie
This past January, I imagined that my summer message would be about the 50 year anniversary of our materials science program, which was founded in 1970 when metallurgy merged with chemical engineering to form CEMS. But the year 2020 has taken us all in very different directions than we anticipated.
The murder of George Floyd at the doorstep
of our campus on May 25th and the ensuing protests and violence sent shock waves across the University, the Twin Cities, our nation,
and the world. These events had a profound impact on many members of CEMS and brought into sharp focus the challenges we face as
a community in creating a truly equitable environment for all students, postdocs, faculty, and staff regardless of race, nationality, gender, gender-identity, or sexual orientation. We must acknowledge, for example, that we don’t have many African Americans in CEMS, and we must
understand why this is so and commit to making positive change. A diverse and inclusive culture is already an important goal for our department, but discrimination and bias have many dimensions, and complacency about this reality is not an option for us.
The CEMS faculty have written a public statement (see the adjacent page) affirming our values as a teaching and learning community, and pledging collaborative
work with all members of the department – students, postdocs, faculty, and staff
– to create a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment. We have also created a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Working Group composed of all constituents that will focus on listening, understanding the issues, and creating
a diversity strategic plan. Other plans are also in the making and I look forward to updating you on progress we will make in DEI, alongside the many important accomplishments of our community in teaching, research, and service. Ensuring diversity and equity in our department is not only the right path from an ethical standpoint, but it is also crucial to our overall success as a top engineering program seeking to attract the brightest talent from around the state, the nation, and the world.
Of course, this change and self-reflection in recent months has been occurring on the backdrop of the pandemic that swept into Minnesota in mid-March and forced a temporary stop of all experimental research as well as a rapid switch to online teaching. The pandemic poses real challenges to universities, as it does to
SUMMER 2020
DEPARTMENT OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING AND MATERIALS SCIENCE HEAD
C. Daniel Frisbie
EDITORS
Courtney Billing Gayle Gabrielski Mary Kosowski
CEMS News is published semi- annually by the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science for alumni, faculty, staff, students, and friends of the department.
Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
College of Science & Engineering University of Minnesota
151 Amundson Hall
421 Washington Avenue SE Minneapolis, MN 55455-0132 USA
Phone: 612-625-1313
Fax: 612-626-7246
Email: cemsdept@umn.edu cemsalum@umn.edu cemsnext100@umn.edu
© 2020 Regents of the University of Minnesota.
All rights reserved.
Connect with CEMS
Visit our website at
www.cems.umn.edu
CEMSUMN
Join our Facebook group
CEMS-UMN
Join the CEMS group on LinkedIn
@UMNCEMS Follow us on Instagram
2 www.cems.umn.edu