‘Diverse’ Names Zatz One of the Nation’s Leading Women in Higher Ed

“My work in pursuit of diversity and inclusion is the most meaningful work that I do,” Zatz said. “I’m honored to be recognized in this group of exceptional women in higher education.”

Zatz created the Graduate Dean’s Advisory Council on Diversity and has been instrumental in developing several other diversity focused programs:

• A grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is helping UC Merced further diversify its community of graduate students and faculty.
• The National Science Foundation’s Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) California HSI Alliance are connecting four Hispanic Serving Institutions in California with the specific goal of developing, implementing and testing a model for creating a more diverse STEM faculty workforce.
• The Interdisciplinary Computational Graduate Education (ICGE) program, also funded by the National Science Foundation, aims to enhance student success and reduce graduate student attrition rates in the computational sciences, particularly for underrepresented minorities and first-generation students.
• The Competitive Edge Summer Bridge program began in 2015 to assist new graduate students — many of whom are first-generation and/or underrepresented minorities — in making strong transitions to their doctoral programs and, ultimately, help cultivate a diverse professoriate.

Zatz also proposed the Chancellor's Dialogue on Diversity and Interdisciplinarity, now in its third year, to expand the campus’s commitment to diversity and inclusion among students and faculty and staff members.

“We must have institutional change if we’re going to have societal change,” Zatz said. “I’m totally committed to seeing UC Merced lead in this area. We’ve made tremendous progress, but we’ve still got a long way to go.”

Previously, Zatz served as vice provost for Academic Personnel, associate dean in the Graduate College, and director of the School of Justice & Social Inquiry at Arizona State University. She was appointed Fulbright senior specialist to Australia’s Monash University and RMIT University in 2012 and held positions as distinguished visiting professor in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University and as visiting researcher in the Faculty of Law at the University of Havana. From 2012-2014, Zatz served as director of the National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Sciences Program.