Professor Vickie Mays honored with Faculty Career Commitment to Diversity DEI Award

Faculty Career Commitment to Diversity DEI Award Recipient

Vickie M. Mays, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Health Policy and Management is this year's Faculty Career Commitment to Diversity DEI Award recipient. Professor Mays has dedicated her entire career to researching the health consequences of race-based discrimination. She is co-author of a classic paper in HIV/AIDS research, on perceptions of AIDS risk and risk reduction among Latina and African-American women and her research on sexual and gender minority equity has been cited in Supreme Court cases. In 1998, Professor Mays became the first African-American to serve as Chair of the Academic Senate. As the Chair, she had oversight responsibilities for 22 committees including Planning and Budget, Undergraduate and Graduate Council, Faculty Welfare, Research and others.

During her tenure as the Senate Chair, she managed to successfully double funds received from the UCLA Foundation as a contribution to the Faculty Grants Program. She also served in the cabinet of Vice Chancellor of Research Economou as an AVC for Research Diversity, developing with her colleagues the UCLA Research Initiative for Diversity and Equity, which funded 17 small grants on campus climate. These transdisciplinary grants provided insights into ways to address campus climate for specific populations on campus, through intergroup dialogues, through the improvement of classroom practices and overall general climate interventions to enhance inclusion at UCLA.

Professor Mays' teaching has contributed not just to the subject matter of the Departments of Psychology and Health Policy and Management but her courses have been listed in such departments as African-American Studies and Women's Studies and in the near future will also be cross-listed in American Indian Studies. She is among the early faculty who throughout her career regardless of her departmental teaching load assignments taught diversity courses before they were supported. Her concerns about minorities and research abuses in racial/ethnic minority communities led her to develop a course entitled "Research Ethics in Health and Behavioral Research with Ethnic Minority Populations" which was designed to train academic researchers as well as community CEO's about research ethics in order to improve ethical practices and empower communities to better negotiate their participation in research studies. She is working with high schools in predominantly racial/ethnic minority communities to bring them an innovative AP Introductory Psychology Course as well as developing her research ethics curriculum as a certificate program for community colleges. All of these activities are designed to increase the pipeline into higher education and employment opportunities in research.

Professor Mays is currently the Director of the UCLA Center for Bridging Research Innovation, Training and Education (BRITE) for Minority Health Disparities Solutions. As the Director of BRITE (an NIH funded P60 Center), she is engaged in cognitive studies of how race-based discrimination impacts cognitive processing by the brain, how the stress of race-based discrimination contributes to early mortality, developing smoking cessations apps for Korean youth 14-19 years of age and has translated the IRB ethics training into Mexican Spanish for monolingual users with a 7th-9th grade education to increase their ability to participate in research beyond just being outreach workers. Her activities at UCLA have been designed to create an open environment for all.