The College of Chicago is honoring six members of the UChicago neighborhood as recipients of this 12 months’s Range Management Awards, which acknowledge College school, college students, employees and alumni who’ve proven a dedication to fostering justice and equality.
The 2023 winners are Prof. Monica E. Peek, alumni Bea Younger, AB’60, MAT’64, and Rick Palmore, JD’77, employees member Tracye A. Matthews, graduate scholar Lizeth Tamayo and School scholar Tyler Okeke. They are going to be acknowledged throughout UChicago’s Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Celebration on Jan. 23 at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. (Be taught extra about that event here.)
“Range is central to the College of Chicago’s mission of discovery and is a core worth that we constantly search to advance,” mentioned Waldo E. Johnson Jr., vice provost of the College. “It’s an honor to acknowledge these members of our educational neighborhood whose creativity has generated pathbreaking scholarship, fueled innovation, and promoted inclusive engagement inside our campus neighborhood and past.”
College recipient: Monica E. Peek
Monica E. Peek is the Ellen H. Block Professor of Well being Justice, affiliate vice-chair for analysis school improvement within the Division of Drugs, govt medical director of neighborhood well being improvements, affiliate director of the Chicago Heart for Diabetes Translation Analysis, and director of analysis/affiliate director of the MacLean Heart for Medical Medical Ethics. She is a famend well being companies researcher, bioethicist and internist centered on well being fairness.
Her analysis concentrates on selling equitable doctor-patient relationships amongst racial minorities, integrating medical and social wants and of sufferers, and addressing the influence of structural racism on well being outcomes. She has revealed extensively on social determinants of well being, well being disparities and well being care training.
Peek has served on the Nationwide Advisory Council of the Company for Healthcare Analysis and High quality, Nationwide Govt Council of the American Diabetes Affiliation, Nationwide Council of the Society of Common Inner Drugs, and Worldwide Board of Administrators for Physicians for Human Rights. She was a planning committee member of the Nationwide Academies’ workshop sequence on Evolving Disaster Requirements of Care and Classes from COVID-19. Moreover, she helped develop COVID-19 Disaster Requirements of Look after the state of Illinois and was a member of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Racial Fairness Fast Response crew. She is a marketing consultant to CME Outfitters, the place she leads a nationwide initiative designed to supply well being fairness training to clinicians.
Peek acquired her MD from Johns Hopkins College, acquired her MPH from Johns Hopkins College and earned her MSc from the College of Chicago. In 2022, Peek was elected to Nationwide Academy of Drugs, which is taken into account one of many highest honors within the fields of well being and medication.
Alumni recipients: Bea Younger, AB’60, MAT’64, and Rick Palmore, JD’77
Bea Younger’s profession has spanned greater than 60 years, addressing racial disparities in each academic and company organizations.
She started her profession as a U.S. historical past highschool trainer and co-founded, in 1960, The Amistad Society, a corporation dedicated to introducing Black Historical past to lecturers and neighborhood members. She later taught a Black Historical past graduate course on the Heart for Interior Metropolis Research. The Scholar Nonviolent Coordinating Committee invited Younger to co-develop and implement a part of the 1964 Mississippi Summer season Freedom Colleges curriculum. Younger was requested to create the Illinois Fee on Human Relations’ first Academic Providers Division, accountable for integrating Illinois Public Colleges. She was later appointed because the Fee’s Govt Director. Younger went on to hitch Harbridge Home, Inc., a world administration consulting agency, establishing the agency’s Managing Range Observe.
She grew to become one of many earliest pioneers within the variety and inclusion business. Her organizational improvement method to cultural change impacted scores of Fortune 500 corporations. Twenty years later, Younger shaped the Kaleidoscope Group, an entrepreneurial agency that at this time continues as a frontrunner in variety and inclusion work. Most just lately, she created Bea Younger Associates, LLC: Collaboration for Academic Fairness, which helps determine practices to handle systemic racism and advance educational and alternative achievement. Success in two Illinois faculty districts was highlighted in Restoring the Soul to Schooling, which Younger co-authored.
Younger earned her bachelor of arts and grasp of arts in educating on the College of Chicago, the place she additionally accomplished doctoral coursework in training and organizational improvement.
Rick Palmore is a nationally acknowledged advocate for variety within the authorized business. With almost 20 years of expertise serving as normal counsel and as a public firm director, he advises private and non-private firms on danger administration and governance points throughout practices and business sectors.
Palmore at the moment serves as senior counsel within the Chicago workplace of Dentons US LLP, the successor agency to Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. He’s additionally the principal of Palmore Consulting, an govt teaching agency. Earlier roles embody management positions at Common Mills, Inc. and Sara Lee Company. Palmore additionally labored as a trial lawyer and served as an assistant U.S. legal professional in Illinois.
Palmore is the creator of A Name to Motion: Range within the Authorized Occupation, which urges normal counsel to drive variety by their very own actions and departments and by holding legislation companies accountable. This initiative grew into the Management Council on Authorized Range, a collaboration between normal counsel and managing companions that at the moment consists of greater than 400 chief authorized officers and legislation agency managing companions. Greater than 10,000 legal professionals have participated in LCLD’s expertise improvement applications. As founding chair emeritus, Palmore serves on the LCLD board of administrators and the manager committee. He has been acknowledged as probably the most influential normal counsels in America by the Nationwide Legislation Journal, Inside Counsel journal, and Company Board Member journal.
Palmore acquired a bachelor of arts diploma in economics from Yale College and a JD from the College of Chicago Legislation College.
Workers recipient: Tracye A. Matthews
Tracye A. Matthews is a historian, curator, and documentary filmmaker working inside and between the realms of academia, public historical past, museums, and documentary movie. Most just lately, she produced the Academy Award-shortlisted documentary quick ’63 Boycott with Kartemquin Movies. She is at the moment govt director of the Heart for the Research of Race, Politics and Tradition, the place she started her UChicago profession as a Mellon Postdoctoral Instructing Fellow.
For the previous 18 years, Matthews has performed a pivotal management function in selling engaged scholarship and advocacy round race and anti-racism at CSRPC and throughout the College. She has established and sustained quite a few partnerships, positioning CSRPC as a key connector of College and South Aspect communities and labored tirelessly to supply progressive public programming and launch all kinds of latest initiatives. She co-created CSRPC’s decade previous Artist-in-Residence Program with Arts + Public Life, was the lead organizer of the Timuel Black at 100 Symposium and was instrumental in growing the Mass Incarceration Working Group, Land Acknowledgement Working Group, Black Students Salon, and Nappy Hour, a social networking area for Black employees.
Matthews is co-founder of the Intersectional Black Panther Celebration Historical past Mission, a public programming collective, and a board member of Sisters in Cinema Media Arts Heart. Previous to her arrival at UChicago, she was a public historian on the Chicago Historical past Museum and an assistant professor in Africana research on the College of Massachusetts-Boston.
Matthews acquired her Ph.D. in historical past and bachelor of arts diploma in psychology from the College of Michigan.
Scholar recipients: Lizeth Tamayo and Tyler Okeke
Lizeth Tamayo is a Ph.D. candidate in genetic epidemiology. Her analysis broadly focuses on the interaction between genetic and environmental components and their influence on advanced illness danger in low-resource and understudied populations. Extra particularly, her dissertation undertaking bridges a number of features of methodological coaching associated to genome-wide affiliation research, gene-environment interactions, and the implementation of a public well being intervention of returning genetic outcomes.
Tamayo is a member of the Graduate Recruit Initiative Staff, a scholar group centered on sustainably bettering the recruitment and retention of marginalized teams in STEM. Inside GRIT, Tamayo helped create an advocacy crew centered on worldwide and immigrant college students. She additionally co-authored a proposal to permit college students within the Organic Sciences Division to fulfill one in every of their two Instructing Assistantship necessities by sustained involvement in variety, fairness, and inclusion work. These DEI Assistantships, or “DA-ships” have been piloted final 12 months. Tamayo serves on the BSD Range Committee and has devoted important time and power to serving to college students and college higher perceive the experiences of underrepresented and worldwide/immigrant college students.
She can also be co-founder of the Nationwide Affiliation of LSAMP (Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation) Alumni. LSAMP is an NSF-funded program centered on growing the illustration of marginalized teams in science, and NALA permits trainees to stay linked and function assets for each other.
Tamayo accomplished her undergraduate research in biochemistry and French at Augustana School and her Grasp of Public Well being with a focus in epidemiology from the College of Illinois at Chicago.
Tyler Okeke is a fourth-year scholar within the School pursuing a joint BA/MA in worldwide relations. He has demonstrated a deep dedication to variety and inclusion by quite a few management roles with Undergraduate Scholar Authorities and the African and Caribbean Scholar Affiliation.
Final 12 months, Okeke served as co-president of ACSA and expanded the board’s programming concentrate on the politics, economics, tradition, and actions of the African continent and its diaspora. By way of his involvement with USG, he has made lasting contributions to the campus neighborhood as a School Council consultant, Vice Chair of School Council, Vice President of Advocacy, and most just lately, Undergraduate Liaison to the College’s Board of Trustees, assembly repeatedly with trustees and senior directors as a part of the Scholar Views Collection. Okeke labored to determine the USG Committee on Marginalized Scholar Affairs, which advocates for the wants of scholars, maintains relationships with scholar teams to tell USG coverage, and supplies help and funding for a wide range of student-driven initiatives and occasions. He additionally based and directed the Maroon Match consulting program, connecting scholar consultants with South Aspect companies and nonprofits which have been adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Okeke was a analysis intern with the Regional Workplace for Sub-Saharan Africa on the U.S. Commerce & Growth Company and has written extensively about African political financial system centered on commerce points, international funding, extractive industries and frameworks to equitably deal with local weather change—publishing work within the Gate, the Chicago Journal of International Coverage, and Hampton Suppose.
