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About the Institute for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA Institute)

Endowed Lecture Special Event

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Location: Current students will receive Zoom details via Canvas
Speaker:
Lynford Goddard
University of Illinois

The IDEA Institute was founded in 2019 with the mission of supporting scholarly research, innovation, collaboration, and leadership in the areas of inclusion, diversity, equity, and access at all levels: faculty, staff, students, and K-12 outreach/public engagement. The Institute plays a crucial role in the 2020 strategic plan of the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois. This strategic plan highlights diversity and inclusion as one of the six major thrusts. The Institute brings together nearly 200 faculty, staff, and students from engineering, across campus, and the local community to collaborate towards a shared objective. This large and diverse collective enables substantive improvements and impact at scale. In this talk, I will present a few highlights of Institute activities including the Grassroots Initiatives to Address Needs Together (GIANT) program, which funds and mentors teams led by students, staff, or faculty and the work of the Anti-Racism Task Force (ARTF), which formulated actionable recommendations for the College, its departments and units, and its individuals to combat racism.

Dr. Lynford Goddard received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford in 2005. His thesis topic was 1.5-micron gallium arsenide-based lasers. He conducted postdoctoral research at Lawrence Livermore National Lab on photonic integrated circuits and sensors. He is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Founding Director of the Institute for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois. His research group fabricates, tests, and models photonic sensors, circuits, and instrumentation, develops novel device processing techniques, and applies quantitative phase microscopy for nanoscale science and for semiconductor wafer metrology. He received the PECASE award from President Obama and the Early Career Public Engagement Award from AAAS. He is a Fellow of SPIE and of OSA and co-author of over 200 publications and has 13 issued patents.

Seminar Series