The Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion group at the Institute for Astronomy has the following goals:
-Make the IfA an inclusive and welcoming space
-Recognize the experience of feeling excluded
-Identify and improve on current problem areas
-Apply lessons broadly to attack systemic barriers preventing inclusion.

We meet twice a month for an hour for discussion sessions and programming meetings. Please contact michael.petersen@roe.ac.uk if interested in joining our mailing list!

Newsletter project

Academics love to learn, so we developed a scheme to meet our colleagues on their level by sending a newsletter on a roughly monthly basis. See the most recent newsletter here, or links to the whole list here.



American Astronomical Society's Division of Dynamical Astronomy meeting

The AAS DDA meeting in May 2021 featured the following call:
"A call for contributed talks or posters on Strategies to make graduate programs more inclusive: admissions, bridge programs, and the graduate school experience. Each participant may contribute an abstract for this session in addition to the allowed science abstracts. We emphasize that presenters in this category need not consider themselves experts in this area and short presentations designed to spark discussion are encouraged.”
I contributed a talk discussing the EDI efforts at the Institute for Astronomy. (Transcript here)

A recent recorded talk I gave describing the EDI team at the IfA.



Accountability

The group is always interested in improving. To that end, we conducted a review at the start of 2021 that included a short survey. You can view the responses here.