Graduate Climate Conference Diversity Statement

The Graduate Climate Conference (GCC) is committed to cultivating an equitable and inclusive environment for all members of our community. We believe diversity and inclusion are essential to creating a thriving community that can achieve excellence in research, and thus we strive to ensure people of all backgrounds feel welcome at our conference. We work to foster an environment wherein we recognize and celebrate the visible and invisible characteristics that make individuals different from one another. 

The GCC recognizes the historically colonialist and racist roots of Western science, and we are committed to ensuring that this conference is a space where students have the opportunity to share traditional knowledge as well as highlight and/or address inequities in climate science. 

Specific actions that the GCC will take in order to ensure an equitable and inclusive environment across the application process to the conference itself are:
  • Blind evaluation of all applications conducted by two committee members. 
  • Establishing clear expectations for appropriate and inclusive behavior during the conference, as laid out in the GCC Code of Conduct. 
    • All participants will be expected to read and agree to the GCC Code of Conduct in advance of the conference. We believe that adherence to this Code of Conduct will help advance our goals of enabling and encouraging all meeting attendees to participate fully in the conference. 
  • Providing participants with a number of papers on diversity, equity and inclusion, that all are expected to read. These papers will be relevant to a keynote session during the GCC that will focus on topics covered by the readings. 
  • Hosting participatory workshops, of which 50% will be relevant to the topics of diversity, equity and inclusion.
  • Committing to record and evaluate the conference in the following ways:
    • Participants will be asked for their gender and racial identities. Since the review process will be conducted blind to identity and institution affiliation, we expect the participants to reflect the population of applicants, but upon completion, if the accepted population is unbalanced in some way, we will re-evaluate the review criteria to aim for equal representation.
    • Participants will be prompted to identify their pronouns upon registering, and during the Q&A sessions, moderators will strive to maintain a balance between individuals of different identities when soliciting questions.
    • GCC organizers will conduct a survey at the end of the conference to collect feedback on conference diversity, equity, and inclusivity and what future GCCs might do better.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Resources

We are pleased to announce our keynote speakers:
  • Dr. Kuheli Dutt is the Assistant Director for Academic Affairs and Diversity at Lamont, and serves as Lamont's Diversity Officer. Dr. Dutt has a PhD in public policy, and extensive experience developing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and initiatives. Her research focuses on STEM diversity issues, with a focus on implicit bias, including gender bias, racial bias, and LGBTQ+ awareness. 
  • Dr. Geeta Persad is an Assistant Professor of Climate Science at UT Austin’s Department of Geological Sciences. Her research centers on innovative applications of numerical global climate modeling to understand the behavior and societal impacts of the physical climate system. She previously worked as a Senior Climate Scientist at the Union of
    Concerned Scientists, and a Research Associate at the Carnegie Institution for Science.

​Dr. Kuheli Dutt​ has provided the following articles so you can familiarize yourself with her work in advance of her talk and the DEI Discussion session.


Further Reading: