Professor Heather Maynard has been selected for the award which honors her contribution to a diverse campus.
Each year, the UCLA Academic Senate Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (CODEI) committee honors one undergraduate student, graduate student, staff and up to four faculty members for their contributions to furthering a diverse, impartial and inclusive environment at UCLA.
In the announcement for the award, the CODEI committee highlighted Maynard efforts which led to the award selection: “Professor Maynard is the Director of the Chemistry Biology Interface (CBI), an important NIH-funded cross campus graduate training program at UCLA. The program trains students from different departments in the languages and techniques of chemistry and biology. In the short time she has been the director, Dr. Maynard has developed CBI into a model program with regards to diversity and inclusion. Not only has she made sure that there is equal female to male representation, but she also has considerably increased the representation of underrepresented minorities (URMs) to consistently 25-33% of the program. Professor Maynard also does an enormous amount of outreach work to the community. She started the Maynard Science Traveling Road Show, which consists of a collection of chemistry demonstrations targeting elementary students that include fake snow and gooey gak. These demonstrations have encouraged scientific interest in children across Los Angeles.”
Maynard is the Dr. Myung Ki Hong Professor in Polymer Science at UCLA, Director of the Chemistry Biology Interface Training Program, and Associate Director of Technology and Development for the California NanoSystems Institute. Her many awards include the 2018 ACS Cope C. Scholar Award, the 2017 Fulbright Specialist Award for New Zealand, the Herbert Newby Award for Outstanding Research at UCLA, and the Hanson-Dow Award for Excellence in Teaching. Maynard is an ACS POLY, ACS PMSE, Leverhulme, Kavli Frontiers, and Royal Society of Chemistry Fellow, and was a member of the 2016-17 U.S. Defense Science Study Group.
To learn more about Maynard’s research, visit her group’s website.
