Aradhna Tripati wins 2017 Bromery Award for Minorities

The Geological Society of America awarded UCLA’s Aradhna Tripati the 2017 Bromery Award for Minorities, which is given to a minority who has “made significant contributions to research in the geological sciences, or those who have been instrumental in opening the geoscience field to other minorities.”

Tripati was nominated by UCLA professor emeritus Raymond V. Ingersoll, who noted her strong contributions to the field of paleoclimatology and the fact that she has “mentored more than 120 high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, and postdoctoral scientists, many of whom are minorities.”

In receiving the award, Tripati wrote in a statement that “[a]lthough it is now over half a century after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, our collective actions and inactions have not yet achieved equity or equality in education or employment in the geosciences or environmental science.”

“Perhaps we need to consider what we are all doing is not enough,” she added. “That diversity is not just something to include in our grant proposals and reports, but is something larger that is in fact integral to science and innovation, and to the fabric of a civil society. The presence of diversity signals the health and well-being of a field both internally and externally. A lack of diversity speaks to wasted talent, a stifling of creativity, and intellectual bias and narrowness. Our field is weaker because we have not effectively addressed diversity.”

To better address the problem, Tripati this summer launched the first university-based center for diversity in environmental science and geoscience, where 86 percent of the workforce in the United States is white.

• Read Tripati’s full statement on receiving the award.
• More on Tripati’s personal story and the launch of the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science: New center raises everyone’s voices for environmental science.