Join Us!

Learn from graduate students, faculty, and staff on their experiences navigating graduate school with disabilities.

Thursday, February 10, 2022

4:00 PM – 5:30 PM

WebEx (Virtual – link will be emailed after registration)

For more details and to register for the event, click here.

Captioning and ASL interpreters will be provided at the event. If there are other access elements we can help with, please contact: cinnamon.adams@uconn.edu

More Information

The Graduate School recently polled UConn graduate students who identified as having a disability. The results of the poll revealed several things. First, many of our grad students do not “disclose” their disability to anyone at the university, including CSD (the Center for Students with Disabilities), for a variety of reasons. Even among those students who do receive accommodations through CSD, many do not disclose to their advisers, supervisors, or colleagues due to fears of stigma and othering. This tells us that there is a need at UConn to initiate a broader conversation that addresses the unique needs and experiences of graduate students with disabilities. 

Another thing we heard is a desire for community. For many disabled grad students, our only exposure to disability is through CSD, which, while absolutely crucial for our success, is by its very nature focused on disability as a problem to be solved or overcome. For many of us, our disability is much more than that; it is a central part of our identity and our lived experience. We hope to develop, over the coming years, a community where disabled members of the UConn community can joyfully connect with one another in a way that is not clinical or remedial. 

To this end, a group of UConn graduate students, faculty, and staff are organizing an event in spring 2022 to begin a conversation about navigating graduate school with a disability, and we hope it is the first event of many. We invite the graduate education community to join us in a virtual panel event in February. The panelists will be graduate students and graduate faculty who will share their experiences of navigating academia with a disability. We have also invited University staff from CSD and Human Resources who are familiar with the accommodations process for grad students and grad assistants to share information and answer questions. 

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Join colleagues and students across UConn in supporting Shipra Malik’s game-changing research “Switching from Sickle to Non-Sickle” by voting for her in this year’s three-minute thesis competition (3MT).

See this year’s competitors here: https://universitas21.com/U213MT2021 And vote for Shipra here: https://universitas21.com/form/u21-3mt-r-2021-competition

Following the national incidents of racism and racial injustice in Summer 2020, The Graduate School began to reflect, study, and discuss how we can better serve Black, Indigenous, and/or Person of Color (BIPOC) graduate students at the University of Connecticut. This process involved many campus partners, including graduate faculty, staff, cultural centers and other University offices, graduate student organizations, and graduate students, and it produced the following report, which is also available on The Graduate School’s website.

The report outlines our process, our findings, and, most importantly, our priorities. We will use these priorities to guide our work in 2021-2022 and beyond with the goal of improving the experiences of BIPOC graduate students at UConn.

While the written report is final, our work to support BIPOC graduate students is never done, and our approaches will evolve as we learn more from our attempts to improve the experience of BIPOC graduate students. We welcome your thoughts and suggestions, and we look forward to making a UConn a welcoming and inclusive place for all of our students.

Kent

—

Kent E. Holsinger
Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor
Vice Provost for Graduate Education
and Dean of The Graduate School
University of Connecticut

I write today to share the final version of The Graduate School’s strategic plan outlining our vision for the future of The Graduate School. An earlier draft of this plan was greatly improved by feedback from the Executive Committee of The Graduate School and from a variety of campus partners, faculty, and staff.

The final version of our strategic plan introduces the vision to which The Graduate School aspires, and it describes our mission as a set of activities grouped within three broad themes—innovation, community, and service—that will guide our work through 2026.

Kent

—

Kent E. Holsinger
Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor
Vice Provost for Graduate Education
and Dean of The Graduate School
University of Connecticut

The Graduate School is delighted to announce this year’s Postdoc Seed Award Recipients.

Dr. Maria Rodgers, from Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, has been funded for the following project:

“I am isolating and examining various immune cells from a small fish species called the threespine stickleback. While I recently completed a project that determined what types of cells are present in various tissues of this fish species, still lacking in the field is knowledge of how specific cells are different between populations. For example, a specific cell type in one population might highly express gene x, but those same cells in another population do not express gene x. The more that we understand these nuances, the more we can 1. Understand evolutionary processes, and 2. Use cells as treatments/therapies.”

Dr. Matthew Sasaki, from Marine Sciences, has been funded for the following project:

“Climate change is causing an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme heat events. As we saw during the recent heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, these events can be fatal for animals, which in turn has detrimental effects on ecosystem health and human activities. To better understand how extreme heat events may affect recreational and commercial fisheries around Connecticut, I am proposing to measure lethal thermal limits (the highest temperature an individual can survive) for copepods. These are abundant crustaceans that are an important source of food for many fish species.”

Dr. Heather A Kittredge, from Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, has been funded for the following project:

“Evolution is often a slow process, but it can happen incredibly fast. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is one mechanism of evolution that is increasingly thought to drive rapid adaptation. HGT allows microbes to steal DNA from neighboring cells, making it a powerful evolutionary force. However, acquiring foreign DNA can also be lethal if it disrupts finely tuned cellular processes. Despite potential risks, computational models indicate that high rates of HGT facilitate microbial invasion. Here, I apply experimental evolution and genetics to understand if HGT helps microbes invade extreme environments, revolutionizing the contemporary idea that evolution is too slow to alter ecological processes like invasion success.”

The Graduate School is delighted to announce this year’s 3MT winners.

In 1st place, Shipra Malik (Pharmaceutical Sciences) with her presentation “Precise and Safe Genome Engineering.” View her winning presentation here:

In 2nd place, Tommy Lee (Psychological Sciences) with his presentation “How the Brain Turns New Experiences into Memories.” View his presentation here:

In 3rd place, Corrin Laposki (Anthropology) with her presentation “Burning Questions: Oxygen Isotopes as Biomarkers of Air Pollution in Archaeological Bone.” View her presentation here:

After a year hiatus due to Covid, UConn’s 3MT competition is back, bigger and better than before.

We cordially invite you to join us this Thursday at 6-7pm EDT where 11 graduate student finalists will compete for the opportunity to represent UConn on the global stage. Please feel free to forward the following link (which contains the info to join the event) to your undergraduate and graduate student populations as well as interested staff and faculty. Come and cheer on the finalists! https://mailchi.mp/uconn.edu/youre-invited-to-support-uconns-3mt-finalists.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Onwards!

Stuart P. Duncan PhD DMA