Dr. Renetta Garrison Tull is the University of California Davis’ inaugural Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), which houses Academic Diversity, the Office of Campus Community Relations, four centers, and Health Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (DEI within the medical school, nursing school and health center). She also serves on the Chief Diversity Officers Council for the University of California, and has several programs and boards within her portfolio including HSI initiatives, the Police Accountability Board, Diversity and Inclusion Education and strategic planning, four centers and more.
Tull formerly served as Assistant Dean for Graduate Student Development and later, Associate Vice Provost for Strategic Initiatives at UMBC. She had a detail within the University System of Maryland’s headquarters (for 12 institutions), serving as the Director for Pipeline Professional Development Programs, and she has been either Co-PI or PI on National Science Foundation grants within the Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP), ADVANCE and Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) programs. At UC Davis, she is PI of the PROMISE Engineering Institute, a collaboration between UC Davis and UMBC, with connections to engineering schools within the UC, and engineering schools in Maryland (UM College Park, Morgan State and Johns Hopkins) to form an engineering “East-West” collaboration. Her degrees in electrical engineering and speech science are from Howard University and Northwestern University. She was inducted into Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society, and participates in faculty activities as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Davis, and a faculty affiliate in the Interdepartmental Program on Human Rights Studies.
An international speaker on global diversity in STEM, Tull was a Global Engineering Deans Council/Airbus Diversity Award Finalist and has received the ABET Claire L. Felbinger Award for Diversity and Inclusion and the Student Platform for Engineering Education Development Global Mentoring Award. She has been involved with Puerto Rico’s ADVANCE Hispanic Women in STEM, the Latin and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions, UNESCO, the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies (IFEES) community, and her research interests in Humanitarian Engineering continue through sharing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). She is an author of a chapter of Rising to the Top and was part of the consensus committees for the National Academies’ “Impact of COVID-19 on the Careers of Women in Academic STEMM,” and “The Science of Effective Mentoring in STEMM.”
