Tien Honored for Work in Diversity Equity and Inclusion
Institute Research Awards: College’s researchers earn recognition for outreach efforts, impactful publishing, and expanding Tech’s research portfolio.
By Joshua Stewart | March 20, 2023
Georgia Tech’s executive vice president for research has recognized four College of Engineering faculty members and a spaceflight group for their outstanding contributions to the research enterprise.
The 2023 Institute Research Awards celebrate the achievements of faculty and staff as partners, mentors, and researchers. The College’s winners — comprising more than half of the awards categories — span five disciplines and emerged from more than 150 total nominations.
Iris Tien was honored for her work advancing diversity and inclusion, Marta Hatzell for early career research, Wilbur Lam for his impactful publications, Pascal Van Hentenryck for outreach efforts, and the Spaceflight Project Group for helping expand Georgia Tech’s research portfolio.
Advancing DEI
A similar concern for community-based solutions is featured in Tien’s work. She won the award for Outstanding Achievement in Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
“Dr. Tien has been a leader in community-driven research, starting from community needs to drive her fundamental scientific advances,” School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Chair Donald Webster wrote in his nomination.
“She has conducted significant work in connecting the performance of infrastructure with its impacts on the communities and populations these systems serve, with an emphasis on serving diverse populations, increasing equity in critical infrastructure services provided across communities, and providing inclusive opportunities for community stakeholder voices to be heard in infrastructure decisions.”
Tien is an associate professor in civil and environmental engineering and the Williams Family Early Career Professor. She studies risk and reliability of critical infrastructure systems such as water, power, gas, communications, and transportation.
“It is vital to work directly with communities,” Tien said. “Receiving this award is a great recognition of the successes we have achieved with our community-driven, DEI-focused research approaches and the combined scientific importance and broader impacts of our work.”
Webster also noted Tien’s role as chair of the College’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council, where she is leading an initiative to increase research group diversity.
“Tien is creating a novel interactive data dashboard for faculty to securely visualize and interact with data on the diversity of their research group members in comparison with peers and across the College of Engineering,” Webster wrote. “This is a completely new approach to increase diversity in the graduate student pipeline that has not been done before at Georgia Tech or at other universities.”
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