Online Event: Zoom link and password provided to registered attendees on the morning of the event

Wednesday 21st October 2020

LGBT+ in higher education: Building networks, making change

Please join STEM Equals and CILIA-LGBTQI+ for an afternoon focused on LGBT+ people in higher education.

How can we build stronger networks? How can we create more inclusive research/working communities in which people feel like they can bring their whole selves to their research and their work (continuing discussions from the 2019 article in The GIST What does it mean to be seen?). To paraphrase a focus group participant for the STEM Equals project:

We cannot take our identities off like a jacket and leave it by the door when we come to work in our offices or our labs or our classrooms (and we shouldn’t feel like we have to).

The event will conclude with a launch of the University of Strathclyde LGBT+ staff and PhD student network.

When: Wednesday 21st October 2020 from 1:00pm-3:30pm

1:00pm: Welcome and Introduction

1:25pm-2:00pm: Keynote

2:00pm-3:15pm: Panel discussion and Q&A

3:15pm: Launching the University of Strathclyde LGBT+ staff and PhD student network

Where: Online - Zoom link and password provided to registered attendees on the morning of the event

Free event; Registration required

Welcome by Professor Yvette Taylor, School of Education, University of Strathclyde

Keynote Speaker: Dr Izzy Jayasinghe, Senior Lecturer & UKRI Future Leader Fellow, Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, University of Sheffield

About Dr Jayasinghe: I am a UKRI Future Leader Fellow specialising in biophysics and biophotonics. My early training was as biomedical researcher, attaining my BSc and PhD at the University of Auckland (New Zealand). Since then, I have worked in the Universities of Queensland (Australia) and Exeter as a postdoc. I founded my first independent research group in the Faculty of Biological Sciences in the University of Leeds, UK, in 2015 which led to a number of innovations in super-resolution microscopy methods including an enhanced version of Expansion Microscopy and a fast localisation microscopy method called sandSTORM. In 2019, I was awarded one of the prestigious, 7-year UKRI Future Leader Fellowships, which has led me to form the Applied Biophotonics Group in the Dept of Molecular Biology & Biotechnology in the University of Sheffield where we are now working towards reimagining the way high-end optical microscopy can be performed and applied to a broad range of applications in the Life Sciences. Aside from my day-to-day research and teaching work, I spend most of my time focusing on ways to improve Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility (EDIA) in universities though structures such as Athena SWAN and TIGERinSTEMM. My mission is to improve the career advancement, acceptance and fairness for women and gender minorities in STEMM at the intersections of LGBTQ+ identities, racial minorities and disability. To this end, I take a non-violent approach to raising awareness, tackling misinformation, improving inclusivity and improving the visibility of women and minorities in our workplaces. My ambition is to see universities in the UK become supportive spaces for marginalised groups, safe from hate speech, bullying, discrimination and harassment.

Panellists:

Dr Izzy Jayasinghe, UKRI Future Leader Fellow, School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Leeds

Dr Katie Nicoll Baines, School of Chemistry, co-chair, Staff Pride Network, University of Edinburgh

Dr Matson Lawrence, School of Education, University of Strathclyde

Dr Marco Reggiani, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, University of Strathclyde

Professor Yvette Taylor, School of Education, University of Strathclyde

Jack Hao Yang, Physics Department, University of Strathclyde

Panel Facilitator: Dr Jessica Gagnon, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, University of Strathclyde

The event will be recorded and shared on Youtube after it is transcribed and closed captioning is added.

About STEM Equals: The STEM Equals project is a four year research and impact project focused on women and LGBT+ people in STEM in both academia and in industry. Through an intersectional lens, the project focuses on working cultures within higher education and industry, including better understanding the experiences of and addressing systemic inequalities faced by women and LGBT staff in STEM disciplines. The project industry partner is BAM Nuttall and the project is funded by EPSRC under the Inclusion Matters initiative, with matched funding from the University of Strathclyde. On Twitter: @STEMEquals Website: www.stemequals.ac.uk

About CILIA-LGBTQI+: 'Comparing Intersectional Lifecourse Inequalities among LGBTQI+ Citizens in Four European Countries’ (CILIA-LGBTQI+): Bringing together an international team of researchers, this 3 year EU-Norface funded project investigates the inequalities experienced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and intersex (LGBTQI+) people across the lifecourse. The key objective is to provide cross-cultural evidence concerning life course inequalities experienced by LGBTQI+ people, comparing and contrasting across four European countries with different yet interrelated social, historical, economic and political backgrounds: England, Germany, Portugal and Scotland. The project also examines how inequalities related to gender and / or sexuality vary and intersect with others, such as social class, ethnicity, citizenship status, and so on. Twitter: @LGBTQILives Website: https://lgbtqilives.wordpress.com/

LGBT+ in HE: Building networks, making change (online event)