Rutgers Health Receives Prestigious AAAS Award

August 14, 2024

Dear Rutgers Health community,

We are thrilled to announce that Rutgers Health has been awarded the AAAS SEA Change Biomedicine Bronze award. The award, presented by the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) STEM-Equity Achievement (SEA) Change initiative, recognizes effective actions an organization is taking toward excellence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by supporting success for all.

We are making history as the first in the nation to receive a Biomedicine Bronze award, a new category with SEA Change. The award highlights the progress, internal efforts, and commitments we have made to enhance efforts for inclusion and health equity here at Rutgers Health. This recognition can be leveraged as we support external funding of our scholarly efforts to highlight and further advance related goals.

We want to thank you for all your efforts that contributed to this award, especially within the Rutgers Health SEA Change self-assessment teams and working groups, the Women and Gender Equity Faculty Council, and the Diversity Leadership Council at Rutgers Health. Since 2021 when the award process began, our community members completed a comprehensive institutional self-assessment, evaluated current and future needs, and made recommendations, resulting in a meaningful action plan that helped support our application and plot the path forward.

Our five-year SEA Change Action Plan (2024-2029) focuses on the current and future faculty of Rutgers Health. This focus led to identifying opportunities to continue our efforts to recruit an outstanding workforce and cultivate the environments that help all our faculty thrive. These action items are well aligned with the OneRBHS Strategic Plan, specifically, Goal U1 – People and Workforce and Goal U2 – Inclusive, Respectful, and Accountable Culture.

We look forward to your ongoing collaboration and support as we now seek to implement our action plan for the SEA Change Bronze award, prioritizing inclusive efforts towards excellence across the board at Rutgers Health.

Warm regards,

Sangeeta Lamba, MD, MS-HPEd
Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion
Rutgers Health

Bishr Omary, MD, PhD
Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Research
Rutgers Health

Brian L. Strom, MD, MPH
Chancellor
Rutgers Health