Summer 2022 | Issue V

Join the RA EDI Committee in commemorating Juneteenth, the country's second independence day and the end of slavery in the United States after the Civil War.

What is Juneteenth?

By Madeleine Paley

Madeleine Paley is a Senior Analyst in the Conflict of Interest Office and co-chair of the Research Affairs EDI Committee.

Juneteenth is a nationally celebrated holiday in the United States commemorating the end of slavery in America. The holiday originated in Galveston, Texas in 1865, nearly nine decades after the founding of the United States and more than two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, when enslaved Black Americans finally received word that they were free. Juneteenth honors the end to slavery in the United States and is considered the longest-running African American holiday.

In June of 2021, on the 156th anniversary of the last slaves being freed in Texas, President Biden signed into law Juneteenth National Independence Day, creating a federal holiday to commemorate Juneteenth. Today, Juneteenth commemorates African American freedom and celebrates education and achievement. In addition to a time of rejoicing, it is a time for reflection, assessment, and improvement. It is a long overdue truthful acknowledgement of a painful period in American history that shaped and continues to influence society today. To learn more about Juneteenth, see the official Juneteenth website and the President’s Proclamation of making Juneteenth a federal holiday.

Following President Biden’s declaration of Juneteenth as a federal holiday, UC President Michael Drake announced Juneteenth as a new UC holiday, observed at the end of June in 2021 and to be celebrated according to the federal calendar starting in 2022. At UC San Diego, to assist in the mission of finding solutions to end systemic racism and anti-blackness, UCSD’s Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion developed the Strategic Plan for Inclusive Excellence, which includes resources such as the Chancellor's 21-Day Antiracism Challenge along with an allyship initiative aimed at educating and supporting white campus community members in continuing anti-racism work. Please visit the Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion website for additional information on various initiatives and anti-racism resources.

If you have questions or would like to learn more about the Research Affairs EDI Committee, please visit our website or contact vcr-edi@ucsd.edu.

Meet OCGA’s Pam Tallarida

By Nancy Peritz and Luz Molina

Nancy Peritz is a Senior Trainer on the RA Training team and Luz Molina is an Officer in the Office of Contracts & Grants Administration (OCGA). Both serve on the VCR-EDI Committee. 

If you have ever needed help with anything related to Kuali Research, you probably have worked with Pam, or Pammie, Tallarida, the Assistant Director of Client Experience in the Office of Contracts & Grants Administration (OCGA). She manages the KR Help Desk and the RA Training team. Over the past 11 years, she has worn many hats at OCGA, making her one of the most knowledgeable and helpful colleagues at OCGA. As she often says, “If I can’t answer your question, I will find someone who can.” Talk about a can-do attitude! She is also a huge TikTok fan and loves a good GIF. While you might know Pam, her many talents and her sense of humor, what you might not know is that Pam has an invisible disability: she is deaf. 

An invisible disability is defined as a non-apparent or unseen physical, mental, or emotional impairment that goes largely unnoticed. Examples include chronic illnesses, fatigue and pain as well as depression, anxiety, blindness or low vision, and deafness or hard of hearing. We sat down with Pam to talk with her about her hearing impairment and how she navigates her workday. 

Pam was not born deaf. She began losing her hearing when she was 25 years old. Pam shared, “It was gradual at first and ended with me being profoundly deaf.” She had surgery on both ears and was able to recover enough so that she can wear hearing aids and function normally. In fact, she wears very powerful hearing aids. One of the misconceptions about hearing aids is that they only increase the volume of the people speaking to you. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. “They turn up everything! And by everything, I mean keys jingling, the wind blowing, dogs barking, the TV blaring in the other room, people talking outside your office…you get the idea,” Pam explained. 

Pam is very open about her hearing loss and will let people know that she might ask them to repeat themselves. One of the challenges is that because she speaks with good diction, it’s not easy to tell that she is deaf. She said that just because she speaks clearly does not mean that she can hear you clearly. She finds herself apologizing a lot for asking people to speak up or repeat themselves. Pam goes on to say that she spends a lot of time trying to hear people, which is exhausting because she must stay focused on their lips and facial expressions. When her children were young, they quickly became her ears, listening to people around her so they could repeat back what they were saying. “I was dependent on them because I didn’t always have the best hearing aids.”

While most people wouldn’t think too much about working in an open-plan office, it initially caused Pam to panic a bit. “I cannot hear in that environment,” due to the ambient noise, such as the copy machine, air conditioning, conversations and phone calls going on around the office. She added, “I need walls around me. I didn’t want to ask for an enclosed office because I didn’t want to put anybody out. People at OCGA and the UCSD Accommodations office made the process easy and assured me that I wasn’t taking anything away from anybody else. I felt that I was in a safe environment.” 

The pandemic has had some difficulties and silver linings for Pam. During the peak of the pandemic when we had to wear masks everywhere, that proved challenging for her as she relies on lip-reading. Moreover, voices tend to be muffled under the masks and behind the plastic protective barriers that were installed in many businesses. However, being able to work from home in a quiet environment (except for the occasional barking or begging by one of her three dogs), coupled with being able to see people’s faces up close on Zoom and control the volume on her computer, has made working much easier and more comfortable for Pam. 

The next time you are Zooming with Pam as she is helping you get something unstuck or figured out, and she asks you to repeat yourself, turn to face your camera, smile, and say loudly and clearly, “Of course.” Pam will appreciate it.

If you have a disability—invisible or visible—that might qualify for reasonable workplace accommodations, please reach out to the UCSD Disabilities and Rehabilitation Office via email to request a consultation: hrdcc@ucsd.edu. For more information about invisible disabilities, check out the Invisible Disability Project. 

Entrepreneurial Ethos: Building the Home of the Disruptive Biotech with LabFellows CEO Julio de Unamuno IV

By Web Intern

We believe the best teams win, and the most diverse teams make the best teams. So we built ours to reflect the diversity of UC San Diego’s community.” –Julio de Unamuno IV

Julio de Unamuno IV is the CEO of LabFellows and runs HomeLab at UC San Diego located within the Center for Novel Therapeutics. HomeLab, powered by LabFellows, has the mission to empower disruptive biotechs that invent the future. They provide startups all the operational support thatentrepreneurs require to execute more discoveries. In only the last two years HomeLab at UC San Diego has assisted founders in raising over $1 billion in funding and exits, including Amplyx, which was recently acquired by Pfizer.

De Unamuno who now carries a 20-year career in science, three children, and one of the fastest growing technology startups in the region says his superpower has been pattern recognition. Growing up as a Latino child in a blue collar family, he has been interested in systems and how he can break them down to work for him and his curiosities. He sees models that work for the tech industry and applies it to biotech, unafraid of failure. Upon becoming an Entrepreneur in Residence at UC San Diego, he believes it is crucial to create a community for students and alumni to both succeed and fail. “Community to me has meant humility,” says De Unamuno. He creates a new age of biotech entrepreneurs, thanks to a convergence of all the resources we have at UC San Diego — infrastructure, technology, and some of the nation's most gifted inventive minds.

To read the full article, please visit:

innovation.ucsd.edu/2022/01/10/entrepreneurial-ethos-julio-de-unamuno-iv

Project Implicit

The mission of Project Implicit is to educate the public about bias and to provide a “virtual laboratory” for collecting data on the internet. Project Implicit scientists produce high-impact research that forms the basis of our scientific knowledge about bias and disparities. To take a Implicit Association Test (IAT) and learn more about your implicit biases, visit https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html. 



UC Learning E-courses:

Equitable access to professional development and training is a priority for the RA EDI Committee.

To access these courses, log into UC Learning Center and select the “Find a Course” icon and search for one of the following: 

• UC Policy on Gender Recognition and Lived Name
• Gender Recognition: a Focus on Transgender, Nonbinary, and Intersex Awareness

If you have a question or would like to share a story, event or cultural

celebration, please contact us at vcr-edi@ucsd.edu or submit anonymously via the feedback form on our website.