Behind the Scenes: Changing the Ratio photo shoot

Female faculty in the Mathematics Department at the University of Hartford in April 2018. Back row, left to right: Jean McGivney-Burelle, Michelle Rabideau, Virginia Anne Noonburg (Emerita), Alicia Marino. Front row, left to right: Aslihan Demirkaya, Larissa Schroeder, Mako Haruta (Chair), Hwayeon Ryu.

Group image by photographer Lesly Juarez (https://jlesly.myportfolio.com/, https://unsplash.com/@jblesly)

MAA FOCUS Feb/Mar 2019 article here.

Listen to podcast here.

One spring day in 2017, immersed in cleaning my office, I came across an old clipping that gave me an idea. The 2002 University of Hartford The Observer article, "Four Generations of Women in Mathematics", celebrated one of our sophomore Math majors, Aimee Groudas ('05), winning the American Mathematical Society (AMS) Waldemar J. Trjitzinsky Scholarship. Of the "generations" pictured, only two of us were current full-time faculty.

Female Math faculty at the University of Hartford in 2002

The Math Department, after dedicated efforts by the entire department to change the ratio through new hires, had just reached a little over 50% female faculty in 2017. The time seemed ideal for a celebration picture! So, in April 2018 we had a professional photo shoot. Read the full story in the article in the Feb/Mar 2019 issue of the MAA FOCUS magazine!

Pictured below are behind-the-scenes photos taken during the photo shoot. It was a fun event and we will likely do other photos in the future with the entire department. We are encouraged that as a department we have been able to increase the number of female full-time tenured and tenure-track mathematicians, but we continue to work on increasing our diversity overall.

Listen to a conversation among Drs. Anne Noonburg, Alicia Marino, Larissa Schroeder and Mako Haruta in a podcast by Peter Graywacz, Math Secondary Education major, here.

Behind the scenes photos courtesy of Devanney Haruta (Brown '16.5, Music, Mathematics)