Awards & Honors

Congratulations to Professor Zihao Zhang for being named an early career fellow of the Dean’s Equity and Inclusion Initiative (DEII)! Together with 16 other early career faculty, Zhang was recently welcomed into the second cohort of this scholarly development program.

“As a bilingual Asian landscape scholar teaching and researching in the U.S., where non-white faculty and non-western thinking are still somewhat foreign ideas for many, I find it comforting, refreshing, and exhilarating to connect with a network of amazingly diverse scholars striving for a collective future for all,” says Professor Zhang.

Launched in Summer 2021, the cornerstone of the DEII is this cohort-based fellowship program supporting early career faculty in the academy who are significant contributors to the pursuit of equity and inclusion in/through the built environment. The program works collectively to nurture a diverse population of emerging scholars focused on teaching and researching built and constructed environments to advance socio-ecological and spatial justice, equity, and inclusion. Fellows participate in a two-year cohort, including two summer institutes and academic year-round professional development workshops. Additionally, each fellow is paired with an internal mentor (from within her/his institution) and an external mentor during their fellowship.

More than two dozen U.S. schools and colleges of architecture, landscape architecture, planning, preservation, and design participate in the DEII; among them are are members of Dark Matter University, senior faculty and deans from partner schools, and members of the professional associations of the Association of Colleges and Schools of Architecture (ACSA), the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA). The professional organizations have also offered financial support for the program as have many of the schools — including the Spitzer School.