News Releases

ANN ARBOR – Dr. Sheri Notaro has accepted the position of ISR DEI Director, beginning January 6. Sheri comes to ISR with over 20 years of experience working in higher education and expertise in leading all aspects of diversity initiatives spanning several institutions.

Sheri currently serves as a consultant to Learning and Development and Career Development teams within Human Resources at Washington University in St. Louis, providing strategic consultation to senior leaders and implementing strategies to increase advancement opportunities for diverse staff through targeted leadership programs.

Immediately prior to that role, Sheri served as the Associate Dean of the Washington University Graduate School, earning national recognition for her direction of the prestigious Chancellor’s Graduate Diversity Fellowship Program. From 2011-2014, Sheri served as Associate Dean for Inclusion and Professional Development at Cornell University’s Graduate School, where she worked to build consensus and support diversity and inclusion throughout the entire University and in the broader Ithaca community.

Sheri returns to Ann Arbor as an alumna of both the University of Michigan and ISR. After receiving a BS in Psychology from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, Sheri was awarded a diversity scholarship to attend statistics courses at ICPSR’s summer program and subsequently went on to earn an MA in Developmental Psychology, an MPH in Health Behavior and Health Education, and a PhD in Developmental Psychology from the U-M. As a graduate student research assistant in ISR’s Program for Research on Black Americans, Sheri worked closely with James Jackson, Toni Antonucci, and Cleo Caldwell. Sheri also worked with John Schulenberg and Patrick O’Malley (both members of her dissertation committee) on the Monitoring the Future project, examining the impact of parenting and conventionality on the cigarette use of adolescents. Through these opportunities and dedicated mentorship from a diverse, talented team of researchers at ISR, Sheri witnessed first-hand the crucial role that diversity, equity, and inclusion play as foundations of scholarly excellence.

Thank you to our search committee for doing a great job developing a vision for the position and producing outstanding candidates. The committee members were: Sarah Burgard (chair), Rita Bantom, Fred Conrad, Tara Engholm, Ellen Meader, Colter Mitchell and Cathy Thibault. Thank Mary Schmidt for providing great staff support throughout the process and to the many members of ISR’s DEI working groups and the larger ISR community that volunteered their time to hear from and meet with the candidates and provide valuable feedback.

A special thank you goes to Sarah Burgard for the outstanding job she has done as the Implementation Lead for our DEI process since 2016. Sarah built a great DEI infrastructure and oversaw many successful programs and activities that have helped us make progress on our ambitious DEI plan. Sarah and the many faculty and staff who have worked on our DEI initiative have created momentum that Sheri will be able to build on as she takes over as DEI Director.

For more information about ISR’s commitment to the diversity of our institution, please visit: https://isr.umich.edu/about/diversity/

Contact:

ISR Communications, [email protected]