Dr. Gina Sanchez Gibau serves as the Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Diversity and Inclusion within the Office of Academic Affairs. She is responsible for providing strategic vision to academic units in support of their efforts to attract, recruit, retain, and advance a more diverse faculty. Since 2017, she has worked collaboratively with deans and chairs as well as the graduate office to enhance the pathways toward diversifying the faculty and promoting inclusive excellence as a campus value and practice.
Dr. Gibau leads and administers programs design to support faculty development, including co-directing the Next Generation 2.0 program, a leadership and professional development initiative for women and underrepresented faculty and staff that she co-developed and launched in 2015. She also administers the Support for Talent Attraction, Retention, and Transition (START) program, a funding mechanism used to support academic units in the hiring of underrepresented tenured/tenure track faculty in their first two years.
Dr. Gibau has been involved in several strategic initiatives on campus related to the diversification of the STEM professoriate. In 2018, she chaired the campus’ APLU INCLUDES self-assessment process, which contributed to APLU’s development of its Aspire Alliance. As a result, IUPUI, under her direction, became a member of the inaugural cohort of the Aspire Alliance’s Institutional Change (IChange) Network the following year. In Fall 2020, she collaborated with her IChange Network colleagues to establish the Midwest Experiences in Mentoring Excellence (MEME). She serves as Principal Investigator for this initiative designed to improve mentoring experiences for STEM faculty who identify as women and as being from historically marginalized groups in higher education by establishing developmental mentoring opportunities for faculty across a regional network of institutions. Partnering institutions include IUPUI, Ball State University, Cleveland State University, University of Cincinnati, Iowa State University, and Michigan State University.
Prior to her position in the Office of Academic Affairs, she served from 2011-2017 as the Associate Dean for Student Affairs in the IU School of Liberal Arts. She holds faculty appointments in Anthropology and Africana Studies. With over two decades of experience in higher education, Dr. Gibau has been involved in strategic planning processes, task forces, and self-studies that have informed policy development and implementation as well as improvement processes.
Dr. Gibau’s research interests include racial and ethnic identity development, multicultural pedagogy, and the advancement of underrepresented groups in higher education. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology with a specialization in the African Diaspora from the University of Texas at Austin, M.A. in Latin American Studies from UCLA, and an A.B. in Latin American and Caribbean Affairs from Rollins College.
