The Faculty Development Program provides grants of $500 per year to support interdisciplinary groups of faculty who wish to meet on a regular basis to read and discuss scholarship of mutual interest and support one another's work. Funds are intended to pay for food, reading materials, and/or other relevant expenses.
Proposals are accepted year round and can be submitted by emailing facultydevelopment@scu.edu. Groups should include faculty (and possibly staff) from multiple academic departments (discipline-specific groups should seek support from their departments). A brief survey must be completed at the end of the academic year indicating how the funds were used and how participation in the group influenced members.
Listed below are a number of faculty groups that provide opportunities for shared dialogue, support, and mentorship.
Affinity Groups
Affinity Groups connect over a common purpose or interest with the goal of sharing diverse experiences and fostering inclusivity.
The Inclusive Excellence Division also facilitates a number of employee resource groups for both faculty and staff. The list of groups can be found here.
The African American Faculty Network at SCU provides a welcoming space for all SCU faculty in supporting, networking, mentoring/co-mentoring, and advocacy. Contact Faculty Development for more information. All faculty are also welcome to join the Black/Pan-African ERG (Employee Resource Group) at SCU, whose purpose is supporting and celebrating Black/Pan-African heritage, culture, and communities. Contact Bernell Nevil for more info.
The AAPI Faculty Working Group provides a space for support, networking, and mentoring for all faculty interested in or otherwise connected to the AAPI community. This group functions as both an affinity group and a study group-- meetings will comprise of social events and/or research talks. Please contact Vivien Leung at vleung@scu.edu.
The SCU Disabilities and Chronic Illness Network welcomes all faculty and staff with disabilities. The purpose of the network is to meet one to two times per quarter to empower group members, provide a space for mentoring/co-mentoring and advocacy, and facilitate a welcoming environment for faculty and staff with disabilities. Allies are welcome at policy-focused meetings.
For more information, contact Laura Ellingson or Bill Stevens.
EAGR - encouraging growth & accountability in research, open to STEM faculty. We meet ~monthly for coffee or snacks to discuss research progress and goals for the coming month. EAGR participants celebrate scholarly accomplishments and help one another troubleshoot research challenges. We work together to share knowledge and resources and tips for securing external and internal support for laboratory scholarship needs. Typical meetings include faculty from STEM departments including Biology, Chemistry, Bioengineering, Physics, Neuroscience, and occasionally other engineering departments.
Please contact Amelia Fuller for more information.
This group will provide space for faculty to explore ways of finding hope and peace in their lives. In Winter quarter, we will read SCU Professor Emerita Diane Dreher's new book, Pathways to Inner Peace. During the quarter, we will hold an event where the author will join us for a discussion about her book & more.
Members will also be invited to attend a talk organized by the Retired and Retiring Faculty Group on February 10 at 4pm by SCU Professor Dave Feldman: 'Finding Hope in Difficult Times'. In this talk, Professor Feldman will discuss the science of hope and how we can cultivate hopefulness in challenging times.
Please contact Laura Ellingson for more information.
The Jewish Faculty Group, facilitated by Akiba Lerner (Religious Studies), provides a network for all faculty who are interested in matters related to Judaism, Jewish studies, and Jewish identity. Primary activities revolve around yearly gatherings for discussion over dinner. If you are interested and/or would like to be added to the email list, please contact Akiba Lerner.
Founded in 2007, the Latine Faculty Group provides support and mentoring for Latine faculty in their professional careers and fosters a welcoming and friendly environment for Latine faculty on campus. It also serves as a resource for the university in its efforts to create a more diverse and inclusive community based on the Jesuit values of cura personalis and being “people for and with others.”
For more information, contact Pancho Jiménez, Allan Báez Morales, or Pearl Maria Barros.SCU LGBTQ Faculty Group provides information, support and mentoring for all faculty and serves as a resource for the university in its efforts to create a more welcoming and inclusive community. Questions? Contact Sonja Mackenzie.
This group is open to all faculty and their close family to support community-building and connection at SCU and in the Bay Area. It includes both tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty. Activities include happy hours, bike rides, attendance at SCU sporting events etc. The group meets at least once a quarter for a happy hour and members can propose new events at any time.
Please contact Ewan Kingston for more information.
The Retired and Retiring Faculty Group provides all faculty opportunities to connect and to learn more about retirement and life thereafter! More information is available here.
The mission of the Women and Nonbinary Faculty of Color Network is to empower and support women and nonbinary faculty and academic librarians of color by creating opportunities for building professional and personal connections across campus. We cultivate community through on-campus events, off-campus activities, and peer mentoring. All faculty are welcome to join this faculty group. Contact Nicole Branch and Elsa Chen for more information. The network is a collaborative effort of Faculty Development and the Gender and Sexuality Studies Department.
Study Groups
These groups are opportunities for faculty to explore a shared disciplinary interest or meet to advance their teaching and scholarly work.
Our Faculty Learning Community on Accessibility is a dynamic, cross-disciplinary group dedicated to creating an inclusive and equitable SCU campus environment for all. This FLC provides a supportive space for faculty and staff to explore resources and partnerships available on campus, to dig into universal design for learning (UDL) principles and inclusive pedagogies, and to gain sharper awareness of and engagement with institutional policies related to Accessibility. Through meetings, workshops, shared resources, and reflective dialogue, members will work together to become confident practitioners of inclusive, student-centered pedagogical strategies. One key aim of this community is to foster a culture of continuous improvement and empathy, empowering both faculty and staff to become effective advocates for accessibility across campus.
Please contact Cara Chiaraluce or Mythri Jegathesan for more information.
The Applied Spirituality Institute (ASI) (formerly the Spirituality and Health Institute) is devoted to exploring the complex relationship between spirituality and well being from an interdisciplinary, multicultural perspective. Faculty, staff, and students from Santa Clara as well as other universities (e.g., Stanford, UC Berkeley, and the Graduate Theological Union) participate in a variety of collaborative research, teaching and outreach projects. The intention behind ASI is to bring creative, thoughtful and rigorous scholarly pursuit to better elucidate the relationship between spirituality and well being.
Visit the group's webpage and contact Thomas Plante for more information.
This is an interdisciplinary group of faculty whose scholarship and/or teaching focuses on the criminal legal system, including those with interests on racial and ethnic disparities in criminal justice processes and outcomes. In this group we will convene to discuss our research agendas and potential opportunities for collaboration, mentor and support each other through publication and grant application processes, and share teaching approaches to the inherently interdisciplinary discipline of criminal justice.
Please contact Elsa Chen for more information.
The Developmental Science Research Group connects faculty working on research and scholarship questions related to childhood development. We discuss our research questions and findings, and we share ideas for best practices in recruitment, community outreach, involving students in research, and finding external grant support. We also strive to identify new intersections of our work that could become fruitful places for collaboration. Contact Kirsten Read for more information.
The Indigenous Latin America Study Group focuses on the discussion and inquiry around aspects of Indigenous culture and influence in the region. Our group also welcomes links with faculty interested in Indigenous histories and discourses more generally.
Please contact Maia Dedrick or Victor Quiroz for more questions.
Join SCU's new Interdisciplinary Research Network, to elevate interdisciplinary research and foster a vibrant collaborative community. This network is open to all research-interested SCU faculty and staff, particularly those engaging in or seeking to build interdisciplinary collaborations across departments or schools.
We will convene roughly quarterly to share ideas, collaboration tips and learnings, new grant opportunities, project updates from ongoing grants, and connect researchers to proposals. Enhance your research visibility and find partners for impactful interdisciplinary work.
If you are interested and/or would like to be added to our email list, please contact Subbu Vincent, Katy Bruchmann, or Yuhong Liu. You may also directly send a join request to: interdisciplinary-research-network-group@scu.edu.
The Interdisciplinary tUrn: A Climate Crisis Research Group [CCRG] is a discussion group for faculty and staff who are interested in climate justice conversations, contemplating, exploring, or sharing climate research of their own or of others, and getting more involved in contemporary manifestations of climate action in our community. We meet quarterly over lunch for a one hour discussion. Uniquely-themed sessions are co-facilitated by any two members, and many members of the CCRG are involved with tUrn on campus in either October or April. To sign up, please fill out this brief form. For more information, please contact the research group lead, Kristin Kusanovich.
This interdisciplinary research network brings together Santa Clara University faculty whose teaching, research, and creative projects engage with the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. Our purpose is to create an intellectual and collegial space for faculty across disciplines and departments—History, Religious Studies, Art and Art History—to exchange ideas, share works-in-progress, and develop new approaches to this defining episode in U.S. history.
Our goals are to workshop in-progress research and writing; read and discuss recent interdisciplinary scholarship on incarceration, and identify collaborative opportunities for research and teaching. Activities will include meeting two to three times per quarter to discuss readings or works-in-progress, and maintaining a shared Google Drive for resources. For more information, please contact Sonia Gomez or Karen Peterson-Iyer.
The Political Theory Study Group meets about 3 times a quarter and we read and discuss books in political theory (understood broadly). The books are selected by the participants. The members of the group come from several different departments: Philosophy, Political Science, Economics, and Classics.
Please contact Phillip Kain for more information.
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is a systematic approach to collecting and analyzing data related to one's teaching practice and sharing that work with others. The SoTL Faculty Group meets several times per quarter to read, discuss, and analyze findings from SoTL research, as well as explore how to develop relevant SoTL research questions of their own; gather evidence; and share the results with other practitioners and members of the academic community.
Please contact Loring Pffeifer for more information.
We are a faculty group to provide statistics support and advice, and share the love of R, working together to expand our R skills. Feel free to email Brody Sandel (bsandel@scu.edu) with any questions.