My contributions to diversity started in 1964 as a teaching volunteer in highly disadvantaged areas and is largely continual by various ways, to the present.

As a reflection of my contributions to diversity within and exterior to UCSD I have been the recipient of the UCSD award for Contributions to Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action and Diversity. The basis of the nomination was contributions made as a faculty member. This includes broad mentorship beyond the norm of underrepresented students, including high school students. It was also in recognition of the yearly work of bringing in hundreds of students from high school and junior high schools to expose them, for the first time, to the University and stimulate their interest in attending this (or any) university. It also recognized the many lectures to students in areas of high diversity at high school and elementary schools, and from public lectures of many venues.

My own research group is and always has been, highly diverse with underrepresented minorities as well as women.

Each year I have helped host and lecture a meeting with visiting journalists from Latin America and South America as a potential mechanism to amplify academic connections with those countries and provide possible research activities for our students present at UCSD from those countries. I have also participated in lectures and personnel meetings in visiting programs from Mexico and Latin America to raise the visibility of UCSD to those communities across San Diego.



I have arranged and personally guided groups of high school students from under-represented schools in San Diego to my own laboratory in an effort to simultaneously welcome them and encourage them to attend school here. As part of my participation in the Annual Kyoto lecture, I have been involved with facilitating the attendance of more than three hundred high school students to UCSD; predominantly from under-represented groups,many of whom were visiting a university campus for the first time.