Getting to Know Assistant Dean Marcela Hernandez
This installment of the College of Engineering’s “Getting to Know” leadership series features Marcela Hernandez, assistant dean for faculty affairs and recruitment.
A molecular biologist and biochemist by training, Hernandez formerly served as an administrative director in The Ohio State University’s Office of Postdoctoral Affairs. Prior to that, she was the graduate and STEM diversity director with the College of Arts & Sciences.
In her new role as assistant dean, Hernandez will represent the college in various faculty-related initiatives. In partnership with Ohio State Offices of Human Resources, Academic Affairs, and Diversity and Inclusion, among others, she will develop and execute strategies to establish pipelines of diverse candidates and assess the progress and success of recruitment efforts. She will also lead the college’s development and implementation of training to support faculty search committees and hiring processes, including onboarding.
College of Engineering: What excites you most about your role as assistant dean for faculty affairs and recruitment and the work you’re doing?
Marcela Hernandez: During my administrative career, I focused a lot of my time and energy on supporting research trainees—undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars. My goal was to help them thrive and set them up for success whatever their next career step was. An important aspect of this work was removing the barriers that are responsible for the underrepresentation of many groups in academia. Working with and supporting faculty made the implementation of policies and programs that aimed to benefit trainees much more successful, especially the ones intending to create more equity and inclusion. I realized that the impact is much greater when you engage and support faculty.
Coming into this position, I was very excited to be able to work with and support faculty through recruitment and retention efforts. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work with the faculty affairs team and the rest of the College of Engineering in creating an environment in which an increasingly diverse group of faculty thrive and succeed along with all those who they teach and mentor.
CoE: What do you see as the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity?
Hernandez: Recruiting and retaining a diverse faculty workforce in the engineering field is a great challenge. In addition to all the challenges the STEM fields generally have, academic careers may take a back seat for a person with an engineering bachelor’s degree because they have ample job opportunities that pay relatively higher salaries than other college graduates.
The opportunity, on the other hand, is that among those who decide to become academics there is likely a significant number of people who want to teach and mentor the next generation of engineers and make the engineering workforce more diverse. As we align our values with our practices, we have an opportunity to make changes to the way we evaluate prospective faculty and select those excellent researchers who will help us create a more welcoming, inclusive, and equitable academic culture, which will in turn produce a more diverse workforce.
I am thrilled to see that in the College of Engineering we have already seen progress towards the use of rubrics and the consideration of DEI competencies in the selection of new faculty. I am excited to contribute towards the improvement of these processes and come up with a “Moneyball” approach—one of my favorite movies—to selecting our academic workforce. This of course needs to be done in parallel to a robust individualized retention strategy and an ongoing intentional culture change, which will involve every one of us in the college. I am very optimistic that this will be possible given the efforts that have been outlined in the college’s strategic plan and in the inclusive excellence initiative.
CoE: What’s the most impactful job you’ve had?
Hernandez: As the inaugural administrative director of the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs (OPA), I was heavily involved in the launching of the OPA and our advocacy efforts led to the implementation of significant improvements to postdoctoral compensation and benefits. Ohio State now offers a competitive benefits package to all postdoctoral scholars regardless of the scholar’s funding source. This has made Ohio State an outlier, as most institutions treat scholars on postdoctoral fellowships as non-employees. Shortly after I started in that position, we were asked to implement the Presidential Postdoctoral Scholars Program, which gave us an opportunity to create models for postdoctoral recruitment and retention as well as professional development that would allow these individuals to transition to faculty positions.
We also worked to improve the mentoring quality in training environments through the creation of the Ohio State Mentoring Initiative (OSMI). A large group of faculty and staff across the university were trained as facilitators for faculty and postdoctoral scholars mentoring workshops. These workshops are now offered monthly. OSMI facilitators from the College of Engineering initiated a subset of workshops to give faculty in this college more opportunities to participate in these workshops. I am very proud of the institutional changes we were able to make, and the visibility and support we gave postdoctoral scholars who had been ignored for a long time.
CoE: Is there an accomplishment or accolade you’re most proud of?
Hernandez: In 2020 I was one of the recipients of the university’s Distinguished Diversity Enhancement Award. I am very proud of this award as I consider diversity, equity, and inclusion areas of competency that every professional in the 21st century needs to continuously improve. During my administrative career these core principles have guided my work. I was nominated by colleagues from different corners of the university, which made this award even sweeter.
An accomplishment I am very proud of was obtaining my PhD in four years while raising my twin boys. I had a superb PhD mentor and an extremely supportive husband who made all this possible.
CoE: Do you have a favorite mentor?
Hernandez: I have three people who are my core mentoring team: my husband, my friend and colleague Yolanda Zepeda, and my former boss Noah Weisleder. I seek and value their opinion on anything professional and personal. They all have different perspectives. My husband is not an academic nor a scientist, Yolanda is a seasoned academic administrator, and Noah is an academic scientist. My husband and Yolanda are both Latinx, but while my husband and I are immigrants, Yolanda is not. Their combined wisdom is of great value and a reminder of why one must have a mentoring network and ideally a very diverse one.
CoE: Tell us about your hobbies or interests outside of work.
Hernandez: I have some hobbies that I have neglected, and for which I plan to carve out more time: painting, drawing and learning to play the piano. More recently I have gotten hooked on podcasts and audiobooks because I can listen while I work out, drive, or do house chores. Most of these are non-fiction as I really like to learn about history, life skills, current events and things that make me laugh out loud.
by Meggie Biss, College of Engineering Communications | biss.11@osu.edu
