2024 AGU ELECTIONS

Richard Vachula

Global Environmental Change

Secretary

Bio

Assistant Professor, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA

AGU embraces the global community and welcomes leaders representing various identities, voices, and perspectives. List any identities, voices, and perspectives you would bring, including but not limited to nationality, regional representations, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and anything else you feel comfortable sharing.

My identity as scientist is inextricably linked to my own cultural identity and worldview as a person of mixed white and Middle Eastern heritage. Although I typically pass as completely white, this complexity of ethnic background greatly informs my outlook and approach to my scientific research, the building of scientific communities, and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. For example, my own experiences have often provided a perspective on intersectional identities that can be overlooked in communities (e.g., socioeconomics, disabilities). This perspective underscores my firm belief that scientific communities must be structurally and foundationally inclusive to facilitate the full disclosure and recognition of their diversity.

Volunteer experience that relates to this position:

I currently serve as faculty chair of my department's Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Committee. Additionally, I currently represent my department at my college's Inclusion, Equity, and Diversity Accountability committee. As a graduate student, I was a representative to my department's faculty and represented my department at the graduate council of a multi-department environmental institute.

Q&A

As one of the elected leaders of your section, how will you partner with your president, president-elect, other leaders, and staff to communicate with and engage your members to achieve AGU’s vision, values, mission, and goals?

As Global Environmental Change (GEC) section Secretary, I would assist the section President in their pursuits toward achieving AGU's strategic goals. The Secretary is primarily responsible for generating quarterly newsletters and for amplifying the GEC section to the broader AGU community. As the impacts of climate change manifest before our eyes, the GEC section has an important part to play in AGU and broader society. I would promote an inclusive newsletter by seeking out news from all members of the GEC community, cognizant of power dynamics and tendencies of our community to marginalize folks belonging to groups with less representation in science. Additionally, I would seek out ways to publicize GEC news to the broader AGU membership when appropriate.

Section affiliations:

Biogeosciences; Global Environmental Change; Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology