Each year IUPUI and the GMC honors a Trailblazer and Innovator Scholar Award to recognize their outstanding mentoring, especially to minoritized students, and invites this individual to IUPUI to present seminars to our faculty, students, staff, and administrators. This seminar series is supported by Indiana University President’s Diversity Initiative and is facilitated by the IUPUI Graduate Mentoring Center.
2023 IUPUI Trailblazers and Innovators Scholar
Dr. Tera R. Jordan is the Assistant Provost for Faculty Development and an Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Studies (HDFS) at Iowa State University. She provides leadership for institutional initiatives related to faculty hiring, orientation and onboarding, mentoring, data, and work-life integration. Her research program focuses on marriage and intimate relationships, community based participatory research, and qualitative and mixed methods. An award-winning scholar, the HDFS Department, the College of Human Sciences, and Iowa State have honored her dedication and commitment to teaching and mentoring, community engagement, and diversity enhancement and inclusive excellence. Prior to her faculty appointment in 2012, Dr. Jordan earned a dual-title Ph.D. in HDFS and Demography from The Pennsylvania State University in 2005 and worked at the University of Georgia from 2004 to 2012.
Dr. Kenneth Lai Hing received his BS degree in Chemistry from the City University of New York and his Ph.D. in Analytical/Physical Chemistry from the University of Georgia. After graduating from UGA he accepted a faculty position as Assistant Professor in the Chemistry Department at Oakwood then College, a HBCU, in Huntsville, Alabama. He progressed through the ranks to full Professor. Administrative positions include Chair of the Chemistry Department for over 20 years and in the 2016-17 school year was selected as Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. In the Fall of 2021, he was awarded the latest of three NSF funded HBCU-UP, Implementation grants. Dr. Lai Hing is married to Jean, and they have one son Steven who is an Associate Professor of Chemistry in the Oakwood Department of Chemical and Biochemical Sciences. They are the proud grand parents of Drs. Steven and Ebony’s three children Steven II, age 6, Divya, 4 and Lylah, 1.