Renetta Garrison Tull, Ph.D., is the Vice Chancellor for Inclusive Excellence at the University of California Davis, and she is a past convenor for the University of California’s system-wide (10 campus) Council of Vice Chancellors for Equity and Inclusion. Tull’s undergraduate and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering and speech science are from Howard University and Northwestern University, respectively. She has had past faculty roles at UW-Madison, the University of Maryland College Park, and UMBC. At UC Davis, she is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering, and a faculty affiliate in the Interdepartmental Program on Human Rights Studies. As Vice Chancellor, her divisional portfolio includes the Davis-based Office of Campus Community Relations, and the Office for Advancing Mentoring and the Professoriate. The Sacramento headquarters houses the Office for Health Equity by Design for Inclusive Excellence, serving the medical school, nursing school, and medical center. Inclusive Excellence also covers medical clinics around California, and UC Davis’ locations in the Bay Area and other parts of the state. Her portfolio also includes the Avanza initiative; the Police Accountability Board; the Center for Reducing Health Disparities; the Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science; the Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Social Sciences, Arts, and the Humanities; and the Truth, Community Healing, and Transformation Center. She credits the success of Inclusive Excellence to talented teams and a supportive university environment. She is proud to be the Executive Sponsor for the UC Davis Principles of Community university-wide campus climate campaign, which highlights the key phrase, "We affirm the dignity inherent in all of us."
Before joining UC Davis in California, Tull was in Maryland at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) and served as Assistant Dean for Graduate Student Development (GSD), Associate Vice Provost for GSD and Postdoctoral Affairs, and Associate Vice Provost for Strategic Initiatives. She later had a detail with the University System of Maryland (USM, 12 institutions), serving as the Director for USM Pipeline Professional Development Programs, and she had Co-PI and PI roles on National Science Foundation (NSF) grants within the LSAMP, Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate, and ADVANCE programs. At Davis, she is PI for the NSF-funded PROMISE Engineering Institute (PEI - UC Davis and UMBC). PEI has developed an intergenerational mentoring engineering leadership network which has engaged engineering graduate students and senior leaders from UC Davis, UMBC, UC Irvine, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, University of Maryland College Park, Virginia State University, Rice University, George Mason University, and North Carolina A&T.
An international speaker on global inclusion in STEM, Dr. Tull, a member of Tau Beta Pi, has shared Humanitarian Engineering principles and work connected to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals at the United Nations Headquarters, and on every continent (except Antarctica). Through the Latin and Caribbean Consortium for Engineering Institutions (LACCEI), she has given bilingual talks across Latin America on topics related to engineering for all.
Tull was a finalist for the Global Engineering Deans Council/Airbus Diversity Award (announced in Italy and acknowledged in Dubai). In addition, she has received the ABET Claire L. Felbinger Award for Diversity, the Student Platform for Engineering Education Development Global Mentoring Award, and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Head Association’s (ECEDHA) Diversity Award. She was a PI for Puerto Rico’s ADVANCE Hispanic Women in STEM, she is the past President for LACCEI, and the current Vice President of Transformative Initiatives for the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies (IFEES). Tull is currently leading the “Alianza” project for LACCEI in partnership with the Organization of American States; she sits on the Board of Directors of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), one of the world's largest Earth and space science organizations; and recently, she has been invited to serve on engineering expert teams in Chile and China.
Tull was a co-author for UNESCO Engineering Report II, and she participated in the UN Women CSW66 side event on “Role of Women in STEM in Addressing Climate Change” where she joined global leaders on the importance of women in engineering for climate action, disaster risk reduction, and sustainable development. She is an author of a chapter of "Rising to the Top," an IFEES book on global women in engineering, and was a co-author for the National Academies’ “Impact of COVID-19 on the Careers of Women in Academic STEMM,” and “The Science of Effective Mentoring in STEMM. She is also co-author for the "Matilda y las Mujeres en Ingeniería" series, and her book chapter with a collaborative team of authors from several continents, "Models for International Collaborations to Nurture Students into Global Engineers," in the Springer book, “Academic Leadership in Engineering Education: Learnings and Case Studies from Educational Leaders Around the Globe,” was launched in Australia. Tull enjoys her work as a global education policy strategist and champion for equity. She often travels with her husband of more than 30 years, Dr. Damon Tull, with whom she collaborates on work such as “The Success Equation,” and “Dark Matters: Metaphorical Black Holes…”, which creatively couples math, physics, and social science.
http://orcid.org/https://0009-0009-7197-5212
University of California, Davis
[biography]