Sherri Rose, professor of health policy, has been honored with the 2023 President’s Awards for Excellence Through Diversity for her service work aimed at improving equity and research commitment to magnifying how medical and health policy decisions can marginalize and exclude minoritized groups.

Rose’s research focus is on developing and integrating innovative statistical machine learning approaches to improve human health and health equity. She shared at the awards ceremony that the honor was not just a reflection of her work, but also those of her collaborators, colleagues, and students.

“I have certain lived experiences coming to academia from a low-income background and as a woman in science, but I also have many privileges as a white woman and continually learn important perspectives from communities I’m not part of, including from faculty, staff, and students of color,” Rose said. “Prioritizing their experiences and engaging with their innovative knowledge production is crucial in disrupting the inequitable status quo of our institutions.”

Rose is founding co-chair of the Department of Health Policy’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) Committee and the founding organizer of the Stanford Health Policy Health Equity Lecture Series, and was previously a diversity liaison for the School of Medicine. In 2020, Rose became a founding co-director of the Stanford Population Health Summer Research Program, a 7-week training and research experience for community college and undergraduate students from underrepresented and historically excluded groups in the health sciences.

“This work is a moral imperative,” Rose said for a story in Stanford Report. “It has never been a question to me about whether I would invest my time toward making our academic environments better aligned with principles of justice.”

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The awards established in 2009 are intended to recognize that a diverse campus community enhances the university’s institutional excellence by broadening and strengthening Stanford’s mission of teaching, learning, and scholarship. Stanford students, faculty, and staff submit award nominations to the Office of Faculty Development, Diversity and Engagement.

The additional 2023 award recipients: 

Darion Wallace, a doctoral student in race, inequality and language at the Graduate School of Education and Knight-Hennessy Scholar, for his leadership and community initiatives that have provided support to the Black community and others at Stanford.

The university’s Community College Outreach Program (CCOP), founded in 2020 as a grassroots effort by developmental biology graduate schools who attended community college. The program offers scientific mentorship and provides research opportunities to underrepresented and underserved community college students.