Inclusive Excellence and Broadening Participation
SECQUOIA is committed to fostering a welcoming, equitable, and supportive research and learning environment. Diverse perspectives across background, nationality, discipline, career stage, and lived experience strengthen scientific discovery and make our engineering methods and open-source tools more rigorous, trustworthy, and broadly useful.
Our Commitments
- Inclusive recruitment and mentoring — We welcome trainees and collaborators from diverse academic and personal backgrounds and provide structured mentorship tailored to varied career goals. We strive to lower barriers to entry through transparent expectations and supportive advising.
- Accessible and equitable teaching — We design courses, tutorials, and open educational materials with clear learning structure, modular background refreshers, and accessible resources so learners from varied disciplines can engage deeply.
- Community building and shared respect — Through group meetings, journal clubs, seminars, and collaborative projects, we cultivate respectful technical dialogue, constructive feedback, and shared accountability aligned with institutional policies.
- Open and reproducible science — We publish open-source software, benchmark libraries, and reproducible documentation so researchers and students across institutions and resource settings can build on our work.
- Partnerships and outreach — We partner with student organizations, international academic networks, and professional societies to broaden participation in process systems engineering, operations research, and quantum computing.
Actions We Take
- Provide structured mentoring, individual development planning, and conference/fellowship support for undergraduate, master’s, doctoral, and postdoctoral researchers.
- Maintain a collaborative lab culture with clear professional standards and open channels for feedback.
- Develop and share open-access course repositories and hands-on computational tutorials.
- Release and maintain open-source optimization and quantum-computing software packages and benchmarks.
Continuing to Improve
Building a supportive scholarly community is an ongoing commitment. We welcome ideas, outreach invitations, and collaborations on broadening participation in science and engineering—please reach out via the contact form below.