Fellows have the opportunity to cultivate community as well as leadership, collaboration and problem-solving skills through developing and implementing initiatives that strengthen the Brown graduate student community. Selected fellows include: Mirjam Paninski and Regina Pieck (family friendly) Ramisa Fariha and Shuai Xie (international community), Christopher Lee and Prabhdeep Kehal (LGBTQ+ community/Gender Queeries) and Benjamin Wilks, Amanda Ruiz and Kiara Lee (race and social justice/DiversiTeas).

As a doctoral student, Shuai Xie has been involved with the Global Brown Center for international students, but saw Community Fellows as an opportunity to develop more graduate student specific events.

“I’ve received a lot of support from the Graduate School and I want other students to know about it,” says Xie.

She and Ramisa Fariha met last summer while volunteering at International Orientation and enjoyed working together. This is Fariha’s second year as a Fellow who believes “community building and giving back are part of being a holistic student.”

They have planned a graduate student self-care series, with three events throughout the fall semester. Each event will provide graduate students with a new skill to combat stress and take care of themselves. They also plan to collaborate with different student groups to create "Emotion to Motion” event to teach students different dance moves from around the world as a mechanism for stress management through body movements.

Christopher Lee was drawn to the Community Fellows program as a way to expand programming and organizing work for transgender, gender non-conforming and non-binary students. Gender Queeries, as a new initiative will hope to initially build a structure with a small event in the fall and a larger one in the spring, potentially a movie with discussion to follow.

Lee is excited to have collaborative thought partners through the program and hopes to help the University expand the current initiatives for this group and to extend the conversation beyond bathrooms and pronouns, which they acknowledge are important first steps.

The family friendly group with Mirjam Paninski and Regina Pieck plan to join efforts with other campus groups and have already successfully executed a fall event at a nearby apple orchard.

They are “interested in helping to plan more graduate student events that are family friendly and inclusive that other campus groups may not be focused on,” says Paninski.

“Most graduate students are not close to their own families and are looking to connect with other graduate students to provide support and learn and experience being parents together,” says Pieck. Paninski echoes this feeling, “families are a vital part of our graduate student community.”

Benjamin Wilks is eager to have students involved from across campus in his team’s event series called the DiversiTeas. He and others, who are part of a variety of identity focused organizations on campus including Out in STEM (oSTEM), Graduate Students of Color in STEM (GSOCnSTEM), and the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), are developing a series of events designed to connect folks within the STEM community under the umbrella of identity. 

“We hope that by providing an informal space for folks from various minoritized identities to be in community, we can start to build an intersectional STEM network at Brown committed to supporting one another professionally, and personally,” says Wilks. 

The first DiversiTeas of the semester was held on October 23 with guest speakers Professor Matthew Guterl and Dr. Stacey Lawrence of the Sheridan Center to discuss best practices related to diversity and inclusion in STEM.  

Find out more about Community Fellows.