Courting Records

Mean Green basketball teams net tournament berth and other accolades for this season’s performance

The North Texas men’s basketball team captured a spot in the 2023 National Invitation Tournament, capping of a season in which they racked up 26 wins — the most regular season victories in program history.

In a frst, the team made a national postseason tournament for the third year in a row. They also boasted the nation’s No. 1 scoring defense at 55.4 points.

Junior guard Tylor Perry

(pictured below with the Mean Green Maniacs) was named Conference USA Player of the Year and earned spots on the Conference USA First Team All-Conference and C-USA All-Tournament Teams. Senior guard Kai Huntsberry snagged the title of C-USA New- comer of the Year.

Junior guard Rubin Jones took a place in the C-USA All-Defensive Team. Junior forward Abou Ousmane was named to the third-team all-conference.

In women’s basketball, junior Quincy Noble was named for the third time to the All-Conference Team, becoming only the second UNT player to earn that distinction. With an average of 17.1 points per game, she was the third highest scoring player in C-USA.

Check out more sports news. meangreensports.com

Softball Fields Great Success

The softball team made their pitch as one of the top teams in Conference USA and in the nation.

The team earned a spot in the D1 Softball Preseason Top 25 — a frst for the team, which came in at No. 24.

Junior frst baseman Kailey Gamble set a UNT record by reaching 10 home runs in the fewest number of games. She accomplished the feat in 19 games, eclipsing the previous mark of 26 games set by Kelli Schkade (’17) in 2016 and Taylor Schoblocher (’16) in 2015.

Last year, the team appeared for the frst time in the NCAA Regionals and won their frst Conference USA Tournament championship.

Women’s Golf Breaks Records

The women’s golf team, led by graduate student Audrey Tan (’22), put in a record-breaking performance at the ICON Invitational tournament at the Golf Club of Houston in February. Tan broke her own 54-hole scoring record, earning Conference USA Player of the Week honors. The team, ranked No. 50 in the Golfstat poll, came in second place, defeating 10 teams ranked higher.

In other golf news, Sandra Palmer (’63) is scheduled to be inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame this June. Palmer racked up 19 victories during her 30-year career on the Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour.

By the Numbers

Well, 58-03.75 feet, to be precise, is the distance freshman KeAyla Dove covered in the shot put, a Mean Green record. She competed in the NCAA Division I Indoor Track and Field Championships in March and was runner-up in the Conference USA Indoor Championships in February. Also at the meet, freshman Marta Sivina won the women’s pentathlon.

2023 Mean Green Football Schedule

SEPT. 2 vs. CAL

SEPT. 9 at FIU

SEPT. 16 at LA TECH

SEPT. 30 vs. ACU

OCT. 7 at NAVY

OCT. 14 vs. TEMPLE

OCT. 21 at TULANE

OCT. 28 vs. MEMPHIS

NOV. 4 vs. UTSA

NOV. 10 at SMU

NOV. 18 at TULSA

NOV. 25 vs. UAB

Schedule is subject to change. Check meangreensports.com for the most up-to-date information.

New Faces for Athletics

Just as UNT prepares to make its move to the American Athletic Conference, Jared Mosley (pictured at right) was appointed vice president and director of athletics, and Eric Morris (center, next to UNT President Neal Smatresk) was named head football coach.

Mosley, the 15th director of athletics in UNT history, brings 20 years of experience in athletics administration and leadership. He previously served as associate vice president and chief operating ofcer at UNT, as well as sport program administrator for both men’s and women’s basketball while assisting with football and handling scheduling for the football program.

Before joining UNT, he served as chief executive ofcer and president of the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, as well as director of athletics and associate athletic director at Abilene Christian University.

“We have accomplished much in recent years, but we need all of Mean Green Nation pulling in the same direction to help take our department to even greater heights,” Mosley says.

Morris, the 20th football coach in North Texas history, previously served as ofensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Washington State in 2022.

“As a native Texan, I understand the pride and standard of Mean Green football and I am humbled to be able to lead this storied program,” Morris says.

STORY BY HEATHER NOEL

PHOTOGRAPHS BY AHNA HUBNIK AND BEN TORRES

Iva Jestratijevic was 16 and working as a model around the world when she frst learned about the not so glamourous side of fashion. Getting ftted for runway shows, she often visited factories and clothing manufacturers. The abysmal conditions she witnessed are images that still fuel her work to make change today.

“There are so many bad things hidden behind the curtain,” says Jestratijevic, now an assistant professor in UNT’s College of Merchandising, Hospitality and Tourism with a research focus on sustainability and transformative behavior. “Huge amounts of waste, underpaid employees (commonly women and children) working day and night and overall unsafe work conditions.”

With all the glitz of the runway and pressures to obtain the latest trending styles, it’s easy to disassociate from the people involved in fashion’s production and the impact the industry has on the workers and the environment. As one of the world’s largest polluters, the fashion industry has weaved some not so pretty tales in terms of its environmental impact. While the industry is not inherently sustainable, that isn’t stopping UNT community members from researching and experimenting with ways to reduce the toll that fashion takes on the Earth and the people involved in its labor.

From plant molecular biology to fashion design and merchandising, UNT faculty, students and alumni are thinking of ways to reshape the fashion industry’s supply chain. In the process, they are inspiring others through their actions and educational instruction to be the next generation of changemakers with an eye on sustainability.

“As an industry, we have been bad people making really beautiful things for a very long time,” says Barbara Trippeer, UNT assistant professor of fashion design. “We must acknowledge that we have a part to play in the solution and a responsibility to be mindful of the efect of our actions.”

Thoughtful Design

Like Jestratijevic, Chanjuan Chen (’15 M.F.A.) also saw frsthand the poor conditions of some manufacturing facilities as she toured them during her undergraduate education in China. Those experiences made her realize she wanted to do more than make beautiful clothes.

Then, as a master’s student in fashion design at UNT, she was introduced to sustainability and thinking through a garment’s whole life cycle. Now, she’s come full circle as an associate professor of fashion design in UNT’s College of Visual Arts and Design exploring ways clothing could be developed on demand via 3D printers at home in what she calls modular fashion. Her modular designs are all made up of smaller pieces that interlock together — one even mimicking intricate, hand-woven lace.

“The idea is that in the future, you wouldn’t even have to go to the store anymore. You could download, print and assemble your own garments at home,” Chen says.

While 3D-printed garments might not be ready for mainstream, there are simpler sustainable techniques that could more readily be adopted by the industry. In her courses at UNT, Chen instructs students on zero waste pattern design and cutting techniques that reduce fabric scraps.

“I introduce sustainability in all of my courses as something that shouldn’t be an extra thing to think about, but rather something that’s a natural consideration in the way students approach their designs,” Chen says.

Many of Chen’s students have taken a sustainability focus with their work. For his senior collection inspired by nature, Johnathan De La Cruz is using all cotton fber and natural dyes.

“I wanted to use biodegradable materials so that if it ends up in a landfll, it can decompose naturally and not pollute our environment,” he says.

De La Cruz visited a cotton farm along with other fashion design students in 2022. The trip was one of many educational initiatives such as feld trips, lectures and workshops funded through grants UNT has received in recent years from Cotton Inc., a nonproft funded by U.S. cotton growers that is focused on research and marketing of the crop.

“It’s so important to step outside of the design process and think about other parts of the fashion industry — such as where fabric is being made, how it’s being made and who it’s being made by,” De La Cruz says.

That perspective is exactly what UNT fashion design faculty members Barbara Trippeer and Hae Jin Gam hoped students would glean from the experience. Trippeer, Gam and other professors in the Department of Design are working together to give students a well-rounded education when it comes to sustainability.

“We’re really working on an interdisciplinary approach to design education across our programs in fashion, interior and communication design,” Trippeer says. “In all three disciplines, we share a vision of ethical design, looking at things with a holistic thought process and thinking about the more human-centered perspective.”

Trippeer and Gam also have teamed up to analyze UNT’s design curriculum that cross-trains students and look at the viability of using smaller clothing manufacturing facilities through doing a published case study of Ottomatic Threads, a Cross Roads-based micro-factory and outdoor fashion line owned by Alisa Otto (’06, ’15 M.F.A.).

“Our industry is changing. With some of the big fashion corporations closing, there are more opportunities for students to start their own companies,” Gam says.

Efficiently Grown

As a plant molecular biologist, Roisin McGarry’s work is far from the fashion runway, but in the future, it still could have a very real impact for a prime textile used to construct many of the world’s garments. Her research, which has been funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Cotton Inc. among others, focuses on the architecture of the cotton plant. She’s part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers in UNT’s BioDiscovery Institute, which was established in 2016 to develop innovative solutions to create a sustainable bio-based economy. Cotton is a textile most prominently used for clothing, but it’s also a component for making currency, foor coverings, building insulation, medical supplies, various beauty products and other items.

“It permeates so many facets of our lives, yet we haven’t seen much study on cotton’s genetics,” McGarry says.

The absence of previous research has required McGarry to invent her own genetic tools for working with the plant. She specifcally looks at ways the cotton plant’s genes can be manipulated to impact the structure of the plant, making it grow more efciently using less of Earth’s precious space and water resources.

“I investigate the growth regulation of the plant, looking at things such as fowering time, arrangement of branches on a plant, as well as the size of the bolls it produces,” McGarry says. “The goal with my research is to fnd ways to increase the yield of cotton fber from the plant.”

As fashion designers turn to using more natural fbers for their collections, the demand for textiles like cotton will grow, McGarry says.

“And as we increase the yield of cotton, we want to make sure its fbers still have a high quality,” she says. “Those attributes don’t happen during processing or after harvesting. They happen on the plant itself and are determined by how the plant grows. That’s why my work on the biological and agricultural side of things is fundamentally important to solving sustainability challenges.”

Reducing Waste

Another challenge is production waste. Each year, 11.3 million tons of textile waste in the U.S. ends up in a landfll. That amount of waste was smaller when Jana Hawley became one of the frst scholars in the country to study textile waste in the 1990s as an assistant professor at UNT, but it still didn’t sit well with her.

“I wanted to do research that was personally satisfying to me,” Hawley says. “I studied it from all aspects how textiles go into the waste stream, what companies do with the waste and what we can do to reduce waste from entering the stream. Now, we’re seeing more companies fnally starting to look at the circularity and zero waste possibilities of textiles, which is exciting.”

As a sought-out expert on textile recycling, Hawley has consulted for many companies from large retailers such as Walmart to smaller businesses like Looptworks, which works with waste from brands to upcycle materials into new products.

Currently serving as dean of UNT’s College of Merchandising, Hospitality and Tourism, Hawley has made sustainability a priority in the college’s curriculum and is encouraging younger faculty like Jestratijevic to continue discovery in this feld.

In her courses, Jestratijevic ensures students understand fashion’s impact on the world, so they are well equipped to make environmentally mindful decisions in their future careers. In 2020, she launched a unique undergraduate course covering sustainable strategies in merchandising, and she is currently developing another course on sustainable packaging, a focus of her research.

“I tell my students, you know what the ideal fashion item would be, the one I hold in my hands which doesn’t exist,” Jestratijevic says. “Whatever we produce will never be completely sustainable because there will always be some sort of impact. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop trying to decrease the negative efects of the industry.”

Jestratijevic has found that a combination of sustainability strategies could help fashion brands lessen waste from their packaging. The seven strategies include: rethinking packaging logistics, refusing to use single-use packaging, reusing packaging, reducing the packaging quantity, recycling packaging, repurposing packaging and providing rot or compostable packaging solutions. This past fall, Jestratijevic and her research partner Urška Vrabič-Brodnjak, who was a visiting professor at UNT in 2022, presented the frst global report on sustainable packaging innovation in the fashion industry in scientifc journals Sustainable Production and Consumption and Sustainability

Top left: Iva Jestratijevic, assistant professor in UNT’s College of Merchandising, Hospitality and Tourism

Top right:

Chanjuan Chen (‘15 M.F.A.), assistant professor of fashion design, speaks with senior Johnathan De La Cruz

Left: Research Assistant Professor of plant development and plant molecular biology Roisin McGarry

Jestratijevic will soon publish an open-source book through UNT Press that educates about sustainable practices businesses can incorporate in their operations using her own research and interviews with leaders from sustainably focused organizations such as Patagonia, Eileen Fisher and Fashion Revolution. Of the thousands of fashion brands in the U.S., fewer than 100 are ofcially certifed for their sustainability practices.

“Many companies say they are sustainable, but it’s just good marketing,” she says. “The fashion industry is not isolated, there are so many other industries from agriculture to retail that are involved. We must work together to make sure the entire chain of operations is sustainable.”

Read about UNT alumni who are making sustainable change. northtexan.unt.edu/future-fashion

UNT ALUMNI AND FACULTY BRING UNIQUE VOICES TO A RANGE OF SETTINGS — FROM THE CLASSROOM TO THE CORPORATE BOARDROOM.

BY AMANDA

STORY BYAMANDA FULLER

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LEO GONZALEZ & AHNA HUBNIK

Maria Otero (’07, ’19 M.S.) was a high school student volunteering at a summer camp for children with special needs when she frst witnessed the life-changing power of applied behavior analysis.

“I’d hang out with some kids one summer, and by the next summer, they’d made a ton of improvement,” she says. “They were communicating more, expressing themselves and interacting with their peers. They just seemed so much happier. It was a common thread that a lot of these kids were getting applied behavior analysis therapy.”

Born in Colombia, Otero migrated to the U.S. at the age of 5 as a political refugee with her mother and older sister. After studying behavior analysis at UNT — one of a few universities in the nation to ofer the program to undergraduates — she’s now a second-year doctoral candidate at UNT and a member of G-RISE, a National Institutes of Health-funded program that recruits and prepares a diverse pool of doctoral scientists for careers in the biomedical research felds.

She’s well on her way, currently serving as a boardcertifed behavior analyst at Cook Children’s Hospital and providing early intensive behavioral interventions to children with autism spectrum disorder.

Through her research in the lab of Manish Vaidya, associate professor of behavior analysis, Otero is working to develop technologies that enable clinicians, teachers and other caregivers to be more efcient and efective in providing data-driven interventions for children with learning difculties. One example is her prototype for an app that converts a complex behavior analysis assessment that typically requires multiple appointments with a specialist into a simple app anyone can use to determine whether a child has the prerequisite skills needed to learn a complex verbal task.

“I focus on creating technologies that help facilitate learning for children,” she says. “Systemically speaking, there just aren’t enough people to provide the services they need, and that can set them behind for the rest of their lives. But we can make a diference. Through research and through technology that is user-friendly and accessible, we can bridge those gaps.”

A designated Minority-Serving and Hispanic-Serving Institution, UNT is home to students, alumni and faculty who are fnding innovative, interdisciplinary ways to break barriers to equity and access in all areas of society — from health care and education to industry.

In 2022, UNT became a founding member of the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities, a group of 21 of the nation’s Tier One research universities committed to increasing opportunity for students historically underserved by higher education. Members strive to achieve two key goals by 2030: to double their number of Hispanic doctoral students and increase their Hispanic professoriate by 20%.

“Becoming more intentional in the steps we take to serve all of our students will have far-reaching benefts, not just for all of the members of UNT’s diverse and caring community,” says Pam Padilla, vice president of research and innovation, “but for our society at large as these innovative thinkers create solutions for a more equitable future.”

Speaking Up

Cesar Jaquez (’19, ’21 M.S.) began seeing a speech therapist for his stutter when he was in elementary school.

He was bullied for his stutter early on, but it didn’t impact his ability to make friends and socialize until middle school, when negative thoughts began to creep in.

“I felt isolated in my experiences, thinking I was the only person who stuttered,” he says. “I didn’t get to talk to another person who stuttered until I started group therapy at the UNT Speech and Hearing Center during my sophomore year.”

He continued speech therapy until he began his graduate studies in speech-language pathology at UNT, and he attributes his interest in the feld to the strong relationships he built with his own skilled and empathetic speech therapists.

“It showed me how much it can impact someone’s life, especially being someone who needed a little bit more help,” he says. “Now I get to choose when I want to implement my strategies and be fuent on my own terms, rather than have my speech dictate when I should talk and participate in my own life. I’m much closer to truly understanding what it means to be content with myself, knowing that what I want to say is more important than how I say it.”

Jaquez is now a speech pathologist himself, working in a skilled nursing facility to provide senior patients with acute and long-term speech therapy.

“We have some full-time residents and some skilled patients who come in for a shorter rehab stay, so their needs can really vary. A person who has just had a stroke might need to learn how to communicate for themselves and properly sequence basic tasks like standing or swallowing. That’s where co-treatments come into play a physical therapist will work with the physical aspects while I work on the cognitive aspect.”

Jaquez always thought he’d work with children with communication disorders, like his own therapists did. But after completing his graduate externship at Medical City Plano, a Level I Trauma Center, he saw how speechlanguage therapy can transform someone’s life at any age.

“Many of our patients are dealing with dementia, Alzheimer’s or other language impairments that, even if they can’t be cured, can be managed. Our goal is to help them live as independently as possible so they can socialize, advocate for themselves and feel a sense of purpose.”

Completing his master’s degree during the COVID-19 pandemic was challenging, but he found support in mentors like associate professor Katsura Aoyama, director of graduate studies in speech-language pathology and the UNT Psycholinguistics Lab.

“Dr. Kat is every student’s No. 1 supporter,” he says. “She’s never hesitant to reach out to catch up and provide career support.”

According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, 92% of speech-language pathologists are white and 96% are female. As a Hispanic male, Jaquez is proud to be part of the national push to increase diversity and representation in the feld.

“One of the reasons I got into this feld is that our patients deserve to see themselves,” he says. “Whether it’s a child or an adult, with or without a disability — if you consider my speech a disability, which, for people who stutter, varies from person to person. Patients deserve clinicians who can relate to their life experiences and understand how it impacts their language, their speech, their communication. I realized I can provide that for my patients by just being a little diferent.”

Aoyama has advocated for increased diversity in audiology and speech-language pathology throughout her career.

One of her current initiatives is Project Communicate, an interdisciplinary collaboration led by associate professor of special education Miriam Boesch. Funded by a $1.24 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, the fve-year program will train special education teachers and speech-language pathologists to better serve students with autism spectrum disorder.

Project Communicate was inspired by the nation’s growing need for professionals to work collaboratively across numerous disciplines to improve outcomes for students with disabilities. Its frst cohort will begin in Fall 2023 with 12 special education teachers and fve master’s students from the speech-language pathology program.

Cohort participants will complete interdisciplinary coursework at UNT and conduct supervised feld work in Dallas-Fort Worth area schools, where they’ll work directly with students with autism while receiving one-on-one training and mentorship from an onsite autism specialist.

The program also funds networking and professional development opportunities such as local and national conferences, monthly seminars hosted by expert practitioners, and workshops with distinguished scholars.

“Research shows that children tend to have better outcomes when they’re taught by individuals from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds,” Boesch says. “To increase diversity and representation in the feld, we have to increase it in our own programs by attracting more diverse and nontraditional students. Initiatives like Project Communicate, which ofers generous funding and focuses on career-readiness, are a step in the right direction.”

Improving Education

Karisma Morton, assistant professor of mathematics education, also is working to transform the future of education by transforming future educators. How children learn math — and more importantly, what they believe about how they learn math — is deeply infuenced by cultural and societal factors. Through her research and teaching, Morton investigates how gender and racial inequities in STEM education arise and works to instill the principles of equity-minded pedagogy in preservice elementary teachers. In her classes, she also cultivates opportunities for her students to refect on their own experiences as math learners and deepen their understanding of the various challenges and approaches.

“I want to leave them with tools and a new perspective of what math learning can be for all children,” Morton says. “My focus is the students in front of me, and the students in front of them.”

One of those students was Marin Woodard (’22). Now a fourth-grade teacher at Ginnings Elementary in Denton ISD, Woodard found her calling while working as an afterschool coach at the YMCA, a job she took after being laid of from her full-time job in the mortgage industry.

“Although I was a nontraditional frst-time student, I never felt ‘old,’” she says. “UNT has so many people from so many backgrounds, it was always so inviting.”

Woodard was in the frst cadre of the College of Education’s Practice Activism in Literacy (PALs) Teaching, an innovative teacher training program that is embedded in Denton ISD schools and grounded in a commitment to preparing teachers.

In addition to Morton, Woodard worked closely with assistant professor Brittany Frieson and senior lecturer Jeannette Ginther in the Department of Teacher

Education and Administration, and the three would go on to shape not only her journey at UNT, but her entire teaching philosophy.

“I wouldn’t be half the teacher I am if it weren’t for them,” she says. “Dr. Frieson focuses on equity and literacy and honoring students’ real voices, especially when they’re expressing themselves. All three of them emphasized the importance of building relationships with students — seeing them for who they are and what they bring to the classroom beyond the academic aspect.”

Since 2021, Woodard has partnered with Morton and Frieson on the Professional Dyads and Culturally Relevant Teaching project. An initiative of the National Council of Teachers of English, it’s designed to create a space for early childhood educators of color and educators who teach children of color, emerging bi/multilingual students and children from low-income households. They have presented their research on culturally relevant pedagogy at national conferences in Louisville, Kentucky, and Anaheim, California, with their fnal conference scheduled for summer 2023.

“Now, as we work together in this research area, Dr. Morton is able to come visit my students, and we talk about what a mathematician looks like,” Woodard says. “The kids have realized that mathematics is everywhere, and a mathematician can look like them or anyone else.”

Empowering The Individual

Melissa Savage, assistant professor of educational psychology and faculty associate in UNT’s Center for Racial and Ethnic Equity in Health and Society (CREEHS), is researching ways to increase participation in healthy habits, like group exercise, for a group that’s often overlooked in inclusion advocacy — individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Savage and colleagues from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill created a program called Step It Up to research self-management strategies, such as selfmonitoring and goal-setting, to support individuals with disabilities in exercise. They plan to use that information to create efective, scalable interventions.

Her project began with a $30,000 pilot research grant from the Organization for Autism Research. It explored the individual factors that can contribute to adults with disabilities participating in physical activity, including learning self-management techniques and receiving social support through individual coaches. The study reinforced Savage’s belief that, although it is crucial to build skills and capability at the individual level, meaningful inclusion requires a systemic solution.

“Access is there, but the social barriers make inclusive participation more challenging,” she says, adding that the next phase of the project will be a multi-site partnership with UNC researchers.

The teams will build on Savage’s pilot program, engaging with caregivers, support professionals, exercise professionals and community leaders to remove barriers to inclusion, shift perspectives and establish inclusive ftness experiences ranging from classes and programs to community events. She will work with CREEHS to recruit participants representative of the racial and socioeconomic diversity of Dallas-Fort Worth communities and already has begun securing community partners such as The Rec of Grapevine.

“Another big part of our work is to ensure we actively involve individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities in our research and fnd better methods to help us do that,” Savage says. “Learning from their experiences can support increasing healthy habits for all.”

Harnessing Connections

Raquel Daniels (’94, ’08 M.J.) has built her career around breaking barriers. But she’s learned that if you want to be an agent of change, you must frst make meaningful connections.

Growing up, Daniels wanted to be like Barbara Jordan, the frst African American elected to the Texas Senate after Reconstruction and the frst Black woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“I loved her diction, her voice,” she says. “I loved how she advanced society and wanted to be a voice for the underrepresented. I didn’t know how that would show up in my own life, but I’ve always been interested in how to connect people, how to create opportunity in a way that amplifes people as individuals.”

In June 2022, Daniels was appointed vice president and chief diversity, equity and inclusion ofcer for Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC), the largest customer-owned health insurer in the United States.

She leads initiatives ranging from accountability practices like leadership scorecards to company initiatives including business resource groups that bring employees together around shared identities and interests.

“I am excited to serve in a role that aligns with my values, and to use my gifts to continue HCSC’s longstanding commitment to attracting, hiring and retaining people who refect the makeup of the communities where we live and do business,” she says.

Daniels has served in numerous leadership roles throughout her 20-year career in DEI, most recently at Southwest Airlines. She traces much of her career success back to the connections she made at UNT, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology and public relations and her master’s degree in strategic communications and marketing.

“UNT was a connective tissue for me,” she says. “I felt very prepared for my future, from an academic standpoint but also because of the individuals I met and formed relationships with.”

The professor who left the greatest impression was Bertina Hildreth Combes, a longtime professor and administrator in the College of Education who was known for her passion for mentoring and her dedication to diversity and inclusion.

“As a young African American woman, working closely with someone who looked like me, who was so well respected and had such love, care and diligence for her work, was very important to me. Dr. Combes was the one who would tell me, ‘You got this. You’re going to do great.’ She saw things in me that I didn’t,” Daniels says.

The lessons Daniels learned at UNT continue to shape her vision for the future of DEI.

“There is a solid business case for practicing inclusiveness: productivity. Companies in the U.S. and across the world that take an inclusive approach to hiring and leadership are relatively more proftable,” she says. “Inclusive leadership is going to be the competency that we’re all looking toward; the willingness to ask humancentered questions like, ‘How can we harness the things that make us great, like our diversity, to be the most relevant, connected and competitive?’ I think inclusion is the activator.”

A proud alumna, she sees that spirit of belonging in UNT’s caring community and commitment to innovation.

“Every time I visit the UNT campus, I think, ‘Wow, how it has evolved!’ It’s a wonderful thing, because we can’t even begin to imagine the great shifts that can happen with the openness to evolve.”