Welcome to Duy Duong-Tran's personal webpage

Duy Duong-Tran’s Statement on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)

Today’s challenges can no longer be sufficiently categorized into one single field. They are rather complex and interdisciplinary in nature. Solving these challenges requires talents drawn from multiple disciplines. In higher education domain, universities have witnessed a more socio-culturally diversified student bodies across campuses. DEI has played an increasingly critical role in order to provide a better education experience for students, staff, and faculty.

My PhD training in computational neuroscience has equipped myself with necessary tools to make inferences on latent links between social inclusion and fundamental human brain theory. Neuroscience research findings have shown that individuals who feel the underlying stress of exclusion activate the same brain’s sub-circuitry as if they are experiencing physical pains. Inclusion is the fundamental backbone that ultimately allows diversity and equity to shine. Scientifically, embracing diversity for optic reasons might result in less cohesive organization. The human brain’s hallmark for inclusion lies within our tribal instincts that ultimately gave rise to involuntary stereotypes – often about race, gender or other fundamental social attributes. As human brain is hard-wired to belong, individuals with similar social statuses, upbringings tend to give each other the benefit of the doubt. In order to encourage and embrace inclusion, each individual needs to start making conscious efforts towards our biases by minimizing involuntary stereotypes on social attributes. At its core, embracing diversity is the ultimate appreciation of differences originated, in part, from the aforementioned social attributes. To embrace diversity, we must evaluate ideas, thoughts, and perspectives – even though, much different than ours – through the lenses of science and/or common ground-truth. By addressing an idea solely through the lenses of science, we have accomplished two tasks: overcoming the instinctive judgments of ancient brain, and developing a civilized, constructive workplace that is fully logic-driven.

In my journey, I have been involving and embracing diversity and inclusion. I started my college career with opportunities to support two-year college students with very diverse racial backgrounds, across multiple age groups. Looking back, this exposure has ultimately shaped my teaching and research philosophy in many positive ways. Later on, I was appointed to work in different international corporations whose successes critically depend on multicultural interactions. Specifically, as a program manager at Mann+Hummel, the programs’ deliverables are principally contingent upon my leadership on providing an inclusive workplace for colleagues with different professional backgrounds (e.g. engineering, quality controls, manufacturing, operations, finance, and purchasing) and nationalities/cultures (such as Germany, Japanese, North and South American).

The key motivation for me to choose Industrial Engineering (IE) as a life-time career originates from its nature of interdisciplinary collaborations. At its core, IE brings the mutual understanding from a variety of disciplines to essentially ensure success and ownership to all team members. During my time as a graduate student, I acquired further knowledge on pedagogical developments of multiple Industrial Engineering courses that are inter-/multi-disciplinary by design. Working with students whose expertise spanning beyond engineering discipline challenged me to diversify my approaches and provide more tailor-made solutions to fit students’ domain-specific needs. One of the main reasons I joined Purdue Engineering was also because of its distinguished track records in diversity and inclusion such as the birthplace of the National Society of Black Engineers, or the second largest producer of undergraduate female engineers nationwide. As a PhD student at Purdue, being appointed to be the chair of health and wellness, I was tasked to build different inclusive work-life-balance programs that are mindful of Purdue IE’s diversified graduate student body. As a graduate researcher and a Boilermaker community member, I am always committed to support fellow Purdue students, whether they are part of my research group, IE students at Grissom Hall or other Boilermakers. Recently, served as a search committee member for the next James Solberg Head of Purdue School of Industrial Engineering, I was fortunate to be part of a brilliant collective effort from Purdue Engineering leadership in finding the next leader with unmatched vision for diversity and inclusion.

Our fight for social inclusion has recently being challenged by the manufactured fear and hostile politicized optics of COVID-19 pandemic, propagating concerns to many Asian communities across the world. Times and times again, we see that solidarity is the answer to violence and hate. I truly believe that our fights against #Asianhate and other racially-profiled hate crimes must recommence. I am fully committed to seek and participate in different DEI organizations across campus, to lead by compassion and example, and to become a reliable resource in helping my fellow students and colleagues in challenges related to DEI.