Dr. Sumant Jha is an active NASA IMPACT team member through STI/USRA. He is a passionate advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the geoscience field in particular and higher education broadly speaking.
Dr. Jha became interested in DEI initiatives during his Ph.D. program when he joined the International Association for Geoscience Diversity. He met many like-minded people in the group and since then has been actively involved in promoting DEI in various ways. He advocated using Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) services at major geoscience conferences like the GSA and AGU. GSA was a success as they include CART at all major talks and have special links available to people who would like to use it for a given session. He has also served on the first-ever zero-gravity flight organizing team for disabled scientists and professionals through Mission AstroAccess.
Through the USRA’s DEI initiative, Dr. Jha plans to bring more awareness of available DEI practices at USRA and its partners, provide advice on improving current practices and infrastructure and promote inclusion in the work we do here.