Please join us in welcoming Associate Professor of Chemistry Malika Jeffries-EL as the next Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, as of July 1, 2020.
Malika spoke to BU Today about how her training as a chemist will help her in her new role, remote teaching, and the future of graduate education. With the COVID-19 pandemic and the antiracism movement happening concurrently, she hopes to make graduate studies more accessible to all and expand the educational and professional development opportunities available to graduate students.
Malika’s research focuses on the development of organic semiconductors and their use in optical and electronic devices. Specifically, her work explores designing organic electronic materials that take advantage of the processing power of polymers and the electronic properties of semiconductors for use in devices such as solar cell and displays. She was elected as a Fellow of the American Chemical Society and holds multiple additional honors for her research, her service to the field of chemistry and her support of advancing diversity in the field. Prior to joining the BU Department of Chemistry in 2016, she was an Associate Professor at Iowa State University and previously held a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professorship at MIT.
Since joining BU, Malika has been active in administrative leadership and departmental and university-wide service. She has experience with the many of the intricacies of graduate affairs, serving as Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Chemistry since 2018 and she has also been a member of the Graduate Recruitment and Admissions Committee. A committed advocate for diversity and inclusion, she has served on the University’s Recruitment Committee and on the CAS Diversity and Inclusion Committee, and she has worked on several projects to help increase the diversity and improve the support for graduate and postdoctoral scholars. In addition, Malika has also been a mentor for BU RISE and BU GROW.