Dr. Rushika Patel is chief health and academic equity officer in academic nursing. In her career and DEI consulting practice, she collaborates top executives and everyday leaders to create impact in diversity, equity, and inclusion. She has 20 years of experience steering diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, engaging and establishing trust with multiple stakeholder groups, and mapping pathways to advance organizational mission and culture for greater impact in DEI.

She is a proven, outcomes-driven leader for DEI strategic planning and implementation, DEI training, education, and professional development, and diversity recruitment, retention, and advancement. She is a DEI researcher, scholar, and social justice educator with experience leading DEI and social justice initiatives in diverse, private, public, non-profit, US, and global settings.  

Dr. Patel is a credible, trustworthy, and knowledgeable DEI leader, a compassionate listener, able to map lines of opportunity and collaboration between multiple groups with profoundly diverse experiences, institutional locations, viewpoints, and bottom lines. She has successfully steered the work and priorities of executive university leadership, founded and directed educational centers and programs for groups historically marginalized in the US, led large-scale and institution-wide collaborative DEI strategic planning initiatives, and has trained and sensitized thousands across the US and Asia to the needs of disadvantaged and underserved populations when accessing educational and healthcare systems.

Dr. Patel uses existing institutional data sets to design new studies that deepen and enrich the knowledge and insight available to make progress in diversity, equity, and inclusion. She develops innovative, grounded, and efficient strategies for increasing organizational performance, progression, and advancement in diversity, equity, and inclusion.

She also assesses the strength and quality of institutional cultures, relationships, processes, and resources while providing counsel on how to develop and harness the generative potential of organizational culture for total organizational advancement in diversity, equity, and inclusion.

She is an expert communicator, intergroup dialogue facilitator, and DEI trainer leading groups to develop a deeper mutual understanding, increased skill, shared values, sense of commitment, and grounded direction in alignment with key organizational goals and missions.

Dr. Patel has had the privilege of studying closely with world-renowned scholars of race, gender and culture, all of whom encouraged her to value and develop a disciplined and rigorous method of inquiry and academic foundation for her work.

She has a strong understanding of various applied approaches in diversity, equity and inclusion and is extensively trained in curriculum design for multicultural group processes and trainings, DEI assessment and DEI evaluation. She has further experience in 21st century pedagogical innovation and educational technology and finds great interest in designing trainings that involve multiple forms of media in order to both variegate training delivery and maximize learning outcomes.

She has experience in educational assessment including the use of various instruments, such as the Intercultural Development Inventory, in addition to satisfaction data, focus group and interview data, as well as other quantitative and qualitative assessments, to assess participants’ cultural competency and determine the appropriate training design. She also has a wide range of experience designing and implementing educational programs and services for diverse, multicultural, and multi-generational groups.