Arti Agrawal is the Associate Vice President, Diversity for IEEE Photonics Society. In this volunteer role she has helped organise events for Women in Photonics all over the world, and has helped create the diversity and inclusion policy to include intersectionality. The Society instituted scholarships for females to attend conferences like OFC. She has overseen the female membership of the society rise from 6 to more than 16% in 4 years.
She is a keen activist for ethnic minority and other under-represented groups. She helped run the first Pride in Photonics workshop at the flagship CLEO conference in USA in 2019, (to be run again in 2020), to increase inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people in IEEE activities. She has helped create awareness raising (bystander, unconscious bias, leadership trainings) for IEEE members.
She has written for the IEEE’s Institute on Diversity issues:
http://theinstitute.ieee.org/ieee-roundup/blogs/blog/we-need-to-support-our-lgbt-community
In her day role Arti, is an Associate Professor at UTS in Electrical Engineering and also the Director of Women in Engineering and IT, UTS. In this role she is responsible for research in photonics and policy, strategy and implementation to increase female participation in engineering and IT at UTS. Arti volunteers for other organisations as well on increasing inclusion and diversity in STEM