Gertrude Fraser is Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. From 2001-2003, she was a Program Officer in higher education at the Ford Foundation.  In that capacity, she had responsibility for the Ford Foundation's Minority Fellowship Program and worked on the MIT Women in Science project, among others.

Dr. Fraser earned degrees from Bryn Mawr College and The Johns Hopkins University, where she completed her Doctorate in Anthropology. She is the author of African American Midwifery in the South: Dialogues of Birth, Race, and Memory, published by Harvard University Press. Gertrude Fraser’s career has combined scholarship with action on behalf of strengthening opportunities for women, African Americans and other minorities in higher education.

Norma Cantú , professor of education and law, brings exceptional practical and policy-making experience to her new joint appointment in the Education and Law Schools at UT. For eight years, she served as the Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights in the Clinton Administration, where she oversaw a staff of approximately 850 in implementing governmental policy for civil rights in American education. Within the first two years, her office increased the number of illegal discrimination complaints resolved by 20%; more than a third of the cases were disposed of without adversarial proceedings based on voluntary corrective action. By her final year in office, the number of cases resolved each year had risen almost another 20%.

Prior to her service as the nation's chief civil rights enforcer in the educational arena, Professor Cantú worked for fourteen years as regional counsel and education director of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In that capacity, she litigated scores of important cases affecting educational funding, disability rights, student disciplinary policies, access to special services for English-language learners, and racially hostile environments.