Name: Dena Plemmons
Title/Institution: Director, Research Ethics Education Program, University of California Riverside
APPE member since: 2007

You have served as the APPE Board Chair for the last two years. What has been the most surprising thing about serving in that role?
Not really surprising, but incredibly reaffirming: our membership is wildly intelligent, accomplished, thoughtful, respectful, creative, committed, dedicated, and importantly to the growth of our Association, kind and welcoming and accepting and nurturing. I’ve experienced all of this in both general and personal ways during my many years of APPE membership, but I’ve witnessed this in a very much more focused way as a Board member. It’s been an absolute privilege to serve APPE alongside the very impressive and selfless members of the Board [and our amazing and awe-inspiring Executive Director!].

Your term ends on June 30, so you're not done yet! What do you hope to accomplish or set in motion before then?
We’re working on bringing bystander training to our members, hopefully this fall, as that was a member suggestion we very much want to act on. The Board’s newly established Outreach and Engagement Committee will be taking the lead on that, as well as other initiatives to broaden and diversify APPE’s reach, and to ensure that our members always feel included and represented in our conference and between conference programming, in our affinity groups, and in our leadership. I want APPE to be an association to which our members feel they can truly and authentically belong, so I’m hoping to work closely with that Committee in furtherance of those initiatives.

One of the projects that APPE undertook under your leadership was the National Dialogue on the State of Research Integrity Education. What has happened since that meeting in November, 2023?
We had early successes in the outreach and implementation phase of that endeavour, actually, with some very productive and promising conversations with members of federal funding agencies, accrediting bodies, and professional societies. Unfortunately, the results of the [U.S. presidential] election put a halt to continuing work with several of these partners, and understandably so, given the resulting uncertainty and precarity for those partners. I have remained engaged in conversations with professional societies, however, and will continue to do so, and will hope to be able to come back to some of our other partners over the coming year.

Like many people on the board, you are an advocate of APPE to early career professionals and graduate students. What is your pitch to prospective members? Why should they join?
The opportunity to be mentored and nurtured – as a scholar and as a whole person – is unique at APPE, in my experience, and we are genuinely, truly interested in hearing about what interests you and knowing more about how you come to your work. This is a true community of researchers, scholars, professionals who care deeply about ethics broadly defined and enacted, and who are very welcoming to any who want to be part of our community.

What are you looking forward to over the next year, personally or professionally?
I am in the manuscript drafting phase of a research project which just concluded and so will be relieved to have that finished! I’ve been working on this specific issue – deliberative lab communication, based on deliberation in social communication – through a couple of different research projects for over 10 years, so it will be nice to close that out with this publication. On a personal note, I’m looking forward to a trip to the Galapagos in May, and hoping to see some penguins!