Michelle Manno
To schedule a meeting with Dr. Manno, contact Leona Quist: leona.quist@northwestern.edu.
Dr. Michelle Manno is Chief Diversity Officer at Northwestern University. In this role, Manno oversees The Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion (OIDI) including The Women’s Center and Native American Indigenous Initiatives. She leads the implementation of diversity accountability processes across Northwestern’s 12 schools and colleges on three campuses. This involves coordinating initiatives to address bigotry and exclusion while promoting inclusion, diversity, and equity.
Manno comes to Northwestern from the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), where they served as assistant vice chancellor of diversity initiatives and as faculty affiliate in the Department of Sociology.
At UIC, Manno led several important initiatives aimed at increasing equity and inclusion for the entire campus community including the Equity Dashboard Project, the Inclusive Classroom Initiative, Advancing Racial Equity strategic planning, and the Equity Advocates Program. She was responsible for campus-wide efforts around diversity education, served as a co-investigator on UIC’s “Building Inclusive Excellence in STEM” Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant, and served on key university task forces focused on campus climate, student mental health and well-being, Native American student inclusion, and food and housing insecurity. They She co-created the gender-affirming procedures (GAP) advocates program and co-chaired the Chancellor’s Committee on the Status of LGBTQ people. Manno also regularly taught courses for the Department of Sociology and UIC’s Intergroup Dialogue program.
Manno earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Emory University, with a concentration in social inequality. She is the author of Denied: Women, Sports, and the Contradictions of Identity (NYU Press).