Deborah L. Plummer, Ph.D.

Deborah is a nationally recognized psychologist and diversity solutions thought leader. She serves as Vice Chancellor, Human Resources, Diversity and Inclusion at the UMass Chan Medical School (UMass Chan) and Professor, Departments of Psychiatry, Quantitative Health Sciences and the Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing. As UMass Chan’s Chief Human Resource Officer, she is responsible for establishing the vision, providing leadership, strategic direction, and execution of the people strategy. As UMass Chan’s Chief Diversity Officer, Deborah shapes and leads the Medical School’s embrace of diversity as fundamental to institutional excellence. As consultant and founder of D.L. Plummer & Associates, a firm specializing in diversity management and organizational development, Deborah consulted for over seventy international and national corporations including Fortune 500 companies, community mental health agencies, public and private school systems, and faith-based institutions. She has held past roles as a hospital system chief diversity officer, university psychology professor, founding director of a graduate degree program in diversity management, and a staff psychologist.

As a licensed psychologist, she maintained a private practice for twenty years treating individuals, couples and families while serving a term, by appointment of the Governor, on the State of Ohio Board of Psychology.

Deborah is the editor of the Handbook of Diversity Management (University Press of America) and author of Racing Across the Lines: Changing Race Relations through Friendships (Pilgrim Press) which received the Mayflower Award for best publication in the category of Church and Society. In addition, she has authored several book chapters and published numerous journal articles to the professional community on racial identity development and managing diverse work environments. She is the lead author in the design and development of the Diversity Engagement Survey (DES), a tool for measuring diversity in academic medicine. In her leisure time, Deborah is an avid blogger and contributing writer for the Huffington Post, an American news website, content aggregator and blog.