A Message from Inaugural Dean Yoshitaka "Yoshi" Iwasaki
Heartfelt invitation to join our HEST community-building, transformative journey together:
Overwhelmingly, I am grateful for this opportunity to serve as the Inaugural Dean of the College of HEST at NMSU. Since April 2022 (before the official starting date of July 1), my onboarding processes have involved reaching out to representatives from a variety of our stakeholder groups to start respectful, constructive conversations and dialogues about the co-creation of prosperous, thriving future of our college.
Above all, I am fully committed to co-building One College under One Umbrella, within One NMSU System, while embracing the legacy and strengths of each discipline embedded within the college to elevate our profile and visibility. Putting the people first is my motto to invest into our peoples with its intentionality to promote faculty and staff development, empowerment, and success, which is the foundation to enhance the collective success of the entire college — transferable to advancing student success and successes of our alumni and community/industry partners broadly.
I envision that the College of HEST at NMSU is a distinctive, truly interdisciplinary solution-oriented college that integrates both human and health dimensions across clinical and community contexts with its emphasis on holistic health, well-being, and human development — guided by our fierce commitment to addressing health, educational, and socio-economic disparities that the Borderlands region (i.e., a microcosm of the United States) and the State of New Mexico face.
Importantly, differentiation and branding is critical for our aspirations to become authentic best of ourselves through compelling, impactful storytelling, as a national and global leader of an interdisciplinary, transformative college of HEST at a premier land-grant public research university. Accordingly, it is imperative for college stakeholders to come together and dig deep into the fundamental questions of who we are (i.e., identity/DNA), why (why we worth it and why we matter; vision, values, and principles), for whom (who we serve), what (what we deliver; i.e., outcomes/impacts), and how (processes/strategies) to articulate our niche, distinctions, recognitions, and differentiators.
In fact, I am wholeheartedly inspired by and attracted to this very exciting one-of-the kind ground-breaking, innovative opportunity to mobilize NMSU and HEST ways of making a real difference and having a profound impact on our peoples and communities we work with. Central to such partnership-based, solution-oriented approaches involve our intentional, actionable commitment to social justice/DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and social economic mobility of our students and alumni, and their families and communities in New Mexico and beyond. On behalf of our people-first, relationship-centered college, I sincerely invite all of you to join me to embark on our community-oriented transformative journey together!
