Celeste Atkins, PhD
Dr. Celeste Atkins, a proud alum of the College of Education joined the staff in December 2025, transitioning her grant project Graduate Communities for Academic Fellowship & Efficacy (Grad CAFE) from the Graduate College to a joint venture between the College of Education and College of Science in collaboration with her co-PI Dr. Nicole Marrone, Associate Professor in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences. Grad CAFE has been Drs. Atkins and Marrone’s passion project since meeting as Hispanic Serving Institution Fellows in 2022. They built the program as their fellowship project in the 2022-23 academic year, piloted the program in the 2023-24 academic year and in the 2024-25 academic year the program was funded for 5 years through a $1 million National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education grant.
Grad CAFE is a transformational mentoring program that provides a holistic, strengths-based, community-building approach to mentoring graduate students with an interdisciplinary, intersectional, multi-tiered model. Grad CAFE reimagines peer mentoring for graduate students by moving from traditional one-to-one peer mentoring to a community-building model which creates a larger peer mentoring cohort that moves beyond discipline specific or identity-focused peer mentoring to create an inclusive space for all to come together and build community around shared experiences. Grad CAFE also moves beyond single year programs to a multi-year program in which students can join as peer mentors in their first or second year of graduate school and return once they have successfully completed their comprehensive exams to serve as community leaders and near-peer mentors for first-and second-year graduate students while also building their teaching, facilitation, curriculum, and leadership skills. Initial analysis from the first two years of grant funding indicates that Grad CAFE has a positive impact both on participants’ sense of belonging at the University of Arizona as well as on their research self-efficacy. Anecdotal evidence points to Grad CAFE as a key component for retention for some participants who were struggling in graduate school.
Dr. Atkins is passionate about mentoring and the difference it can make for success and retention of underrepresented students, faculty, and staff. Her vision is to increase diversity and representation in the biomedical sciences through research, assessment, and innovation. She believes in a flexible, adaptable, humanistic model for mentoring across disciplines and throughout the university that leads to a more socially just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive campus for all students and faculty. The Grad CAFE team has currently published about the program in the Chronicle of Mentoring and Coaching and have a forthcoming article in Frontiers in Sociology as well as a third article under review for a peer-reviewed journal. The team is also working on grants to 1) utilize the CAFE way to support STEM students transferring into U of A from community colleges, 2) beta-test Grad CAFE in other institutions and environments.
Dr. Atkins earned her BA in sociology from California State University San Bernardino and an MA in sociology from the University of Southern California both with an emphasis on race and gender. She received her doctorate in Higher Education in 2021 from the University of Arizona’s Center for the Study of Higher Education where her dissertation focused on the experiences of faculty from traditionally marginalized backgrounds teaching about privilege and oppression. Her research interests derived from her experiences as a full-time sociology instructor and department chair at Cochise College in Sierra Vista from 2011-2020.
Dr. Atkins has been honored with numerous awards during her educational career including being nominated by her students for Instructor of the Year 2017-18, and being awarded the 2019 Pacific Sociological Association Early Career Award for Innovation in Teaching, the 2020-21 Dr. Maria Teresa Velez Diversity Leadership Scholarship, the 2020 American Sociological Association’s Hans O. Mauksch Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Sociology, a 2020 Erasmus Circle Scholarship, and the 2021 Arizona Women in Higher Education Emerging Leader Award. She brings a passion for mentoring to this position as she owes her personal successes to the support she received from her family and multiple mentors. Her greatest joy as a full-time instructor was the relationships she built with her mentees.
As a researcher/scholar, Dr. Atkins has contributed to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning with her original approach to teaching Introduction to Sociology – the 20 Concepts method – which was the 9th most downloaded resource in 2019 from the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology (TRAILS) as well as book reviews and pieces in the ASA’s Teaching/Learning Matters Newsletter. She has published chapters in Accessibility and Diversity in the 21st Century University and Gender, Race, and Class in the Lives of Today’s Teachers: Educators at Intersections, Picture a Professor: Intersectional Teaching Strategies for Interrupting Bias about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning and Betrayal U: The Politics of Belonging in Higher Education. Recent journal articles include Teaching Up: The Intersection of Impression Management and Controlling Images for Marginalized Faculty in Symbolic Interaction, Understanding the Impact of Data-Driven Tools on Advising Practice and Student Support in the Journal of Postsecondary Student Success.