Meet the Senior Vice President

Enobong (Anna) Branch, PhD, is the senior vice president for equity at Rutgers University, where she provides strategic leadership to foster an inclusive organizational climate, enabling alignment across Rutgers' four Chancellor-led units and the central administration. She leads the University Equity and Inclusion office, which provides centralized support for faculty, offers extensive opportunities for learning and inclusive leadership development, and builds community through creative and intentional engagement opportunities. 

Before joining Rutgers University, Dr. Branch served as associate chancellor for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. Her significant accomplishments in that role included leading the integration of diversity throughout the campus strategic plan, executing the university’s campus climate survey, creating diversity infrastructure through climate advisors in executive areas and diversity officers in schools and colleges, and leading the National Science Foundation funded ADVANCE program pursuing innovative organizational change strategies to spur institutional transformation and support racial and gender equity in the faculty ranks. 

A professor of sociology, Dr. Branch specializes in research that examines how race and gender shape experiences in the American labor market. She is the author of Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work, the editor of Pathways, Potholes, and the Persistence of Women in Science: Reconsidering the Pipeline, the coauthor of Black in America: The Paradox of the Color Line, and, most recently, Work in Black and White: Striving for the American Dream. A sought-after national expert, her public opinion pieces have appeared in the New Jersey Star-Ledger (nj.com) and national outlets, such as Bloomberg and The Washington Post. Dr. Branch received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University at Albany, SUNY, and her B.S. in biology from Howard University.