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Eric Abrams is KQED’s Chief Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Officer. He is responsible for developing and implementing a strategy to embed the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at KQED. Eric has two decades of experience leading DEI initiatives, primarily in higher education.

Prior to arriving at KQED in 2023, Eric was the inaugural Chief Inclusion Officer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. In this role, Eric served as an internal consultant for faculty, students and staff colleagues on a number of DEI-related issues, including faculty and student recruitment, as well as helping to ensure that the school built an inclusive culture where students, staff and faculty could be their full and best selves.

In 2012, Eric became the first Director of Diversity Initiatives at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where he developed an overarching vision for DEI at the school. Building on his years of experience in admissions, he raised awareness of DEI issues across a number of internal and external areas.

Eric has also led DEI initiatives in a variety of undergraduate and professional school admissions roles. In two stints in the Stanford MBA Admission Office, Abrams advanced efforts that helped that institution become the most ethnically diverse of the nation’s most selective MBA programs. As Associate Director of Admission at Berkeley Law, Eric helped lead an effort that increased enrollment of students from traditionally underrepresented groups by more than 600 percent.

Eric has a B.A. in political science and drama from Stanford University and an M.A. in political science from UCLA, where he was a co-founder and secretary of the Black Graduate Student Association.

Eric is a regular speaker at a variety of conferences. He has served as a board member at the Making Waves Academy, a charter school in Richmond, California; at 826 Valencia, a nonprofit dedicated to creative and expository writing skills for under-resourced students, in San Francisco; and as former President of the Board of 826 National, a national network of tutoring centers focused on empowering underserved youth through writing.