Anna (Enobong) Branch, Ph.D. is a scholar and strategist who helps move organizations and leaders from well-meaning to well-doing. She served as the senior vice president for equity at Rutgers University from 2020 to 2025, providing strategic leadership that made the institutional commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion tangible for faculty, staff, and students, as well as the community. She established the University Equity and Inclusion office and the Faculty Diversity Collaborative, which were closed in November 2025.
Prior to joining Rutgers University, Dr. Branch served as associate chancellor for equity and inclusion 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.
Dr. Branch remains a professor of sociology at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research examines systemic racial and gender inequality in the American labor market, specializing in the vulnerability of Black women and the cultural narratives that enable its persistence. She is the coauthor of Work in Black and White: Striving for the American Dream (2022), coauthor of Black in America: The Paradox of the Color Line (2020), the editor of Pathways, Potholes, and the Persistence of Women in Science: Reconsidering the Pipeline (2016), and the author of Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work (2011).
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.