Candi Castleberry-Singleton

Chief Inclusion and Diversity Officer
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Pittsburgh, Pa.

Candi Castleberry-Singleton often says that she inherited her business acumen from her father and her strength and inspiration from her mother, aunt and three sisters. “Although my family has both informed and influenced who I am today, my husband, Alex, provides my daily inspiration,” she says.

Castleberry-Singleton is the chief inclusion and diversity officer at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, an $8 billion global health enterprise, where she is the first person to hold her title. She created the Center for Inclusion in Healthcare at UPMC, which oversees the inclusion strategy and goals involving 50,000 employees, and its relations with the communities it serves.

After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s degree in legal studies, she joined Xerox Corp. in marketing and sales, and later earned an M.B.A. from Pepperdine University. She moved into a career in diversity first at Sun Microsystems Inc., then Motorola Inc., and finally at UPMC. At UPMC, she launched the Dignity and Respect Campaign, which uses ideas and feedback from UPMC employees to create internal best practices. 

Each career relocation takes Castleberry-Singleton farther away from her California roots, but she finds an embrace in her Power and Joy groups, an informal gathering of friends that she creates wherever she lives. “These groups remind you of how good you are in your power, and the importance of having joy in your life,” she explains. “There isn’t a person who would choose to be caught in a perpetual cycle of being in a place or position that gives them power, but steals their joy.”

Castleberry-Singleton always makes time to pamper her stress away and has never met a spa she didn’t like. “For that period of time, the world belongs to me,” she says. “Since I’ve earned that time, the hardest thing to do sometimes is to enjoy it.”