 Hello and welcome back. My name is Cheryl LaDonne and I'm an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech. We will now move into session three. This panel session will focus on emerging programs that work to enhance diversity, equity and inclusion and the chemical sciences and needs to advance forward. We will hear from four invited speakers, each of whom will speak for approximately 20 minutes. Note that I will interject and give each speaker a five minute warning at the appropriate time. At the end of each talk, there will be time for one or two clarifying questions if any are submitted. Otherwise, all questions and discussion will be held for the panel discussion at 4.15 after all speakers have presented. As a reminder, please submit your questions for the speakers via the Q and A feature on Zoom. With that, I would like to introduce our first speaker, Dr. Judy Kim. Dr. Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Associate Dean of the Graduate Division at the University of California, San Diego. She is a member of the Americans Chemical Society Bridge Advisory Board, which is an effort to increase the number of chemical science PhDs awarded to underrepresented students. Dr. Kim. Wonderful, thank you very much for that introduction and thank you all for sharing some time here with me and all of us today. Well, I guess it's still morning here in San Diego, but I know it's afternoon for a good number of you folk. So I'm really excited to be able to share with you the work that's been going on through the American Chemical Society. As mentioned, I am a faculty member at UC San Diego. I'm also a member of the advisory board for this bridge program, which is what I will be describing today. Oops, oopsies, okay. So first, this is a very large project. We're really proud of it. It is in collaboration with several partners. Of course, not only in terms of content, for example, IGEN, the Inclusive Graduate Education Network as well as partnering with Nobashay and there's financial support really kick started with NSF. Genentech has been very supportive and PPG with supporting awards and other aspects of the program. And the motivation I think is one that we are all, well, unfortunately or fortunately familiar with, which is that there is a gap. So what this graph is showing is the percentage of students who are earning degrees from underrepresented groups at the associate degree, bachelor degree, master degree and doctoral degree. And we're kind of used to seeing these graphs where there seems to be a downward trend. We see that for, and this is looking just at US citizens. So the percentage of students who are earning chemistry bachelor degrees from underrepresented groups is maybe a little shy of 20% and that drops to a little bit around approximately 10, 11% as you get to the doctoral level. It's about an 8% gap. And that can of course be translated into absolute numbers because we have an estimate of the number of students who are earning degrees at these levels. But really the key focus is there is a gap and this program, this project here aims to address directly this gap to enhance the number of students who are able to earn the doctoral degree. So the ACS bridge project, it is modeled after, you know, to say historically the American Physical Society has also had a very successful bridge project. I think the ACS, the American Chemical Society, really we've adopted it, expanded it greatly. There's really four main goals here as you see on this screen. Primary number one, really to increase we're aiming for within 10 years, the fraction of PhDs awarded to students from underrepresented minority groups. The target of course is to match and duplicate the fraction that's awarded in bachelor's degrees. We wanna develop evaluate documents, sustainable bridge experiences. And so this is sort of a sharing of best practices, of course, which goes to goal three to promote and disseminate the successful program components to the broader chemical science community. And not just to support sort of targeting this gap here, but to provide additional professional development guidance to undergraduate students, graduate students as well as postdoctoral scholars in underrepresented in the chemical sciences. So those are the overarching goals of the bridge project. There are multiple components to this. I'm gonna focus primarily on the bridge program itself. So just for a little language, there's an overarching project and within that many smaller or large programs. The ACS bridge program is one that directly supports students as well as departments that are supporting the students and there's the financial support associated with that. There are many other components to this project, the career and develop professional development awards to recognize students. As I mentioned, being part, an active part of the inclusive graduate education network, being part of the NSF includes national network. There are other programs to help students with their careers. For example, the ACS career Kickstarter program, this is targeted for graduate students and postdocs who are transitioning to their next stage of their career. For undergraduates, something to help them get started if they're interested in graduate school. So this is a boot camp for graduate school readiness and professional development. Of course, some e-courses, there's research. So we're gathering quite a bit of data from this project and there's a designated postdoc who is working to really understand this from a much deeper level and a career symposium scheduled for in a couple of years. And all of this, just to put it in the context of, what's the ecosystem we're thinking about here? We have students over, if you look on the left side, high school who are entering associate programs, of course bachelors programs, they could be entering the workforce or really quite a few would like to advance their careers through education. So whether it's through a master's program or a doctoral program. And there's maybe a subset of students who for whatever reason are finding obstacles. In particular, we're looking at this differential in terms of underrepresented students who perhaps are gonna take a different path to get to the doctoral degree. And this is what the bridge project targets. This is what the bridge program comes in because you see here on this upper portion, ACS bridge departments. The students are being directly supported by these departments and helping them transition and encouraging them to enter doctoral programs, providing them with the tools, getting them ready so that they can have successful graduate careers. And that's the part that I wanna focus on here are these bridge departments. I'll have some more practical comments also from our experience as well as just the process. These are all the bridge departments currently, well, at least as of May of this year. There's 29 departments. They offer master's or post-bac programs to help students transition to PhDs. There's a difference here. There's nine, what we call sites and 20 partners. And I'll talk about the differences in them very briefly. When this project started in 2019, the first set were six schools, four sites and two partners. It got expanded in 2020 and then grew even further in this last round. You saw we sort of started in the Midwest, a little bit on the East Coast. And of course it's very important that there be a nice geographical distribution because we know there are underrepresented students of course all over the country and to provide sort of access at all corners of our country. Now the sites and the partners are doing slightly different things. One is financially, and the sites do have the grant support for the students and the partners are really it's sort of an access and being part of this community. Here's the list of the bridge sites as well as partners. I've, we've got the nine sites here and then the 20 partners. I put in blue UC San Diego because we are a bridge site. This is, you know, we've just completed our first year and I would like to just share with you our experience there to especially for those who are interested in bringing one of these programs to your own institution. And the, the selection of the sites is actually quite extensive. And it's in part of course inspired because we want to make sure that the sites are providing the right climate, have the right resources to really ensure success for these students. So a webinar of course can provide general information for those who are interested in applying. This is kind of an unusual grant or an unusual application. So it's, it's not necessarily a research project or ones that we may be familiar with. So the webinar is very helpful to just share what this program is about. There's also a proposal writing workshop to help those who are really just trying to understand what is being, what is, what we're looking for in the proposals. There is a preposal step. This is the three pages. That's what's solicited followed by an invitation for the full 15 page proposal. So it's sort of NSF style. It's, it's quite extensive. Reviewers, both internal and external to ACS are evaluating the written proposals. And there's even a final step here which I think is a really important step. There's an actual site visits to the top applicants. It used to be in person and then it transitioned to Zoom of course and then followed by the final recommendation. Just to, just to make sure and for those who are interested there will be a new RFP in a few weeks, couple of weeks. In fact, June is right around the corner and the deadline will be September 1st for those who are interested in this, in this program. Even once you become a bridge site or a bridge partner, many ways that ACS remains connected to the students as well as to the departments to all the levels of leadership, not just the annual reports and site visits but there's in person sorry, Zoom meetings with the leadership. There's the IGEN annual conference which is coming up actually next month, Holistic Admissions Workshop, virtual happy hour, social media, peer mentoring, et cetera. An advisory board meeting. This is where myself and other advisory board members really are spending days hearing from, thinking about, answering questions, asking questions to help shape this, make it more successful. What's it like for the students? So one great aspect of this is that it is a single application. All 20 of those schools or 29 of those schools that you saw, the students are basically applying to all of them at once. There's no application fee, there's no GREs, the bridge sites, those nine sites have first access to the individuals who have applied and then at a later time, the bridge partners have access to the students who have applied. The students are interviewed and offers are sent during specific windows of time. So there's a coordinated effort to make sure there's around one set of offers then round two, there's sort of internal information so that all 29 of these are not competing for the same students. And so there was an effort to make the process as smooth as possible. How successful has it been in terms of numbers of students? So as of summer 2020, last year we'll obviously have another big jump this year. There are 30 bridge fellows and more than half were female. And actually some of the students from the first cohort that entered in 2019 have already transferred to PhD programs. So we're already seeing the success of the students moving from the bridge program which could be masters or post back into the PhD program. What's happening at UC San Diego? What is the experience like? So we had our first cohort enter this past fall. So that was three students. We actually made the offer to four and only three could come. We're expecting five new students in the second cohort. So we'll have eight total after fall. What does our offer include to these bridge students? So we have a standalone masters program in chemistry and that's where the students are being enrolled. This is quite different from a typical masters student but the bridge students are offered full financial support tuition fees. Very important. The salary is held at the PhD level which for us is in the low 30s. There's a guarantee of housing so that helps the transition to move in many cases across the country. There are at least four mentors. So not just peer but there's one to help guidance with the academics. There's the research mentor or the PI. There's also a staff mentor which I think is turning out to be very important for multiple reasons. There's full integration with the students who are entering our PhD program in the sense that the bridge students or the bridge fellows have orientation. They're participating in rotations. Again, things that a typical master student would not participate in. The bridge fellows also have priority for some components such as the TA assignments. So we're helping them to get TA assignments that are reasonable. Ones where we know the instructor we can work with them. Some fellowships. And then of course there's bridge activities that is offered for the bridge fellows specifically. What's the typical path that a student will do? First year and this is where they are. Obviously orientation, both I call it regular. This is sort of with our other PhD students as well as bridge specific. The rotations, research rotations as for all of us the challenge in COVID is they've been virtual. They've actually been so very successful. And I'm really proud to say all of our three of our students have joined groups with no problem. They're taking courses at UCSD. There's the course requirement is quite flexible. So they can take, it's a minimum of two and that could be the maximum. So there's no real heavy course requirement. And I think that's also very helpful for the flexibility. They've all been trained to be TA's. They've participated as TA's. And again, they've all joined research groups all in the first year. And this is important to accomplish this because in the second year, these students are now preparing to enter the PhD program which hopefully they will do in their third year. We'd love for all of them to stay at UC San Diego but we don't require it. We don't certainly, we don't assume it. If they say, I'd like to go to school blank. It's closer to home. It's just where I personally would like to be. We're providing coaching for PhD applications as well as preps just a lot of components of applying. That's gonna happen this fall. And of course they're conducting research and then there will be a thesis defense so that they can complete their master's degree. When they complete their term as a fellow at UC San Diego they will have earned the master's degree based on thesis research. And the thesis advisor we also work very closely with. And of course is active mentoring and community building activities throughout. I just wanna share with you some of the challenges that we have faced. Recruitment of students, this is a brand new program. So how to recruit students. This year was a much different recruiting experience because of the, we've been around now for a year. The windows in which the offers are given and accepted it's pretty compact. So your faculty, whoever are engaged really have to be ready for those few weeks. Relocation costs for students were way out in the West Coast. So this was a topic that came up and we're really rethinking, can we better support the relocation costs? The next bullet points are about community both broader on campus and San Diego as well as the fact that there are 300 other graduate students in the program. And so they, how do we make sure that the fellows have a sense of belonging and identity at the same within the cohorts? We found our fellows were really eager to do quite a bit and that was something that surprised us but there could be a lot of reasons why. So this is something that we've had to coach them with. Of course, the integration sustainability is always a challenging component just because we wanna go beyond the three year program. Just I'll highlight really the important things of what we think are important for success. This executive committee, which are your faculty and staff who are basically directing this entire program has to be a very strong committee strong communication, engagement. The best the department, the department should understand what this program is. We have an external advisory committee. The housing, I think is really key for many students to treat the students as a PhD student so that they can transition and of course support outside the department. My last two slides here are just to introduce you to one of our fellows. This is Javier Sanly Hernandez. Goes by Javi. Came to us from Florida originally from the Dominican Republic and he's very open. He says he came to the US to pursue science. He was at Florida International University for earned his bachelor's degree, performed, pursued additional research at University of Wyoming. Thank you, pursued additional research at the University of Miami for a year. Oh, I thought I had less time than that so I'm sorry if I was speeding. So basically had a post-back year of University of Miami. He applied and entered our bridge program this past fall and just recently joined the Mike Burkhart lab which is a lab that focuses in chemical biology. He's been doing research this entire time. You see him in the lab as well as Zoom meetings. This is of course myself and Javi and this is the director of our program at UC San Diego. So he and then of course we have the two others and I just wanted to highlight that these students have just been doing fabulously with the level of support that we have been providing. My last slide here is to acknowledge all the folks in this again, I'm representing this program as a member of the advisory board but of course the details, the entire running of the program is through the American Chemical Society and you see the team here, Dr. York Slaughter, he is the program director. So really administering the details of it. Of course, Latrice Garrison is the executive vice president of education and membership and of course the entire team. So they all have their names and of course all of our team here. Oh, okay, so now we've, so thank you all for your attention and happy to answer any questions. Okay, briefly, there were two questions. What is the ethnic breakdown of the 30 fellows so far? So they are all underrepresented students. I do not know the specific breakdown in terms of Latinx or African-American. I do not know those demographics. Certainly could ask. I don't know if that is information on the website but I don't have that number. I know it is over half female, that's the broader picture I have, but I don't know, but I do know they are all underrepresented students. And what is the change for non-URM students going from BABS to PhD? Sorry, what is the change? I'm not quite sure what they meant by that. Yeah, I'm not sure I understand what is the change for non-BABS going to PhD. Okay, yeah. You'll put it in the chat for you and you can answer it later. And then at the panel discussion, we can discuss. Right, Dr. Kim, thank you very much. Thank you. Our next speaker will be Dr. David Assai who is Senior Director for Science Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His group's portfolio of initiatives includes Inclusive Excellence, Driving Change, Gilliam Graduate Fellowships, HHMI Professors and the Science Education Alliance. Dr. Assai. Thank you. It's great to be here. Today I would like to talk about strategies to advance in a sustainable way racial and ethnic diversity in science. Let me begin with some terminology. The term URM has come to mean race and ethnicity, although really minority can refer to many things. The dictionary defines minority as lesser, diminished, subordinate. And these are not adjectives to characterize people. The UR part of URM stands for underrepresented, but underrepresentation is only the symptom and not the cause. The cause is that the culture of science has systematically excluded certain persons. Thus, instead of URM, I use peer, which stands for persons excluded from science because of their ethnicity or race. Peers can be disaggregated into different ethnic groups, but today I'll use peer in the aggregate, blacks or African-Americans, Latino, Latina or Hispanics, and persons belonging to populations indigenous to the U.S. and its territories. Today the population of the United States is about 33% peers. But the scientific workforce is only 12% peers and peers are only 6% of the tenured and tenure-track STEM faculty. Thus, American science has failed to take advantage of the impressive and powerful racial and ethnic diversity in our nation. U.S. science has long recognized our failure to advance racial diversity. For example, in 1992, Science Magazine published a special section titled Minorities in Science, the Pipeline Problem. The 1992 report is important because it is a snapshot of where we were three decades ago. And when we compare 1992 with where we are today, it shows how little progress we have made. Here are some data reported in the 1992 Science article showing the persistence of peers in red and non-peers in blue in STEM at the bachelor's degree and at the PhD. The rate of persistence of peers was half that of non-peers in 1992. We can look at the same sort of data from today and those data are shown on the right. And really nothing has changed. Today, as it was nearly three decades ago, peers remain in STEM at only half the rate of non-peers. Thus, the pipeline metaphor is really not useful and I think even immoral because the rate of persistence by peers is so poor in our system, it is unethical to simply cram more into the pipeline so that a few come out at the other end. Now, the disproportionate shedding of peers from STEM is not due to their lack of interest. Indeed, today, peers are overrepresented among students entering college intending to study STEM. Nor is the disproportionate loss of peers due today due simply to their lack of preparation. In studies that control for important factors, including high school math, family interest in higher education and family income, peers leave STEM at much greater rates than non-peers. For several decades, our nation has spent gazillions of dollars on a myriad of interventions aimed at increasing racial and ethnic diversity in science. Most of these interventions aim to fix the student. And here are just a few examples and we're all familiar with these. For example, outreach to middle and high school students, programs that assist students from community college to pursue the baccalaureate. Pre-college summer bridge programs, catch up courses and special advising, cohort-based activities, summer research experiences, and then there are my so-called minority supplements to research grants and cluster hiring for diversity. Now, these interventions can certainly be helpful to the participants, especially in the short term. But given the fact that persistence rates have not changed in three decades, it is clear that the fix the student mindset is not sufficient to achieve real and lasting change. Indeed, because most of these interventions are neither assessed nor institutionalized, they remain an awkward extra appendage. And when the funding ends, so too end the activities. Our mistake, I think, is that we focused on only half of the formula that will make a difference. Using the conceptual framework laid out by scholars, including Kimberly Griffin and Lindsay Malcolm PQ, to achieve authentic and lasting change, we need to adopt a two-prong strategy that intentionally integrates both diversity and equity framing. Diversity framing results in programs that focus on the students from underrepresented groups. Diversity framing approaches are quantitative. We measure our progress by counting the number of peers in science. Diversity framing is, of course, important. After all, our bottom line is that we want to see real increases in the numbers of students from excluded groups. But diversity-framed activities that focus only on fixing the student are not adequate. To tap into the power of diversity, it is necessary to also pursue equity-framed approaches. Equity-framed programs seek to make science and science education more inclusive, so that students of all identities and from all backgrounds feel that they belong and that they can be successful. Equity framing goes much deeper than diversity framing. Equity is about culture change. Equity framing is qualitative. We measure our progress by examining the extent to which we have changed the culture of science. Now, if a strategy focuses only on diversity programming, it will not be sustained because the persons who can add diversity will not feel that they belong and they'll soon leave and that's what's happening today. And a strategy that focuses only on equity programming runs the risk of being too theoretical and not grounded in the messy realities of working with people across their differences. So this is really not an either or situation. I think it's an also and opportunity. We need to design programs that integrate diversity and equity framing. I'd like to illustrate these ideas by discussing the evolution of one of our programs, the Gilliam Graduate Fellowship Initiative. The Gilliam program was created in 2005 as a diversity program. It was aimed at identifying and supporting talented graduate students from excluded racial and ethnic groups. The initiative's history to date can be divided into three stages. Between 2005 and 2013, I would characterize the Gilliam program as strictly a diversity frame program. In 2014, we paused the program to evaluate it and redesign it. And then what emerged in 2015 is a program that attempts to combine diversity and equity framing. Let me discuss each of these stages. The old program announcement described the Gilliam program which used a diversity framed language on fixing the students. And I'm just quoting here from that program announcement. The goal of the program is to ensure that a diverse and highly trained workforce is available to assume leadership and science, including as college and university faculty. Now from the perspective of equity, the old Gilliam program had several shortcomings. The award was solely focused on the student. Students applied for the fellowship even before they had finished undergraduate courses. And so they did not have yet a dissertation project nor an advisor. In this first period of the program, the program was really small. We averaged only seven fellowships per year. And at the time we restricted applications to only students who had come through the HHMI X-PROP undergraduate summer research program. And that meant that the possible applicant pool was also very small, averaging fewer than 20 applications per year. We paused the program in 2014 to evaluate it and see what we might do to improve it. And the evaluation revealed some things. We realized that the importance of making the program larger is important and it will create a more energetic cohort of fellows. This meant opening up the eligibility to students who were not just X-PROP alumni. We also decided to start the fellowship later after the student had completed their rotations past their qualifiers and joined the lab. This allowed us to include the dissertation advisor in the program. And most important, we realized that a key to the student's success is the dissertation advisor. And the dissertation advisor needs to be committed to the development of the student and has the skills to be an effective mentor. So we restarted the program in 2015. The goals of the revised program reflect our dual focus on diversity and equity, quoting from the most recent program announcement. The goals are to ensure that populations historically excluded from and underrepresented in science are prepared to assume leadership roles, including as college and university faculty and to foster the development of a healthier, more inclusive academic scientific ecosystem. Here are some of the elements of the current version of the Gilliam program. The award is now made to a pair of persons, the fellow and the advisor. Students may not apply until they have advanced to candidacy, thus ensuring that they have a dissertation advisor. The Gilliam program is now much larger. We average 41 awards per year and this year we will be making 50 awards. And we've opened up the competition. This year, 124 institutions were able to nominate student advisor pairs and we received 296 applications. And finally, in order to accept the award, the advisor agrees to participate in a year long course in culturally aware mentorship. The Gilliam program aims to adopt a strategy that integrates both diversity framed and equity frame approaches. The diversity framed portion focuses on supporting the student. We provide a stipend, a research allowance. The student comes to scientific meetings and we provide the students professional development opportunities. The equity framed portion focuses on the environment. The nomination from the university is a key part of the application and it includes data on the progress the university is making in terms of advancing racial and ethnic diversity in its graduate programs. Half of the application now focuses on the advisor. Their experience as a mentor and their mentoring plan for the fellow. And we ask reviewers to evaluate the advisor's commitment. An important part of the application is a section in which the advisor describes how they will use the grants, diversity and inclusion allowance that is intended to advance diversity and inclusion in their department. And most important to accept the award, the advisor commits to participate in a year-long course in culturally aware mentorship. I'd like to finish with a brief summary of the Gilliam mentorship training. The year-long course includes monthly webinars and two in-person workshops at HHMI. Over the year, this totals to approximately 30 hours of training. The course was designed and has been delivered by the University of Wisconsin Simmer or University of Wisconsin Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research or Simmer. And the course facilitators are listed here and they include Chris Fund of the University of Wisconsin. Chris directs Simmer and was the co-PI of phase one of the NIH National Research Mentoring Network. Angela Byers-Winston of the University of Wisconsin. Angela chaired the National Academies Committee that produced the 2019 report, The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEM. Sherilyn Black, who was Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement at Duke University. Bruce Biren, who was Director of the Genomics Center for Infectious Diseases at the Broad Institute. And my colleague, Sonia Tzadate, who currently leads the HHMI Gilliam program and is the immediate past president of SACNAS. After the workshop in September, we will have 195 advisors who will have completed the training. And then in October, we'll start another 50 on their course, on their year-long course. The course in Culturally Aware Mentorship covers several topics, including a review of the Scientific Scholarship of Mentoring, Exploration of Culture and how to talk about it, discussing disparities in publication rates from institutional data collected from the advisors, putting into practice the principles of Culturally Aware Mentorship and strategies to effect institutional culture change. The summer team is evaluating the impact of the mentorship training course. And here are some of their findings. And I'm summarizing a lot of work and a lot of data that they have rather simply here today. So one thing is that advisors report increased skills. Advisors have a better understanding of themselves as cultural beings. Advisors are disseminating what they've learned to others at their home institutions. Advisors are forming a supportive community amongst themselves. And because we also are working with the students, we can ask the students how things are going for them. And the students report that they are seeing changes in their advisors in terms of their ability to talk about culture and to communicate across cultural differences. And so let me summarize what I've tried to say today. Most scientists agree that we must significantly increase the diversity of the scientific workforce, including college and university faculty who will influence the future generations of students. Over the past several decades, our main strategy has been to create student-centered interventions. While likely benefiting the participants, a strategy that is focused only on fixed-to-student approaches is inadequate. It's inadequate at affecting the kind of deep and lasting change that we need. Too often, we have not paid enough attention to fixing the environment, changing the culture so that our structures, policies, procedures, behaviors are centered on equity. So I believe that in order for us to be successful, we need to design and implement programs that advance diversity through equity. So I appreciate this opportunity to share with you today. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Sy. Our next speaker will be Alan Kauffman, who is the Innovation and White Space Lead Research and Development for GSK Consumer Health Care's US Market. Dr. Kauffman has created, developed, and led Native American employee resource groups at multiple Fortune 500 STEM-driven healthcare companies. His passion has been to bring forward organizational programming, highlighting the value of indigenous leadership styles, professional development, tackling and overcoming invisibility bias and STEM recruitment and retention of indigenous employees. Thank you for the introduction. First, I just want to say thank you to the planning committee for this workshop. Apologize for not being able to make so yesterday and today, only because we're finishing up school here. And my wife and I have become third, fourth, and seventh grade teachers over the past year as we kind of wrap up the virtual schooling. So, it's good to hear some of the talks that I've heard today. And I'm really excited to talk to you about the business case for diversity, inclusion, and industry. You know, I stated in the introduction, I am an American Indian, so Native American, I'm from the Kuala Paul Nation and Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. And, you know, a lot of this comes from my experiences working in industry, seeing some of the things that I've seen and some of the progress, working for very large multinational STEM driven companies. So, you know, happy to connect with anybody afterwards or on the chat. So, just for brief run through, talk a little bit about the business case, talk about the industry gap, you know, and really talk about diversity of recruiting and is that enough going beyond and then high impact leadership programs. And really, you know, I think what David Assai said in his previous talk really kind of is a segue into this because this is where we see a lot of the equity, the equity gaps, the equity problems and really is inclusivity enough. And to talk about that a little bit on in the slides, I think is really powerful what he said on that. So I think we need to pay particular attention to that as we think about how we need to change the culture and some of the systems within industry itself. So, first off, just a problem statement. So it is widely accepted. It's been studied, it's been established by many different firms independently that the business case for diversity and inclusion in the private sector is strong. And if we look at, and this is just one chart amongst many, that if you have a diverse workforce, the likelihood of positive financial performance is much greater. And it's not just positive financial performance. There are many other metrics that a lot of companies look at with regards to innovation sales, creativity metrics, innovation progress, pipeline, employee satisfaction, all of these things start to roll up into a higher performing team that is able to innovate and out innovate their peers that are not within that diversity quartile. And I mean, if you look at gender and ethnic diversity, this is from McKinsey, you have a 25% better chance of having positive financial performance if your teams are more diverse than the others. And that's just very simply put, there's been a lot that's gone into this and they have sliced and diced this any way you can think of. So just really wanted to highlight that the business case is strong. Okay, so companies realize this and if you've seen, a lot of companies are now championing diversity and inclusion. If you go to a website, you're likely to find a DNI statement and a statement of purpose for how they go about incorporating this into the fabric of the company. So, but as many have said, there is a gap and without that concerted effort to diversify the amounts of students earning and using their degrees in the US, especially those from underrepresented populations, America's edge is going to be diminished and a huge amount of innovation potential. And so really that's for the United States that's a huge issue when it comes to innovation. And for right now, as stated many times and the STEM workforce isn't keeping pace. And so this is a chart from Cygnus.org. Whereas, it talks about how the workforce isn't mirroring the population and that's a problem because again, as we go back to the business case, the more diverse and the more inclusive these organizations are, the higher financial performance, the higher innovation potential that we will have, that's our strength. And so we need to be able to incorporate some of the things I wanna talk about into the fabric of these companies so that we can ensure that we remain competitive. And I'm gonna talk a little bit, I wanna focus a little bit on leadership because leadership in my opinion is really where it's at with regards to companies and driving change, not only driving change, but also a lot of the other things with regards to culture, systems, approaches, policies, things like that within industry. And so I'm not to pick on Twitter, I love Twitter, but this is just one visible example, kudos to them for putting out their percentages of overall representation and then dissecting it down into leadership and then technical by ethnicity. And so, but we look at this middle box, it is drastically different than the overall or technical portions of this chart. And so really this is kind of just one example of many that shows that there are big gaps in the Latino populations, Native American populations and black populations where they're not being included into the leadership. And so I think as we start to dig down into these slides, leadership is the key. And it's not to say that the candidates are not aware of diversity and inclusion when they go and search for employment. So this is a survey from Monster. And so a lot of this data is out there publicly. I think when you look at job seekers, DEI is on the top of their minds, folks are even turning down authors for companies that do not support DEI. And so the question that I have and I think that we need to address is if candidates, the new hires of a company are so adamant about DEI and we know that DEI impacts financial performance and we know that leadership is, there's an inequity there, why are we not, why has things not changed? And so I think we just need to think about that. It's not for lack of candidates, it's not for lack of financial performance. And so really I think we need to get to that second point that Dr. Asai talked about is that equity portion. And really that's about going beyond. And so, you know, shameless play for GSK consumer healthcare. Yes, I do work for GSK consumer healthcare. So really I wanted to just highlight some of the things that they do as some of the things that they look to do to effect change. And I think this goes for a lot of other companies too. P&G, Coca-Cola, L'Oreal, all of these big companies are looking to effect change. And I think if you look at some of the metrics that they put out publicly, you'll just like to see that. But I think we need to go beyond just the financial case. And so for GSK, really they go beyond just diversity and inclusion, they talk about our people, our business, and our communities. And I wanna focus a little bit on the two, our people and our communities because I've already talked about the business aspect. So at companies like GSK and also too, just so you know, this is more for awareness of some things that happen inside companies. Cause a lot of times I've talked to folks, academic and government, and sometimes companies could become a black box. And so raising awareness to some of these practices is important. So companies will recruit and try to maintain programs internally to develop and retain diverse talent. And that's just about getting the diversity, right? And so the inclusivity and the equity part is a little bit, you know, it's the second phase, right? It's an important part of once you have the diverse talent, what do you do with it? And so with GSK, you know, there are many different types of programs to end ambition and statements of declaration. Let's say by 2025, they wanna have 45% female representation and senior roles. So there's that leadership part. They're having a meaningful impact on gender pay gap, you know, and that's actually, it's closed quite a bit from what's currently in the US. By 2025, they want 30% ethically diverse leaders to be peen and buff roles. And the reason I bring this up is because this is where the change happens. This is how policies change. And so if we have diverse leaders in those roles, that's where we start to see a little bit of that equity conversation, the culture change. Our communities. So it's not enough for once you get the diverse talent and you have them working inside the workforce, right? So you have to have programs inside companies that put your money where your mouth is. Folks within companies, they wanna see that they're impacting their communities in a meaningful way. At P&G, I helped lead an ERG and Native Americans for several years. And one of the biggest things that we would do that kept and retained people would be to go to indigenous communities and provide grants, provide community service, training, professional development for these folks, really just to kind of get in and show folks that P&G is a good company. We care about communities, but also to give students and candidates role models to look up to and to connect with us as they traverse their academic journey. This is just some things that GSK does. P&G does something similar. L'Oreal, Unilever, they all do these types of things. But really it's about seeding that next generation of leadership. And so they can then go into companies and be able to get into those positions of leadership. So now I wanna talk a little bit about the meaningful actions that we're starting to see within companies. One of the biggest things that I've seen that's been very helpful within companies, and I talk about companies broadly, but programmatic activities is internal policy reconciliation. Internal policy reconciliation basically means that there are support networks or structures inside a company that focus specifically on wage gaps, talent progression and succession, rooting out bias. And so there has been a lot of work inside companies to tackle invisibility bias, which is a huge one for the Native American community and ensure that those folks are seen and discussed as others would be. And so it's really about kind of recognizing that there is a problem setting up those structures and being able to operate those within a company. So things like talent councils, you see those a lot in companies, mentoring networks, it's been talked about a little bit here. Visible leadership representation. And so do we have the leadership at certain levels to affect change and policies? And then active community support and leading with a voice are very important things that companies do to help retain and ensure that people can bring themselves to work fully and so that they can then aspire to those positions of leadership. Some other opportunities have come up and so I think you can look just a bull of them out. There's so many examples within industry, but really we're talking about specific recruiting and professional development conferences. Companies are starting to do specific apprenticeships. Employee resource group leadership, I've talked a little bit about that. Some of the opportunities are also leading internal campaigns and partnerships with community leaders and organizations and then scientific societies. So I wanna speak about ones near and dear to my heart later on in the slides from Sognus. So one of the best in class, you know, URM type recruiting conferences really is focused on African-American, Hispanic and Native American, doctoral and postdoctoral scientists and STEM disciplines. And so really what this is is a three-day program for top early career scientists to get an overview of industry and to interact with other P&G managers or managers inside the company to learn about science and industry, but also to see those people that they aspire to be in leadership roles. It's a great conference. If you guys have any questions about this, I'd direct them to my colleague, Ian Henry, who you've heard from. But this is one of these things that I think, you know, companies are starting to look at as not only diversity of recruiting, but also starting to weave in that fabric of, this is, it's a good fit. We have a community. And yes, we do science, but we're also looking to retain and nurture the communities that we support and serve. I'm gonna skip past this one. You guys can go to Coca-Cola, but really I wanna talk about this. So employee resource groups. So for GSK, similar to other companies, there are 10,000 active ERG participants in over 60 countries. And so these form the fabric of a lot of the DNI efforts within companies. And so you can see that a lot of groups here are represented. But what these groups do and why they have power is they allow the talent councils to come together. They allow people to establish visible leadership roles within companies that they otherwise wouldn't be able to do. And so these are very, very important as programmatic activities or programs that allow URM STEM employees to be able to shine. And so I think, as we think about this within big companies, it's very, it's like on autopilot at this point, but we should really aspire to have these types of activities within smaller companies as well. One last program that I'd like to talk about is the Sognus-Lentenputery Leadership Institute. And I realize that I have Sognus in there twice, but you can never have too much Sognus. So what this is, is it's a institute that provides training for motivated underrepresented minority professionals interested in advancing their leadership in diversity, equity, inclusion in all sectors of the STEM. So we're talking academia, industry, government, nonprofit. And it's not just leadership of the DEI, but it's also about professional development and really kind of setting themselves up to understand how to get to those positions of leadership in whatever sector they're in. And so as an alumni of this, I attended into 2012. This has been around for approximately 11 years. There are over 300 alumni in this institute to date. And really what the program aspires to do is to cultivate the influence in DEI, train and prepare participants and practice exerting influence. And so again, it's a leadership institute. It's not for leaders, it's to develop leaders. And I think that it's just a great program that has allowed me especially to be very visible within a big company to exert influence and then also be able to leverage influence in the DEI to help the communities that I serve, especially with indigenous populations. And then another thing it's done is it's built a strong and sustainable network of like-minded peers. And so you really have that community of leaders within the cohorts as you go into your career for support and collaboration. And so in conclusion, again, the business case for DEI and the private sector is widely accepted. I think it's more about not just focusing on the financial aspects of achieving that diversity, but how we then augment the inclusivity and the equity portions of that so that we can really affect change and aspire to get more folks into those leadership positions where in companies the change really starts to happen. And there are a lot of programs and initiatives in industry and STEM-focused scientific societies for new candidates to look at in all of these really aimed to create a workforce that mirrors the US population and the consumers in which they serve, which is really, really important for companies and again, that positive financial performance. So that's my talk, I appreciate your time. Happy to answer any questions if there is time. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Kaufman. One question is where can we find the charts that you presented from Twitter? I think that was you. Yeah, so again, if you just look up diversity and inclusion Twitter, every company typically has an annual report that focuses on DEI and some social responsibility. And so if you go there, you can usually read these reports and kind of understand the progress that they've made year on year and this was chart taken from 2019. Thank you. That's the last question that we have. Again, we wanna thank you for a very informative presentation. Our fourth presenter, our final speaker will be Cheryl Berksdoller, Dr. Berksdoller founded and directs accessible technology services, including the disabilities, opportunities, internet working and technology or do it and the IT accessibility technology teams at the University of Washington. Dr. Berksdoller? I'm Cheryl Berksdoller. I don't see my arrow here to move the slides. Oh, here we are. Very tiny, okay. I'm gonna talk about engaging people with disabilities, barriers and best practices. And some of you might be thinking, well, we don't really work with people with disabilities. We work with other underrepresented groups. Well, and every one of your underrepresented groups, there are people with disabilities. And what we hear from people with disabilities is they do not feel welcome in your programs and many programs that are designed for other people from their underrepresented groups like women and so forth and don't engage very much. And yet we also hear that that impact in their career is greater as far as their disability than it is the other marginalized status that they have. And so that's of concern. Also, it's important to think about what kinds of disabilities we're talking about. We're talking about that individuals in your case that would be otherwise qualified for your program or your institution, maybe pursuing a PhD and so forth, but they have a disability of some sort that might impact their mobility or their sight or their hearing, their ability to learn, maybe to pick up social cues, maybe it has to do with health, a great variety of disabilities that they might have. And sometimes the biggest challenge is right at the beginning. Just a quick example, one of the participants in our program entered a PhD program in chemistry years ago and was very, very fully qualified according to all the faculty, but there was no pushback once he arrived. He was quadriplegic and there were questions kind of like, well, how are you gonna get a PhD in chemistry if you can't even lift a beaker? And when I talked to some of these faculty that never said that to him, by the way, I said, well, have you talked to him about what he wants to do? Well, no, that's kind of awkward or whatever. Well, he wanted to be a professor and he is a very successful professor of chemistry, but at the time it was hard for faculty members and others to get past being able to manipulate a beaker part. As I would point out as well, I think I know what you faculty members do, you always have a lot of students around. I imagine you can find somebody to move a beaker if that's necessary, if he understands the content. So getting in the door sometimes is a big issue. So I do direct two groups. One is the IT accessibility team. We focus on making sure that the IT that we procure, develop and use at the University of Washington is accessible and inclusive of everyone, including people with disabilities. And then the Duet Center, I started in 1992. And in that center, we're funded by NSF primarily, but US Department of Education, the State Corporate and Private Funds. We even have a center in Japan that focuses on the goals of the Duet Center as well. And we also started and continue to maintain the center on universal design and education. So when we're working with students, we're working, we do a lot of different things. We have summer programs, we work with other programs, maybe like yours to help them be more inclusive. So DigiGirls is a summer camp for girls with disabilities learning to code, or I mean girls learning to code, but we make sure that students with disabilities, young women with disabilities can participate as well. So we love to work with other programs. And we're always focused on self-determination. It's like, why do we have to do this? Because our programs, much of our offerings, and our employment is often not fully accessible to them. And so unfortunately, students with disabilities need to develop some skills in self-advocacy, knowing where resources are, know how to ask for an accommodation, and how to get it, and so forth. And so we do have programs in that domain. But mainly what I'm talking about today with this group is the other part of what we work on. And that is the systemic change that's needed within our institutions and our employment settings. So when we're working with faculty or staff or institutions or technology companies or other companies, we promote universal design. And so universal design is a framework then that can be used actually for any DEI initiative to provide a framework for how we can think about being more inclusive. So what do I mean by being inclusive? Well, anybody who meets the requirements with or without accommodations is encouraged to participate. That would include, for instance, in your program, do you include a statement on how to request an accommodation to participate in whatever program you're offering? If there's no statement there, a student with a disability is likely to just think this program is not going to be accessible to me. So that's an important thing. Feeling welcome. If you're teaching a class, an online class, and you put your syllabus in an inaccessibly designed PDF, that a student who happens to be blind and using a screen reader technology to read aloud the text on the screen or in the document, or a person with dyslexia or another reading-related disability who also needs to use text-to-speech software in order to read the content within that document effectively. And even a student who's an English language learner who also benefits from hearing the words as well as seeing them in the document. So if this PDF is not accessible and it's the syllabus, for those particular students, they too are not feeling welcome in your class. And a lot of them have dropped out this year because of the pandemic, because of the online presence of courses. We hear that, well, that's, you know, being online and being able to stay at home is actually benefiting students with disabilities. Well, not so fast. Some of them, yes, but most people with disabilities, their major problem is in getting to campus. It's being able to engage in the resources that we provide on our campus. So we want everyone then to be fully engaged in an accessible and inclusive environment and activities. So just as an example in online courses, the probably the biggest accessibility issues as far as the cost to our institutions around the country is making inaccessible documents accessible, mainly reformatting PDF files. I always encourage faculty not to use PDF files. They can be made accessible and we will use them in our program, but it takes some effort. And so you probably should take a workshop, learn how to do it, and you'll find out it's a little different on a Mac than on a PC and there are problems in updating that file. So using, for instance, a syllabus in Microsoft Word is very easy to make accessible, as is even better to include it right in that HTML page in your learning management system to put that content of a syllabus, for example, and captioning videos. Often people are really surprised when I say this because you look even at YouTube and all those videos are captioned automatically by a computer. The problem is those videos are captioned automatically by a computer. And so they don't have punctuation, they have misspelled words. When you think about it, isn't it kind of a mean trick to someone who's an English language learner or someone who is deaf to have inaccurate captions, like misspelled words and not accurate punctuation? Well, sure it is. And most people don't realize that it's very easy, you're relatively easy to edit those captions on your video once you post them on YouTube and make them accessible. So instead, our disability services offices are scrambling to remediate documents and to recapture videos when if they were done proactively, then those things would not need to be done. So universal design is the framework I'm talking about. It means the design of products and environments to be usable by all people to the greatest extent possible without the need for adaptation or specialized design. Universal design is hard to apply it just perfectly, but we certainly can shoot for it as a goal. On the screen, I have an image of a name tag. This is the name tag that we create in the do it program for our onsite events. We realize that people like different ways to fix their name tags. And so we offer three options, but all in the same product. It's universal design, so it has flexibility. And what we have is a lanyard and the lanyard has a ring on it. And then the plastic name tag has a clip on it and there's a safety pin that goes through that clip. So one day I might want to use the lanyard or I can unclip the name tag from it and I can use a clip to put it on the collar on my blazer or whatever I can choose how I want to use that name tag. And it even includes the name in large print so that more people can see it. Often conferences, they have it really large what the organization is sponsoring the event. You know, when I'm at a conference, I know what event I'm at, but I don't know the name of my colleagues. And so I would like to see that name large. And then we put the name tag on the front and back so we don't run into the problem at a reception where someone's using a lanyard and the lanyard flips over and we decide, do I know well enough to flip that over so it's not blank? And my answer is always the same. If I do, I know their name already. If I don't, then I just don't touch it. So what are the characteristics of universal design? Any product or an environment like a chemistry lab, everything in it would be accessible, technically accessible as much as possible to people with disabilities. Having an adjustable height workstation is a good place to start. Usable, so it's functional, particularly in an online class, you wanna make it so that people can actually find what they're supposed to be doing. And then inclusive, that as much as possible, everybody is engaged with the same product and doing the same activity, but in a very flexible way. This isn't anything new. In the early 70s, there was a big disability movement promoting curb cuts in sidewalks. On this screen, we have an image of a picture. This is a picture that appeared in the UW Daily, which was in 1970. This is a student and on the back of his wheelchair, it says, ramp the curbs, get me off the street. People back in the early 70s did not think that having ramps in curb cuts or otherwise called curb cuts in our sidewalks was a reasonable goal. It would just cost way too much money. And for the University of Washington, it did cost a ton of money to redo all of those sidewalks that we have, but we did it. And today it's just accepted as a paradigm shift. We just expect that sidewalks will have little ramps in them, curb cuts. Now we even put bumps on them. So someone using a cane who happens to be blind can see that they're about ready to just go right into a street with traffic. So that's a paradigm shift. If we look at technology, we don't have to look any farther than our smartphones that apply universal design. We have features in our smart phones that will turn the characters, different colors of the background, change the size of the characters, and even talk to you. My phone talks to me probably more than I'd like, but still it has that feature. Those types of features used to be assistive technology. They were just add-ons to regular computer technology, but now they're built in to most computer-based systems. And then the other characteristic of technology that's universally designed is it's compatible with assistive technology. So someone using a computer has some features built into it, but also it can be compatible with maybe an alternative keyboard so they can use it better, or some other assistive technology that allows them to use that keyboard and use it for running the simulation or whatever they happen to be doing. Even a computer these days will interface with a Braille embosser so that people who are blind can actually produce their own Braille. So who are the beneficiaries? Well, everybody pretty much so far, things I've talked about, but if we just simply take a look at captions, people who can't hear, of course, people who are English language learners, people in noisy environments like the airport, noiseless environments like a baby's room, if they have slow internet connections, if they want to just simply know the spelling of words, particularly in a chemistry class, we need to see the spelling of those long words that you use and who want to find content quickly because now there are two tools available that you can actually search through the text-based captions on videos, a collection of videos and find the content you're looking for. So there are three sets of principles that underpin universal design in any higher education setting or actually employment setting for that matter. I'm not going to go through those today, I'll just mention them. There are three groups of people that are developing principles and guidelines and practices. One is the group working primarily in physical spaces and the guidelines, and there are seven principles of universal design that can help us design our computer labs or chemistry labs, maker spaces or whatever you want to design. There are three design principles called universal design for learning that particularly focus on instruction, curriculum and pedagogy. And then there are four that focus on the universal design of technology and they're the four principles that underpin the web content accessibility guidelines that are used worldwide. I'm not going to go through those now, but in a nutshell, this is how I would summarize if you put all of those together, particularly in a educational setting. So provide multiple ways for participants to learn and to demonstrate what they have learned would be a guideline to apply. Apply in a service or in a class or whatever you happen to be doing. And then provide multiple ways to engage. When I teach online, I ask students to meet with me one-on-one if they'd like in my syllabus, but I let them choose how they want to engage with me. And it might be by Zoom or Skype or email, but I let them choose so they can use it the technology that they're most comfortable with. The important thing there is to give that student agency the way they can choose what's going to happen in that conversation. Provide multiple ways for people to engage. So learn and share what they learned. Those are three things. And then ensure that all the technologies and facilities and services and resources and strategies are accessible to individuals with a wide variety of disabilities. So just a couple examples, so if this is all new to you, but we have a publication that you can look up 20 tips for teaching an accessible online course. Has references in it, including how to do these things. There's also an additional video and tutorial. And this is developed from a literature review, but also the feedback from students and actual instructors of courses. And we're starting with things that is for a faculty member to get started. I can get much more technical in this, but this is how you can get started. Use a text-based written material. Avoiding PDFs on your websites and in your courses, especially those that are scanned in, are just images. And so a screen reader is going to say to their blind user, image, and that's pretty much it. Structure headings and lists. Again, someone using a screen reader, their screen reader is pretty smart and it can find the headings and read them to the person that would like to read them and it can tell them when a list is coming up. So they can see the organization of a 25-page paper without reading it word for word right from the beginning. And also provide descriptive text for hyperlinks and images. You know, we create our websites and some people like to have all the links say the same thing. Click here, click here, click here, click here. Well, if you're a screen reader, then you happen to be blind. Yet, you can use your tab key and go through those links on any website page and read the underlying text, the link text. And so you can see where you're linking to, but without going there. And so if for a person who's blind that's using that capability, it'll go through and say, click here, click here, click here. So I have to go back and read all the surrounding text in order to figure out what they're linking to. Use large fonts, plain backgrounds, that's what I'm doing today. Caption videos, we already talked about that. Make sure they're accurate. Your instructional methods make the instructions and expectations clear. This is one of the biggest complaints of students with disabilities in our programs is they just don't know exactly what they're supposed to do or what the expectations are. And everyone can benefit from clear instructions and expectations. Provide options for communicating, learning and demonstrating learning. Provide options for demonstrating learning and use plain English, spell out acronyms, define jargon. And then you can look at this whole thing that you've created then, this course. And what you'll find is when something's universally designed, to say universal design, it's an attitude. It's an attitude that you like with the name tag that you think about everyone who's coming to your event or participating in your program and think about how you can make things more inclusive of them. It's a framework which has a lot of guidance beyond what I just talked about. It's a goal that you'll never really reach and it's a process. It values diversity, equity and inclusion. It promotes best practices, does not lower standards, proactive, can be implemented incrementally, benefits everyone or most everyone and minimizes them the need for accommodation. So in the long-term, it can help your course or your program avoid having to provide so many accommodations with a student with a disability in roles. So taking this approach, there's a lot written about it and we've written a lot about it in my program. So you can look for the Center for Universal Design and Education at uw.edu slash d-o-i-t slash c-u-d-e. And there's a 20% discount right now on a book that we published, Creating Inclusive Learning Opportunities in Higher Education, a Universal Design Toolkit. You can also find through the center a project we have called Access Includes for making everything more inclusive of different minority and other groups. And my email here is on the screen. If you have questions or you wanna join our Universal Design in Higher Education, online community of practice. My email address is s-h-e-r-y-l-b at uw.edu. And you can ask any question you want or if you wanna partner with me, like I said, I love to partner with other programs. And so, you know, send me some email and see if we might work together to make your program and others more inclusive of people with disabilities in the targeted population that you already have. Thank you very much for a very informative presentation. We've a little ahead of schedule. So we'll now move into the panel discussion with our four speakers. A reminder to the audience, continue to submit questions through the Zoom Q&A and I will present them to the speakers on your behalf. So the first question is really addressed to all of our panelists. How can we be more inclusive towards students of immigrants or refugees whom based on their ethnicity do not necessarily fall under the umbrella of URM? Anyone here to? I could just talk about the basic approach I was just talking about is one of the advantages of a universal design approach is the idea to think about anybody who might be in your program. In this case, the people that you suggest. And think about what their special challenges might be. And some of them are gonna be related to other groups you're working with and some are gonna be quite different. I think another thing that you can do is set up an advisory board. Either have that representation within your existing advisory board or if you're particularly wanting to outreach to a group like that that you just don't have much experience with and are really puzzled about how you might might reach that group and support them once they're in your program. Have an advisory group that has representation by a lot of stakeholder groups. Parents, children, other people from school districts or whatever that work with that population and do some brainstorming. Talk about what you've already done in your program to make it inclusive and then ask what else could be done to recruit and to support these individuals as they move forward in their academic programming careers. Anyone else have any suggestions or responses to that? Okay. I can add that the question might also be asking about first generation students. So if they are from immigrant families or refugees perhaps not always of course and certainly there is quite a bit of effort. I can speak for my own institution with first generation. We even have a sort of a separate commencement website that let's first generation say, we're so proud of you graduating. So I think this brings up a really great point about beyond unrepresented students and there's just other groups of students where I believe there is a lot of effort that we haven't talked about here certainly but to bring it up with the institution currently in my own department in trying to really send the message that all of the groups with different opportunities we do want to support them as best as possible and not one size does not fit all. So I'm not really answering your question except sharing the concern that there are many other groups of students. Thank you. This question is directed to Dr. Asai. Have you checked the models used in the corporate environment? Diversity strategies, not programs does include equity framing. This doesn't mean that equity is achieved though. The nomenclature needs more discussion. The issue of sustainability is important though and this topic deserves more discussion. Right, I didn't quite get the question there. Okay, I think basically what they're asking is the terminology of sustainability in the context of DEI needs to be discussed more. Sure, and any of these terms need to be carefully defined. When I was saying sustainability I was especially talking about programs that are created in institutions of higher education where they are often not integrated or not institutionalized into whatever the university is doing. And so when the extramarrow funding goes away or when the funding gets tough they often then programs then often die. And what we see over many decades now is that that seems to be recurring over and over again. And I think that's one of the major challenges one of the major reasons that we haven't been able to get better at this work because we keep starting over and over again. Every year new students come, new students come, new students come and if the system doesn't change then we continue to treat the students. And that's really not a sustainable strategy in my view. And I think it's necessary to rethink some of that at the institutional level. Thank you. This question is addressed to Dr. Kim. Can you help us better understand how students are advised and mentor in selecting possible schools before they are accepted and how they can manage the choices that they are given? That's an excellent question. And as we have more bridge sites and partners this becomes even, now they have to, there's 29 possible schools that they can choose from but to be clear, after the interview process the schools have to extend an offer. So not all 29 will extend the offer but a student may still have a subset of, I don't know, five, six, seven however many interviewed them. And I think one of the efforts we're going on for the next year is to really highlight the differences and similarities between the programs because some are post-bac, some are masters based on coursework, some are masters based on PhD, some will help you into the PhD of their own university, some don't even offer PhD. So this is really, this question is a really important one. And the students have also told us, yeah, it's kind of confusing even when they get to a school. So we wanna make effort and we've had a lot of discussion about trying to help students in this portal to highlight, okay, if these are the schools that have PhD programs that you could potentially transfer into, these are targeted one year, these are targeted two years. So I think this question is highlighting just sort of a detailed but important part of the student experience in the decision of which school to join. Thank you. Another question directed to you is how do you manage climate between the bridge students and the other students so that they don't feel like less than? Yes, no, another, you all should be on the advisory board. I mean, this is another very important question. And one topic that has been brought up certainly that I've thought about is just in the name itself, so not everybody understands what bridge means, not everybody understands the implications. So I think when I wrote on my slide that the integration with PhD students is very important, we're lucky or maybe unlucky, our program is very big. So when we have eight fellows, bridge fellows, I like to refer to them as fellows, they do become one of the regular students. But if you're a small program and all of a sudden you've doubled the size of your master's program and now folks don't really quite, this is sort of new. And I think that's why making sure the faculty and staff and students understand what this program is even before it starts. For us, we had a faculty meeting, we talked about it even before the students came as the proposal was being submitted, is everyone gonna support this unanimous yes. Before they arrive, our new students are coming, if they're asking you for rotation, if you have any questions, you ask me as the faculty member, not me, but the PI of the grant and I will help you understand. So we're doing everything we can to direct the questions towards the executive committee and not asking the student themselves, hey, you're a bridge fellow, what does that mean? We don't want that and you've, the questioner has picked up on, this is a really key part. Thank you. This is for Dr. Kauffman. Is the SACNIS Linton Pooley Leadership Institute just limited to students slash faculty? Are scientists working in industry and government agencies eligible? So, yeah, to clarify, the Institute is for postdocs and professionals. So it is for, typically the cohorts are 10, 10 and 10. So 10 postdocs, 10 early to mid, and then 10 kind of more seasoned experience researchers to that are aspiring to get in various positions of administration, for example. So really that's kind of the cohort design typically. So yeah, postdocs and professionals. And as far as industry and government, all sectors, right? So everything is included there. Thank you. Dr. Asai, what steps are needed to encourage more organizations to adopt the diversity and equity framing strategy you described? Yeah, that's a great question. I guess if we knew the answer to that we wouldn't be here today. You know, the science, I'm a scientist as you might know. And so I count myself in this. I'm not trying to characterize others on characterizing myself. I think one of the challenges that scientists have is that we seem to be very fixated on what we think has worked well. And of course it has worked well because we were successful. And so it's really hard for us to think about how we can change. We think about rigor and we define rigor in ways that will work for us. We talk about excellence and we often think of excellence and diversity as a zero-sum game where you can't have, if you add to diversity you have to diminish your excellence. It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. In fact, I think that we need to understand that excellence without diversity is really not excellent, right? I mean, we require diversity and inclusion to be excellent. We think about pedigrees. I mean, scientists are really wrapped up often in pedigrees, you know, where'd you go to school? Who was your advisor? Where'd you get your degree? And if you didn't come from one of these schools then you're considered to be perhaps not as appropriate, not as eligible for things. And so all of this is really not... I work at a funding agency, right? I work at a philanthropy, HHMI. And I've been struggling with this question for a long time because while I recognize the importance of getting grants and that's what we give, we give grants. I've been on the other side and I understand that grants are important. Sometimes I think we put so much emphasis on getting the grant that we avoid doing the harder work which actually doesn't cost money. It doesn't really cost money to think about why we believe that excellence and diversity are at a zero sum situation and so forth. It doesn't really cost a lot of money to change our curriculum so that it can be more inclusive. It doesn't really cost a lot of money for us to think about how we run promotion and tenure criteria so that it includes inclusive teaching. It includes effective mentoring. These are practices that can be learned. But those are harder, right? Those are changing our culture is a lot harder than just writing a grant proposal and getting the money. But I think that at some point, our system, all of us, we have to start thinking differently about how we're going to really make change happen at the cultural level. And as I said, working as at a philanthropy, I feel guilty sometimes because we emphasize too much getting the money and not enough the actual harder work. So that's a very long answer to, and not a good answer to a really good question, but it's on all of us, right? It's on all of us to be thinking about these things and to really challenge how science is currently centered culturally and how we can recenter science and recenter science education if we really care about diversity and inclusion. If we don't, then we're gonna just stay the way we are. So I shall stop before I get myself into too much trouble here. Thank you. Actually, there's a continuation to this question and it is this, how can we hold academic departments systematically accountable to demonstrate diversity? Well, you know, we respond to funding within an institution, right? Within a department and the way the university decides to distribute resources to different departments or different schools, I think it should be examined. I think we should ask our students, whether the department or the courses that they're taking, whether they feel like they belong. And if there's a way then for us to be able to measure inclusivity, then perhaps that measure can be applied towards formulas for distributing resources or as I said, promotion and tenure. You know, I think that this is not trivial, but I think until we actually do some of the serious work, reflection and learning, it's really hard to hold ourselves accountable. Thank you. This is directed toward Dr. This is directed to Cheryl, the other Cheryl. The advisory group ideas and strategies that allow for peer-to-peer training for redesigning the classroom. What is the low-hanging food that each faculty could implement right away to move towards a universal classroom setting design? Yeah, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit. If you're talking about a physical classroom, I talked about an online classroom, much of what I listed there was pretty low-hanging fruit, pretty easy to do, but in a regular classroom, you can start with the furniture. And what some students face on our own campus and elsewhere is they don't, as a person who's using a wheelchair, they can either not get in an appropriate spot to sit or they cannot get under the table. And so I always recommend that there be one adjustable height table. You may not be able to do it in every single classroom, we kind of work in that direction so that a person can have an adjustable table. It's a pretty simple thing. Also think about the way that you have small group discussions, as much as you have control over to avoid some of these rigid classroom sets where the chairs, they adhere to the floor. And so it's real hard, actually for people without disabilities too, it's hard to get a small group together. It's not flexible enough. And I understand the desire for the campus sometimes to use that format because it keeps them nice and neat and so forth, but it isn't the greatest for small group discussion. When you have tiers that combine with that, it makes it even more complicated, but you might not want to change your whole format, but at the very lowest, the flat tier that's on the same level as when you're instructing to make sure that there's some flexibility there. And so first of all, make it so that a person with a disability can be in a group with people without disabilities. And so you can have some flexibility where there's room for people in wheelchairs but also for chairs and so forth. Another thing that can be done is to really look at the instructor station. Often we don't think about the instructor as being the one with a disability. And so making sure that it has technology that can be used with assisted technology very quickly to plug it in and that the instructor can have an example, a mobility impairment and effectively teach. We were giving the person I was talking about earlier who majored in chemistry, that he was gonna be part of the video and he was gonna be the instructor in the video. And it wasn't until we got there to do the filming, it's a really nice modern auditorium that we realized that it was really set up well to be accessible to a student who's in a wheelchair. But they were in the back area and you could come in on the flat from the back and because everything was tiered and there was no entrance at the lower level, he couldn't get down to that level. He had a good sense of humor by the way and in that particular instant, a couple of strong men carried his wheelchair down there with him in it, which was not the way things should be done of course. And I worry about his safety, but again, he was in good humor and did that. So think of some things that just can make it more inclusive. And again, universal design isn't just about students with disabilities, but the other students, all students, so they can get in a comfortable group together and engage in different ways. So flexibility is the rule there. And then there are a lot of things that you can do in your instructional practices, but it wouldn't be the physical space, but just making sure that you speak the content in your videos, you won't always be aware that a student might have a visual impairment that makes it difficult for them to see exactly what you're pointing to, particularly if you like to use images of websites and so forth with the text is so small, that can be a problem, particularly for someone in the back of the room. And so just make sure when you can to avoid situations like that, I like to use screenshots of a website if I'm going to talk about it rather than the actual website, because then I can enlarge it and just show a part of it. But make sure that you speak the content enough of it so someone can follow along without actually seeing it. Thank you. Also in the center of one more thing, the Center on Universal Design and Education does have a checklist on how to design an accessible physical space and went on how to design a physical space like a maker space or an engineering lab or computer lab. And there's much low hanging fruit there. So I would say go over and look at that website that I have the URL for. Thank you. This is for all the panelists. What would be the role of the Internet of Things in helping chemists and engineers with disabilities? Well, I can just say the Internet today, but also in the Internet of Things is accessibility, that a lot of simulations and other graphic-based products are not fully accessible to students with disabilities, particularly those with visual impairments. But even some of them that have sound effects and so forth, they don't have an alternative so that if someone can't hear the sound, they can figure out what to do. Or they have choices where the student has to choose something and they might have a red circle button and then they have a green circle button and a blue circle button. Not thinking, we need to think about students who are colorblind, which is not a disability, by the way, but there are a lot of people who have colorblindness. And one quick way, easy way, logging in food to solve that problem, is to never require that a person understand color or be able to distinguish colors. And so in that example I just gave, the red button could be a triangle and the green button could be a square and I don't remember the other color I used, could be a rectangle or something. And so you can tell someone to select the, you can even use the word red, they can say the red triangle to do such and such. And so just to be thinking about those, some of those accessibility things that some are related to disability and some benefit other people as well. One final question and that is this, in the context of the Oxide project, which is an quoting from the person asking the question, co-opted the business case for diversity to be able to also be the academic case for diversity and very much appreciate the summary of the data. The data from Daven, I guess it is, DOBIN suggested that IRGs had mixed results in advancing DNI groups. They suggested this depended on whether the group had vertical integration with the leadership. Can you comment on this? So I think this one was correct to me, yeah. So I would agree with the Daven research, but I think with ERGs or IRGs, however their whatever acronym you're using, I think it speaks to the whole premise of needing to have leadership, established leadership, whether it's integration of those ERGs into the top down or folks within those ERGs that are in those positions of leadership, I think that's actually the best case. And what I've seen to be the most effective at effecting change and driving programs. And then there was another question actually that was asked about retention, which also then tends to positively impact retention too because those communities see visibly a path for them with regards to employee satisfaction and being able to affect change because I think from a sense of purpose, I think those folks wanna do that. So yes, ERGs, definitely I can speak to P&G, they have ERGs, they have direct lines to corporate leadership, GSK, it's the same way all the way up to the C-suite. And I think it speaks to the culture that those companies aspire to create and that then fuels a lot of that equity discussion as well. You know, it's very important. Thank you. This is director to Dr. Asai. The questioner agrees that the greater emphasis has to be paid to the training of the research advisors. So they see the potential in each of the students. What specific programs should be initiated to improve the quality of these relationships? The summer mentorship training, the summer culturally aware mentorship training curriculum that I described, I think is a really good model to begin to look at. If you go to the summer website, if you just Google summer, I think you find it, CIMER, they've got a lot of resources there. And I think that's a really good place to start in terms of what the kinds of things that they think are effective and the kind of resources that they have and the kind of, and much of the literature, including the National Academy's report from 2019. So I guess I would suggest starting there and to look at what they have there. And there might be other organizations that I'm not thinking about right now, but certainly I think CIMER does a really thoughtful job in this work. Thank you. This question is for each of the panelists. If you had to choose, what is the most important action your program has taken to produce the most change? Well, I guess if I can start there, I think for us to really ensure that the students who are entering our bridge program, that they will have the tools and they will be successful. So we have a very targeted goal of ensuring that as they enter our masters, they're gonna move on to supportive PhD programs. And that's really important because even though they have entered the program, it's meaningless if there's no additional support for any student to make sure they're going to succeed. So we're not only trying to ensure their entry into programs, but do they have the tools? Do they still have the mentoring support say at UCSD if they don't stay with us to really help them through all the process? So it's really a five year program. In some sense, that's how I look at it certainly because those students will always be bridge students. So for us to ensure that the students really have the tools to succeed beyond our master's program, I think that is the best way that we can ensure, addressing this gap and ensuring that the students do well and stay healthy frankly throughout the entire process. Thank you. I think for us in our program, the easiest thing and the one that we have the most concrete evidence of is working directly with students with disabilities to help them develop the skills that they do maneuver in this very inaccessible world at times. And so we have a longitudinal study that started back in 1992 with our participants. So we're continuing to follow them through their careers. They start when they're in high school, later high school years. And so I think that is the one we can measure the most where I'm hoping the most impact has been though is working with faculty to help them make their courses more accessible. And we usually just have data like at the end of a program to say, they can say, are you gonna use, we ask if they're gonna use any of these techniques and what are they gonna do to improve their classes as far as accessibility. And then they often will say, we get very positive reviews that they're gonna make some changes, but we don't follow up with those but we just don't have the bandwidth to follow up particularly when our grants are usually three or five years, as many of you understand. But we actually made a commitment in our first grant to where you have the students that we were gonna set up this longitudinal study and hopefully we get enough grants for similar projects. And so we can continue to follow the old ones and then the new ones as they come in and that actually has worked. So one effort that we're really pushing and we're getting some success but not as much as the others just to get, just simply get programs and institutions to collect disability data. And so when they're asking on there, when they're trying to review the characteristics of the students in a program like a bridge program or something that they simply ask along with asking about gender and racial identity and so forth that they ask if the person has a disability. You don't have to ask more than that. Usually you're not gonna have enough students with disabilities to really, we do in our programs but to kind of analyze a particular type of disability but just to know how the students with disabilities are faring in your program and just to know that they're there. They might, if they don't have to identify themselves in a survey, they may actually disclose their disability and you may not have known that they've had one because a lot of students with disabilities are worried about disclosing a disability during the application time or even the early time when they're participating in the program because they're worried about stigma, discrimination that not being taken seriously that the other students are assumed to be doing. So anyway, yeah. Dr. Koffman. Yeah, I was just gonna say just speaking on the Leadership Institute from Sognas, I think the most important action that they've taken is just recognizing, they're all about community and culture and science. And I think really recognizing it initially in 2010 that there was a need to have succession and leadership and create that sense of community in that program. So to go through it, you would have to understand that a lot of these cohorts are very close to the people that you meet and the networks that form from them after you spend a week and learning best practices from folks in academia and government. For me, an industry was very powerful. Staying connected with those folks over a decade has been tremendous. And so we follow each other throughout our careers. We support each other. And I think that that's just been one of the biggest things has been just the community and culture aspect of the program itself. In addition to the professional leadership development that happens, that really kind of makes you think a little bit differently and outside of the box and how you approach getting to those positions of leadership and influence within the organizations. I just think that community and culture aspects are huge. And Dr. Masa? I think as I mentioned in my talk, I think probably the most important thing we did was when we paused the program back in 2014 because we needed a year to really think about what we were doing, what we weren't doing, what the outcomes were and what we could do differently. And as I try to explain in my talk, one of the things I think then that came out of that is this, it's a requirement. It's a requirement that in order to accept the award, the advisor has to complete this year-long mentorship training. And we've now done it enough with enough people and it's been going on for a while that actually people are now actually beginning to want to do the mentorship training. And I think that's really good. So that's my thought. Thank you. Thank you. I want to thank all of you for some very thoughtful and thought-provoking presentations. We'll now turn the program over to Riga Berto Hernandez for some brief closing remarks. Dr. Hernandez is the Gump family professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University and director of Open Chemistry Collaborative in diversity, equity, or oxide. Thank you, Cheryl. It's my unique privilege to be able to close this amazing workshop. And I won't take too long. I think we'll be able to take advantage of the fact that the speakers have been so on point that we can be able to close it a little early from this sort of zoom heaven. But the first thing that I, let's see if I can get this, is I wanted to do was to thank today's speakers. You heard from Jerry Richmond about the coach program and the impacts that they have made from Judy Kim about the ACS Bridge and what it's still doing and how it's developing. From David Asai, where he offered the term peers as a compliment to the many different terms that we discussed, whether it was URPOC, which I happened to favor or others, which we discussed. I think it's an important conversation. He also talked about the importance of diversity and equity, not just diversity or equity, which as the director of the Open Chemistry Collaborative and Diversity Equity, Oxide, I very much resonate with. Alan Kaufman talked to us about the business case for diversity and inclusion. And I believe that that's not only true there, but it's also true for the academic case for diversity. There's a lot of take home messages there as well. And finally, Cheryl Berksaller talked to us about her do-it program and the importance of universal design and how it's useful for those who need it, for all of us. And in fact, for those who need it, which and we don't want people to have to tell us when they need it. We just want it to be there and be accessible from the get go. So very much appreciate all of the programs that we've heard about today and my sincere thanks to their contributions. And I hope that that will continue to spur many more programs from those of you in the audience. I wanted to then talk a little bit more about some of the other take home messages which I'd like to promote that resonate with things that we've heard about throughout the workshop. And that is that any one program is great, but what we really need is to have it sustained. It's not just a single instance. It's not just a single discussion or a single workshop. It's a sustained discussion. And so I want to advocate for the importance of fostering and maintaining and implementing a diversity culture. I think of this as being complimentary to the notion of safety culture where us as chemists, we and chemical engineers, molecular scientists, we figured out that in order to do safety right, we had to develop a safety culture, not just have a yearly safety training exercise. And so if there's any sort of take home from the discussions about how important it is to have workshops and training and dialogue, it's that we need to do that as often and as possible and to integrate it within everything that we do so that we really can strive for and achieve inclusive excellence. Another notion which I think resonates is this idea of a learning community. Rebecca Rock spoke about this in the context of Merck where what they did was they recognized that they didn't have all the answers. In fact, very few of us have all of the answers. And they argued that what they needed to do was develop a community which actively sought the answers and together advance your understanding of how to improve climate and how to engage with each other so as to truly take advantage of all of the advantages that come from being in a diverse and inclusive environment. So this notion of learning community is one that I'd also which ties in very much to the diversity culture and it's one that I advise that many of you think about as you develop programs that you make it peer to peer that you help each other learn about what we can do to advance inclusive excellence. All of these policies, whatever policies that we implement, whatever programs they must be transparent, all too often there are hidden rules or unwritten rules that are inaccessible to outgroup members. And it's in those written unwritten rules or hidden rules or unknown variables that are being used for assessment make it very difficult for outgroup members whoever those outgroup members are to be able to have an equitable chance at success. We must also hold ourselves accountable for success. And there's many different ways in which we can hold ourselves accountable. One is through numbers but as we've heard that culture is important and then we have to have systemic change in that culture which requires qualitative changes that accountability also has to be implemented towards those qualitative changes. How to do that? That's still not completely understood or we don't know all the answers. This workshop I think was meant to help us engage in some of those answers and in trying to work with you in developing even more challenge, more answers. Far too often we heard about one of the challenges or we may have heard we, I think one person at least mentioned Virginia Valiant's early work from 20 years ago where she talked about malls, barriers can be constructed because there were mountains from which a mall hill on top of a mall hill on top of a mall hill develops a mountain which is insurmountable. That's what I would call cumulative disadvantage. That's a problem of course but let's turn that and flip it into cumulative advantage which is to say, if we recognize that in order to be successful all of the members of our community must be promoted, must be championed. Why? Because each one of those little advantages adds up together to finally lead to a success. Perhaps then we can start thinking about opting in as opposed to opting out. That was a concept that we heard from the entire stallings namely that if we create a environment that is desirable for people from diverse backgrounds to join the faculty to join the research enterprise they will then choose to opt in. And that's the environment that we want to have. We want to have one where we promote within a cumulative way all of the members of our community as we train them, as we engage in them in our science and in everything that we do as chemists and chemical engineers. And so this concept of cumulative advantage maybe one that you might think about as you train a student say an undergraduate who you're mentoring not just to graduate but also what else do they need in their portfolio so that they will be the most competitive they'll be competitive for graduate schools or and eventually for faculty positions or research scientist positions at industrial settings. So cumulative advantage, building up those CVs let's work together to advance each other. And finally what we've another thing that we heard was that we really needed to move the needle. You heard that from Freeman Harbowski yesterday morning when he said that it was great to talk about things but we needed to move the needle. We need to change the numbers of representation and that in turn will move the needle because if we have a diverse workforce if we have leaders from different backgrounds that in turn will encourage better policies and it will encourage others to join them. So we need to move the needle. How do we move the needle? Perhaps it's we need to do more than just incremental change. We can't just say this is the program that we have now and let's just tweak it. So I really enjoyed the lecture by David Asai where he said, or his presentation where he said they had a program, they thought it was the right program. They took a step back backwards for a moment or a step back and asked, was it effective? What do we need to do to make it truly effective? And they reimagined it to make it even that much more effective. And I would argue that this is what we need to do. We need to be brave and reimagine all of the programs and departments and institutions that we have, keep the parts of them that are effective, that are amazing and make them more amazing by truly integrating inclusive excellence. So I encourage us to really move the needle by reimagining everything we do. And I've been inspired by all of the talks and all of the remarks that I've heard throughout this workshop as both from our fabulous speakers but even more so from our fabulous participants who were able to engage with us and share their experiences and their suggestions through Slack. And perhaps that may continue over the next few days. So we have an even stronger set of recommendations and suggestions that will be recorded not in a consensus study, but in the proceedings. So with that, I wanna remind you that there's more. This is not the end of the conversation and this is not the end of where you'll be able to access these materials. All of the recordings of the workshop will be posted online by next week. They're available on this URL that's shown here but you can also probably find it from the websites that you use to register. This proceedings in brief will be published over the next six months to a year before the end of the year. It will provide a workshop summary, mostly cataloging all of the things, the high points and maybe the low points of everything that was said during the workshop so as to continue the conversation with our community to really make changes, to reimagine these changes and implement them. I also would be a miss, if I did not share with you that the Oxide program that I lead will be organizing two events in 2022 for the chemistry and chemical engineering community, specifically in April of 2022. We will be running a national diversity equity workshop and do to continue our engagement with department heads and chairs of chemistry departments from R1s to PUIs to R2s to community colleges even that are truly training the next generation of scientists. And how will we do that by changing our departmental cultures from within and through leadership? Similarly, the AICHE has found that this program was so effective in chemistry that they have replicated it and are trying to replicate it in chemical engineering. So in Endu, a national diversity equity workshop will be held in June of 2020, 2022 for the chemical engineering faculty. And so if you are in one or the other of those groups, please sign up and engage with us so that we can make a difference. There is one last thing to do, which is to thank all of the people who have made this possible. The sponsors of National Science Foundation and Department of Energy, it takes funds to turn on the lights but also to pay for all of the effort by the people who made this happen. So we really appreciate their financial support. All of the members of the planning committee and for which I was also privileged to be a member, I thank them for all of their energy, all of the presentations, the many, many conference calls that we've been on. And you also got the chance to see all of us through the various remarks and some of the roles that we took on during the workshop. The NASEM staff is just simply amazing and I can't speak sufficiently highly of them. I don't have enough hours that they assigned me to do so, but many thanks to Jessica, Kasai, Jeremy and just everybody on the staff that made this possible. I already thank today's speakers, but again, they also can't be thanked enough. None of us, none of them were provided any financial support to come and share what their knowledge and also their engagement to help us create new knowledge as to what will be the effective change. And finally, this wouldn't happen without you, the participants. So thank you for remaining for the two days of a very intense workshop engaging through the questions that you asked as well as on Slack, just thank you. And I look forward to what you will do and what we will do to make, to move the needle.