 Let me just say a few words about diversity here at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Diversity has long served for us as a core value within the school. And as you know, we have renewed our focus to ensure that we are prioritizing and maximizing our efforts to foster a diverse workforce and student body. It seems like only a couple of years ago, it was 2018, that we launched what we call the Culture Transformation Initiative, or sometimes referred to as CTI. This CTI places an emphasis on providing a safe, respectful and inclusive work environment for everyone to study and to work. For us, diversity refers to any difference, large or small, that includes race, gender, upbringing, interests, personal values, identity, or more. And these differences may represent opportunities for various solutions, insights and breakthroughs. The way we listen and the way we speak to each other, as well as the way we treat each other on a daily basis, determines how we accept these opportunities and reflect in our genuine value of diversity and really our genuine value of each other. I'm very proud of the personal commitment that many of our colleagues have made from the start of this CTI initiative. I'm especially proud of the sustained responsibility that I've witnessed over the many months. But from my perspective, the goal of CTI is to extend beyond or immediate institution, immediate department, but rather to reconfigure our School of Medicine's culture into a national model for respect, inclusivity, and professionalism within our work environment. The bedrock of our department is the warm embrace of diversity in all forms with reflexive tolerance and unconditional respect for all. I want to thank our equity, diversity, and inclusion EDI officer, Dr. Camila Gutierrez, who has worked diligently to steward this policy in the department and also worked hard to organize today's diversity day. We now regularly include EDI discussion and consideration into all of our administrative meetings and look strategically for a path forward to augment and optimize diversity at all levels. Two, that I'll say that particularly resonated with me were the following. One was in the racial healing handbook. Dr. Annalise Singh reminds us that we must attack bias with a purpose. And I really liked this quote. It was, yep, this racism thing is everyone's problem, including mine. And I'm going to do something about it. The second quote that really resonated with me was in the anti-racism presentation from the National Museum of African American History and Culture when diversity expert Verna Reynolds observed that when talking about race and diversity and bias, quote, you are not going to get comfortable before you get uncomfortable. Diversity is not a property that is inherent to an individual, right? One is not a diverse person. It's an emergent property of groups of people who bring together their various sources of identity and the different qualities that populate and characterize their lives, right? Whether that be their racial, ethnic identity, their gender and sexual orientation, their age, or various other factors that comprise their life experience. So first, let's talk about the state of affairs in neurology, okay? So where are we with respect to diversity and inclusion? So what I'm showing you here is a figure from a paper from a few years ago that contrasted the demographics of academic neurologists against the United States population with respect to race, ethnicity, and sex. And so what you can see is, if you look at the colors, that academic neurologists do not mirror the U.S. population with respect to representation, and in particular that there is under-representation of Black or African American individuals, Hispanic or Latino individuals, and what using, again, census categories, American Indian or Alaskan natives. And you can see that also there is a disparity with respect to sex as opposed to the U.S. population, which is ever so slightly more female. Academic neurology in 2017 at least had a predominance of males. So let's talk a little bit about why enhancing diversity is important. I hope I've shown you that there is a gap to be filled. I want to talk a little bit about why it's important to fill it. And as I alluded to a few minutes ago, I am not going to at least initially make that argument from a social justice perspective, although I think it's vital and will make that argument, but rather from how it benefits groups of individuals, how it benefits neurology departments. So importantly, it has been shown repeatedly, unequivocally, that diversity enhances performance of groups. That in finance, in science, in every field in which it's been researched, having a more diverse group of workers, of problem solvers, increases creativity, increases the search for novel information, increases the search for novel perspectives that is more likely to yield creative and in many cases, more effective answers. So shifting from just access and disparities in the ability to get to a neurologist, there is overwhelming evidence that there are disparities in how patients are treated once they get to a neurologist. It is the case that in academia, including academic medicine, including neurology, that women and persons of color spend more time engaged in these activities than white men. So here's a graph of this. It's not in neurology. It's from a work life study at the University of Massachusetts. But we have similar numbers at the University of Pennsylvania. And what it shows is that if you tally up service to university service to profession and mentoring, you see that persons of color tend to spend more time than white individuals. And you see that women spend more time than men and women of color. Well, it's almost like they have a second part-time job on top of their academic vocation. And really one of the things we wanted to focus on in this new structure is racism in medicine. To be more anti-racist, that recognition that race is not an innate biological category, but rather social construct, that social determinants of health are institutionalized and are impactful, that there are structural barriers towards career advancement. So within the workforce for underrepresented persons, implicit bias also affects patients and providers and that there's explicit discrimination. So we're really changing or honing our focus in the last several months. And rethinking some of the problems with the first iteration of our inclusion and diversity efforts, that our efforts were too, there were too few people engaged in them, that the work was disproportionately represented by people who themselves were underrepresented or LGBTQ. And it didn't actually include our staff. And it turned out that's where most of our diversity was actually represented, certainly with respect to race and ethnicity. And it wasn't actively, in my opinion, anti-racist. It strove to diminish policies and practices that were discriminatory, but not to pursue ones that were sort of actively countering those systems and structures. So this is our new framework. We call it the inclusion, diversity, anti-racism, and equity in neurology program, or eye-dare neurology. And it focuses on some of the same themes, equity education, recruitment, and retention. But now we've shifted to a broader mission of community and social action, which is really engaging in some of the broader social issues around anti-racism. And then intradepartmental equity, including our staff. How can we make it the case that everyone at every level in our department feels like they belong, but also that there's equity between them so that they can achieve what they need to achieve? And importantly, well, our new mission is to create and sustain a diverse, inclusive and anti-racist culture that ensures equitable treatment of patients and all members of the Department of Neurology. A touch point last year, sort of a critical moment, was the initial publication and then retraction of an article in the Humanities section that had a lot of racist stereotypes about African-Americans and the sort of formal response that we generated to that. This led to the idea of there being associate editors for equity, diversity, inclusion for neurology and the neurology family of journals, which I'm excited to be one of the inaugural associate editors for. And then growing recognition recently that racism itself has neurotoxic effects, that it is itself something that has deleterious effects in neurologic health and the AEN taking a much broader position, a sort of more broad formal position, taking a stand against systemic racism. So there's a lot happening at organizational levels, too. So just to conclude, diversity and neurology. I think we've come a long way, certainly a long way in how we talk about and think about this issue, but obviously we could do a lot better. There's room for continued growth. Diversity is essential for excellence. It enhances everyone's intellectual performance. It improves the delivery of care. It raises everyone's awareness of biases in care delivery. So diversity isn't just there for the individuals who come from underrepresented or underserved backgrounds. Diversity serves everyone. Unconscious biases threaten advancement of diversity in the physician and neurologist workforce. So we have to do our best to unearth those biases, to counter them with conscious awareness. And positive action to promote diversity in neurology requires focused, strategic action and is underway in many places in this country, including your department at the departmental level and at the national level.