 So, again, my name is Vince Bonham. I'm the Acting Deputy Director at the National Human Genome Research Institute. Good afternoon, and I am pleased for the individuals who are joining us today for the Genomics and Health Disparity Special Interest Group. The Genomics and Health Disparity Special Interest Group provides a forum to connect individuals from different scientific disciplines across the National Institutes of Health and researchers in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Before the pandemic, we would meet on a monthly basis in person, but within the pandemic, we are bringing together individuals within this virtual world to engage in conversations around issues of importance with regards to the fields of genetics and genomics and issues of health equity and health disparities. We are pleased to have Dr. Marie Bernard, the Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity at the Massachusetts Health, to join us today. And introducing Dr. Bernard is Ms. Leanne Toe, a Postbaccalaureate Fellow at NIAAA. So, Leanne. Hi, everybody. Thank you, Dr. Bonham, for the introduction. It is with my great pleasure to announce our next speaker. Marie A. Bernard, MD, is the National Institutes of Health's NIH Chief Officer for the Scientific Workforce Diversity, Coswood. As Coswood, she leads the NIH Science of Scientific Workforce Diversity, assuring that the full range of talent is success to promote scientific creativity and innovation, both intramurally and extramurally. Dr. Bernard also co-leads NIH's UNITE Initiative to address structural racism within the NIH-supported and greater scientific community. Prior to being selected as the Coswood in May 2021, she was the Deputy Director of the National Institute on Aging, NIA. As NIA's senior geriatrician, she served as the Principal Advisor to the NIA Director. She also led a broad range of activities, including co-chairing two Department of Health and Human Services Healthy People 2020 and 2030 objectives. One, older adults, and two, dementias, including Alzheimer's disease. She co-led the NIH-wide Inclusion Governance Committee that ensures appropriate inclusion of individuals in clinical studies, including by sex and gender, race and ethnicity, and inclusion of children and older adults. She also co-chaired the Women of Color Committee of the NIH-wide Working Group on Women and Biomedical Careers. Until October, 2008, she was the Endowed Professor and Founding Chairman of the Donald W. Reynolds Department of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine and Associate Chief of Staff for Geriatrics and Extended Care at the Oklahoma City Veterans Affairs Medical Center. She has held numerous national leadership roles, including the Chair of the Department of Veterans Affairs and National Research Advisory Committee, Chair of the Clinical Medicine Now Health Sciences Section of the Gerontological Society of America, Board Member of the American Geriatric Society, President for the Association for Gerontology and Higher Education, and President of the Association of Directors of Geriatric Academic Programs. She has lectured and published widely in her area of research, nutrition and function in older adults with particular focus on underrepresented minority population. Her national leadership in geriatrics research, training and clinical practice has been recognized by the Clark Tibbets Award from the Academy of Gerontology in Higher Education in 2013 and the Donald P. Kant Award from the Gerontological Society of America in 2014. Her work within NIH has been recognized with NIH Director's Awards in 2018 and 2019, including the NIH Director's Award for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in 2020. So I'm gonna pass the ball to Dr. Bernard. Thank you. Thank you very much. As you were reading through that bio, I was thinking, no wonder I have all this great here. I've been at this for a while, but I'm happy to have the opportunity to talk with you today in my role as the NIH Chief Officer of Scientific Workforce Diversity. And my goal is over the course of the next 20 minutes, just so to share with you a viewpoint on scientific inclusive excellence, at least from the perch of the Coswood Office. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about why diversity matters. I know I'm preaching to the choir here a little bit about what the Coswood Office does and then a little bit about the NIH-wide Unite Initiative. So why does this matter? Because the sorts of problems that we need to solve in biomedicine are huge. This elephant should probably be 50 times larger and we as scientists are like people without sight who are trying to describe the elephant. So you need to approach it from a lot of different perspectives and viewpoints and that's what we're all about. We also have data that demonstrates that this makes a big difference. For instance, this wonderful study by Freeman and Long when they looked at some 2.5 million journals and they looked at the homogeneity of the authors based upon last names. They determined that they were of similar ethnicity or not a perfect tool but consistently applied and found that the greater the homophily index through the greater the homogeneity the lower the impact factor all the way through to a 10 author study that had much less than the way homogeneity and much higher impact factor. Now of course you'll look at that and say a 10 author paper probably is looking at different science than a two author paper but no matter how they looked at it whether it was ethnic homogeneity, geographic homogeneity, information homogeneity the more homogene is the lower the impact factor and the less frequently the article was cited. Another example is the report by Haynes and colleagues from last year where they looked at a component of a bird song, the study of bird song and they found that initially there was a dominant paradigm and the field was dominated by male scientists and it was found that as female scientists began to become involved with the field that they were finding differences in the bird song patterns because the female scientists were actually looking at female birds as well as male birds. Just another example and there are lots of other examples in terms of numbers of patents and innovation of research. And yet we know that we are not taking advantage of the full range of talent. What is shown here are people who've gotten our one equivalent awards from NIH versus their representation in the science, technology, engineering and math or the biomedicine field versus their representation in the general population. And what you see here is that looking at race ethnicity, white scientists are well represented, Asian scientists are well represented but Hispanic or Latino scientists and Black or African American scientists are not nearly represented in R01 grantee pool or even the biomedical field as you would expect given their representation in the general population. Another way of looking at this is the Association of American Medical Colleges data that shows that when you're looking at people at the instructor level, whether you're looking at underrepresented women or well represented women, underrepresented men, well represented men, there's a fair amount of diversity at the instructor level but the further you go along in academic rank, the less in the way of diversity there is so that when you get to the level of a professor or department chair, there's much less diversity than you would have otherwise expected. So this talent that we're not taking full advantage of and we have data to show that having those diverse people at the table can make a difference. So what are we doing about this in my role as the Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity? Well, this is a position that was established in 2014 by Dr. Francis Collins, NIH Director. And the vision is, and Dr. Hannah Ballantime is the first Coswood I'm very honored to have stepped in as acting Coswood in October of 2020 and then be made the permanent Coswood this past May. The vision for the office, as I see it for us going forward is to enable NIH funded institutions to benefit from that full range of talent that I mentioned to foster creativity and innovation. We are the thought leader in the science of scientific workforce diversity using evidence-based approaches to catalyze cultures of inclusive excellence. How do we do that? We build the evidence using NIH as a test bed. We disseminate the evidence to working with the full scientific community from trainees to established tenured scientists and we act on the evidence piloting integrated institution-wide systems to address bias, faculty equity, mentoring, and work-life issues. Some examples, but let me first be clear that when we talk about diversity we're talking in terms of the definition that's in the NIH guide in 2019 that we're looking at individuals from racial and ethnic groups that have been shown by the National Science Foundation to be underrepresented in health-related sciences on a national basis. We're looking at individuals with disabilities, individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds with a number of factors like being rural and origin, et cetera. Section gender minorities, women at the graduate level and beyond, we're thinking broadly when we talk in terms of diversity. And we think that there are things that need to be done. There are things that need to be done at an individual level, such as training people about implicit bias that may impact their decision-making, about stereotype threat if one is from an underrepresented group that may impact that person's performance, making sure people are adequately trained. That's absolutely necessary, but it's not sufficient. There are also interventions that are needed at an institutional level, and we've been paying a lot of attention to institutional level interventions lately. Examples of things that have been done have been things like the workplace time at survey done in 2018 at NIH to get a sense of the frequency with which people were experiencing sexual harassment and other forms of harassment and instability. It's led to changes in policies here at NIH. The three COVID-19 surveys that were conducted in 2020, as I came on board, the external surveys were being sent out to individual survey, individual researchers and leaders of academic institutions. I had a chance to get my hands dirty and make sure that we had an adequate response rate and representative response rate. And we found some very interesting things from the data that have informed NIH policy. We have a program called the Future Research Leaders Conference that helps to get people ready to think about working within the NIH Memorial Program. The Distinguished Scholars Program that has been put in place has markedly increased the diversity of our tenure track investigators. The diversity program consortium that was established at the same time in the Cosworth position was established and has run out of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, but our office supports it in terms of advice and consultation with advisory committee to the director and an initiative called Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation, a mouthful, so we call it FIRST, that is designed to build cultures of inclusive excellence at academic and research institutions across the country. And I've had a chance to be very immersed in the FIRST solicitation for FIRST and funding for the FIRST set of cohorts. And there'll be a couple of additional cohorts that will be funded in this year, 22 and 23. We have a recruitment tool that we are now getting the institutes and centers across NIH to use to help develop unbiased searches for people, potentially underrepresented groups who might be good candidates for various positions, not relying on one's mental role of ex who's the best person for a position. And we are working hard in making sure to get our information out through our blog. We also have something that we've recently started that we're calling the Scientific Workforce Diversity Seminar Series and I really encourage you if you have the time to join us December 8th from one to two o'clock where we will be talking about achieving equity in faculty hiring, the pros and cons of cohort recruitment. The FIRST initiative is a cohort recruitment. The Distinguished Scholars Program is a cohort recruitment. The National Science Foundation has advanced the initiative. So what are the things that are good about that? And what are the things that are bad about that? What can institutions potentially do going forward if they applied for FIRST for instance and didn't get it? And we will have a deeper discussion of this sort of thing two half days in mid-February to talk about FIRST, the Distinguished Scholars, the FIRST program consortium and multiple other programs. We anticipate by late April or early May also having a workshop on the impact of Scientific Workforce Diversity. I presented some of the data there to talk about the strengths and the weaknesses in the data and opportunities to further enhance it. And then transitioning to the NIH Unite initiative, one of the really neat things about being the new consulate is that I not only run the consulate office but I also co-lead the NIH Unite initiative. This is something that got started in 2020 driven by the events of the spring of 2020 with disproportionate morbidity and mortality for racial and ethnic minorities in the United States and the videotape murder of George Floyd. And then although we officially unveiled this in February of 2021, just the following month, the killings of six Asian women in Atlanta that really demonstrated that we have issues here in this country that need to be addressed and there's a real commitment within NIH among everyone in leadership that we need to take responsibility. We're at a tipping point, we can't be silent, we need to act. So we developed a shared commitment to address structural racism in the biomedical research enterprise. What does this mean? Well, we have five working groups that are interacting that are helping us to understand stakeholder experiences through listening and learning. In fact, we have a set of listening sessions that are coming up in December and January that we'd love for you to participate in if you haven't had an opportunity to interact with us year before. If you go to this URL, you should find information about it or you can simply Google NIH Unite and it will take you to on the calendar page and events page information of the listening sessions. We're doing new research on health disparities, minority health and health equity. We're looking at improving the internal NIH culture and structure for equity, inclusion and excellence. We have to get our own house in order. We're going to expect outside academic and research institutions to do the right things you might say. We're looking to be transparent, communicate and to be accountable for our activities. And that we are absolutely looking at the extramural research ecosystem. What sorts of policies, culture and structure needs to be done to promote diversity? What are some of the outcomes from this? We're really excited. This was officially unveiled to the public February 26th. As I said, we just had a town hall yesterday to talk to our own family about what we've accomplished. And here are some of the things. February 26th, this is a statement made by Francis Collins, NIH Director. It got published on the NIH Unite website the following Monday, March 1st. Dr. Collins stated, to those individuals in the biomedical research enterprise who've endured disadvantages due to structural racism, I am truly sorry. And I just committed to instituting new ways to support diversity, equity and inclusion and identifying and dismantling any policies and practices at our own agency that may harm our workforce and our science. And I will say there's some real senior leaders in the scientific world at historically, medically, minority serving institutions who've been very grateful for that statement. To the end of increasing health disparities research within a month of unveiling this initiative, we announced the Transformative Health Research Initiatives through the Common Fund. We released as of the middle of last month, 11 awards, five of which have gone to minority serving institutions and the opportunity to compete for funds focusing at a minority serving institution will be offered again for this fiscal year. We have the first initiative that I had mentioned. The whole intent of this is to create cultures of inclusive excellence by hiring faculty cohorts just as our SWDSS will be discussing, making sure that this integrated institution-wide systems to address bias, faculty, equity, mentoring, and work-life issues with a coordinating and evaluating center to make sure that we learn what really works and what doesn't work and what are generalizable principles that can be shared with approaching $250 million targeted for this over the next nine years. This is the first group of awardees. As you can see, it's a mixture of high resource institutions, low resource institutions, is a partnership between Tuskegee and UAB. We're very excited about that. And Morehouse School of Medicine is the coordinating center. So we have those seven in the first cohort. There'll be at least another four from fiscal year 22, at least another four for fiscal year 23. We also have something called, for the first time, planned to enhance diverse perspectives. It's part of the scoring criteria for a funding opportunity announcement issued by the NIH Wide Brain Initiative. It's the first time that we have initiatives that take into consideration the diversity of the scientific team or what you're doing to enhance diversity of the scientific team. It's diversity writ large. It's not only that notice of diversity from NIH, but diversity of discipline, diversity of geography. But we think that this is gonna be impactful in making sure that there are more viewpoints brought to the table so that the science can be better and we will be evaluating the impact of this. And there's a recent publication of Neuron that goes into detail about this. We also are, for the first time, reporting data about our funded researchers by race, ethnicity and diversity. There's this saying from, I think, Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court Justice at the beginning of the 20th century that sunshine is the greatest disinfectant. And to that end, these data are now there. They are added to the data that were already there based upon gender and career stage. And being fully transparent, we also have posted our own data by race, ethnicity and job categorization here at NIH. Very recently, the Office of Veterinary Research has also made it clear that scientists outside of NIH who are experiencing issues with regards to harassment and discrimination can report that to the NIH Commons website. I can tell you that this is something that has been in place for a while with regards to harassment, but it's been expanded, as you can see, to make sure that multiple all-protective classes are included there. And I saw in my life as deputy at NIA, some pretty prominent scientists losing their NIH funding after their institution had conducted the necessary investigation and determined that there was wrongdoing on their side. So this is something that has teeth to it. Takes a little bit of time that has teeth to it. So I'm gonna end with this graphic that shows the 80-plus volunteers who work on the NIH Unite Initiative. And Dr. Bonham, I know your name is here. There you are on the end committee. So Dr. Bonham can elaborate even further on what's happening with regards to the health disparities research. And Dr. Betty Brayham, I know is someplace here as well. I think she's on the E-committee. Yeah. There she is. So great representation from NHRI here. I'm really honored to co-lead this with Dr. Larry Tabak, the principal deputy director. Dr. Larry from Dr. Alfred Johnson, the deputy director for management. It's been just wonderful to see the things that have come from this group. And I'll close with our favorite adage from the Coswood office. Great minds think differently. I'd be happy to have a conversation at this point. Thank you, Dr. Bernard, for those great comments and update. I'm gonna give it over to my colleague now, Dr. Jamil Scott. Dr. Scott, we'll enter into a conversation with you, Dr. Bernard. And then we'll take questions from the audience. So Dr. Scott. Thank you, Mr. Bonham. And thank you again, Dr. Bernard. I'm very pleased and excited to facilitate this conversation. I also wanna point out that across different means of joining in this conversation, we have over 200 participants. So that's including social media and those who are on the webinar directly. So I'll remind everyone that as we go through our questions, please do feel free to add your questions to the Q&A box and we'll get to those as well. But again, thank you and for sharing your wealth of information. I'll start with this question you recently published and you mentioned in that publication that increased participation of the institutes in the NIH Science Education Partnership Award. So I wanted you to say more about that, but can you explain the significance of this expansion and the importance of early education and exposure? Thank you very much for the question. And yes, I didn't cover that in my slides, but yes, that is a recommendation that's come from the NIH Unite Initiative that the Science Education Partnership Award, which is led by the National Student General Medical Sciences be expanded so that all of the institutes and centers can participate. Why? Because we know that science identity gets established really early, really as early as middle school, young people kind of know what it is that they wanna do. And so if we're going to make sure that the numbers of future scientists who come from potentially underrepresented backgrounds is as robust as it could be, we need to start early before that science identity is identified or is solidified and work with them and let them see all of the really neat things that come with STEM. So it's where hopeful that we'll have many of the institutes and centers to sign on and that will allow us to make that outreach. We won't see the outcome for years. We were starting with kids elementary, middle school, but it's well worth the investment. Yeah, yeah, make planning the seed early and ensuring that the opportunities are available. A lot of this work speaks to inclusion, but that often requires that institutions be committed to change and open to change. What are some of the best examples of institutions embracing change and what actions signify a commitment to change on an institutional level? So could you discuss some examples in that space with us? Yes, I think that it's an exciting time because you're seeing lots of places making commitments to change and following through on their words in terms of top leadership saying this is a value, top leadership investing in terms of bringing on staff to facilitate moving the needle and movement in that direction. I think University of Michigan for a long period of time has done great work in this area. University of Wisconsin has done great work in this area. I can say our own NIH has done some really nice work along those lines, again, in the inch moral space. There's been a commitment made that we need to increase the diversity of the scientists in the tenure track program. There has been cohort hiring of individuals. There's been focus on what the environment is like for those individuals. And there's been a commitment at top level leadership that these two directors, the scientific directors, the lab chiefs. And we have seen the curve really bending in terms of that diversity. Thank you for that response. And certainly aspects of your presentation and the work of the UNITE initiative speak to the change and the actions associated with those changes. In your introduction and also during your talk, you spoke about how you're new in your role as the NIH chief officer for scientific workforce diversity. I know it's been just over six months. What has been the most rewarding aspects of your time in this role? And how can these insights be adapted by others who seek to enhance scientific workforce diversity? Again, thank you for the question. I've actually been doing this for a little more than a year now because I was asked to be the acting Coswood on October 1. So from October 1 through the end of May, I was the acting Coswood and deputy director of the National Institute on Aging. So after Dr. Collins asked me to be the permanent Coswood, the change was that I felt empowered to start making some alterations in our pathway. I'd had a chance to see how things really work in this office. There's a wonderful foundation of activities that was laid by Dr. Hannah Valentine, the first Coswood. And it's given the opportunity to build on that foundation. I kind of feel like it's a building. The foundation is there. And so now we can build the buildings or build the rooms. And there's a room that's focusing on our intramural program. There's some furniture in there, we had to elaborate on that. There's a room where we can focus on our extramural scientific staff. And that's kind of an empty room right now. So we have to do some work there. And then there's the room of working on the external scientific workforce. And there are lots of allies there, things that were already ongoing in institutes and centers, things that are going on with the Unite initiative, particularly the Unite committee that looks at extramural things. And just a real willingness to move the needle forward. So it's an exciting time. Is there any one thing that I've learned? That what I have learned is that we're all headed in the same direction, the way that we want to get there maybe a little different. And so we have to do a lot of talking and translating among ourselves so that we are truly fully aligned. And that's an interesting process. It's a fun process, learning from others. Thank you. Okay, thank you. So you painted a beautiful picture by talking about the foundation that was in place when you took on this role in the rooms that you're building and what you wanna place in those rooms. Speaking about the extramural research community though, we know that there's a lot of work still to be done. So one of the questions I have is what do you understand as some of the most persistent reasons for the need to continually evolve in that space? Perhaps the change hasn't been as quick as we would like, but what are some of the persistent reasons why change has been slow in that regard? So particularly with regards to the NIH Unite Initiative that has this very ambitious goal of ending structural racism, the goal there is huge. And it's looking at making change to systems that have been in place for decades. So it's not the sort of thing that can get done quickly. It requires that you step back, you look at things objectively, you question everything in terms of systems, and that can be hard for people. People tend to enjoy the status quo and disrupting the status quo can be really, really challenging to lots of people. There's some people who are just inveterate creators and like to make change on a regular basis, but most people don't. So I think that that's one of the big challenges and keeping an eye on the ultimate goal and recognizing that institutional culture change requires interventions at multiple levels. It has to be top level commitment. It needs to be clear goals and objectives. It needs to be with incentives appropriately aligned with resources provided to allow people to step back and make that analysis. Make your hypotheses about what needs to be changed, make the change, evaluate whether it's accomplished what you hoped and then revise and move forward. It's very complicated. It's not something that gets done easily and sometimes people get frustrated by that. Yeah, yeah. I like that you point out the need to evaluate and the need to work on multiple levels. I'm gonna take a moment to look over at our Q&A box because we do have some questions coming in and I wanna take one that speaks to something you mentioned in your presentation. And the question is, can you elaborate on the initiative or partnership you mentioned with Morehouse School of Medicine? So what I was referencing with regards to Morehouse School of Medicine is that Morehouse School of Medicine competed for funding through the Common Fund to be the coordinating center for the first initiative. And there were multiple applications. They had the best application, they got funded. So they are going to be leading, evaluating these first seven institutions that have received grants and additional, at least eight that will be receiving grants this fiscal year 22 and fiscal year 23. There is a process here at NIH that's called TINCUPING where you go and you kind of say, can you give us more money? And we did that for this first set of grants. We'll see whether that's gonna be something that's needed for the next couple of years. So at least another eight, maybe more, we'll see. Okay, I see. I think I'm gonna try to tie your response to that first question, to this next question. And you mentioned this, I hadn't heard it but I know exactly what you meant when you say TINCUPING. So, so much great work is done. What barriers do you see to continue progress and promoting equity at NIH? Now some of it might be related to TINCUPING, but I'm opening the question to other perspectives you may have on barriers to equity here within our beloved National Institutes of Health. So, as I watched what happened in the spring of 2020, the disproportionate morbidity and mortality for racial and ethnic minority groups, the videotape murder of George Floyd, particularly the videotape murder of George Floyd, it brought to mind the reports that you have of the televised turning opposes on peaceful protesters and dogs and peaceful protesters back in the 60s. That was a time that was a turning point for the country and I think we're in a turning point for our country now but things lose momentum over the course of time and there are potentially people who are resistant. I know there are people who just don't see a need for change and kind of wait it out or maybe even actively resist. So I think that's the biggest challenge, losing the current momentum. We have a lot, not only those events but we as MIH are part of the executive branch and we currently have an executive branch that has, it's hard to count how many executive orders there have been that are focused on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility. So right now there's momentum. Right now there's focus and I think that the greatest risk is losing that momentum and then if you lose the momentum losing your motivation. From my viewpoint, again, I'm at all these gray hairs. You see things going, it's a pendulum but I think the pendulum is on really well and even if it goes back a little bit it will continue with good work to move forward. Given where we are in this swing, what have you seen in terms of the relationships and you mentioned earlier the conversations? How has that dynamic as you kind of reflect back on the back and forth and where you've been over time? Yeah. And I won't mention your gray hairs, I'll let you do that. But what have you seen in terms of the relationships and working together on these issues? So I can't really speak to what has happened here at NIH because I've not been at NIH all of my career. What I can speak to is my colleagues who've been here 20, 34 years who say that they've never seen anything like this, that people are having conversations that they never thought would be had and that things are being advanced in a good way that they never thought would happen. I've talked to some senior scientists outside of the NIH who said, I'm amazed. When I was early in my career and I wanted to submit an application that focused on racism, I was told not to include that word because I would not get funded. So the fact that these conversations are taking place in and of themselves is serious. It's important. But the fact that we're also acting on it, for instance, for this fiscal year, every Institute and Center Director is gonna have a diversity equity inclusion and accessibility element in their performance plan. That's how they get measured in terms of how well they did their job and they're all overachievers. They all wanna get A pluses. A component of that is gonna be the requirement of developing a racial and ethnic equity plan for every Institute and Center. And that expectation for the Institute and Center Director does what we call cascades down. It applies to every leader in the institution. So ultimately, it's translated down to the individual employees. So it's a different volume and quality of conversation than has ever taken place previously, what I understand. And I think it's a good thing. Thank you for that. We have two questions. I'm gonna kind of tie them together with this perspective that there are resources and activities. Perhaps people don't know all that's going on at the NIH to help improve the workforce diversity. So this first question says, what are some of the initiatives being implemented to diversify the leadership of the groups who want to recruit more diverse professionals to work at the NIH? I know that you mentioned your website, your office's website. I know that one activity that you've rolled out throughout the Institute is the use of recruitment strategies. So maybe you wanna share a little bit about that and also talk about what resources are there to help people ensure that they're hosting more diverse searches and diversifying the leadership in our scientific workforce here. Yeah, I really appreciate that question because I probably should have emphasized it more. We have a tool that has been tested since 2016 that's called a recruitment search tool. The way it was used here to for has been for helping to identify candidates for tenure track positions, scientific directors, institute directors, deputy directors, and it's been done by the Coswood staff. It's not rocket science. You look at what the requirements are for the position. You do a literature search to see who's published in it. You look at an NIH reporter to see who's gotten funded in it. Then you do some detective work to see whether those top people that you've identified are potentially from the underrepresented group, whether it's by gender, race, ethnicity, whatever. And you come up with a list. And what we have done since I've taken on this role is to try to disseminate the use of that tool much more widely because when it was just done by the staff in my office, we could on average do about 40 searches per year. There are a lot more searches than that that are conducted at NIH and across the nation. There are a lot of searches of that sort. And it gets you away from having to use your mental Rolodex to think about who would be good for a position because the mental Rolodex is each of us bring is based upon what our experiences are and may not be as broad as if you did this objective process. For example, as was noted, I was the deputy director of the National Institute on Aging 13 years before I got selected for this position in the field of aging research for my career. I know a lot of folks, but when the team came up with a list of candidates to replace, you know, for my replacement at the National Institute on Aging, I looked at the list and I said, I know half of these people and half these people, I don't, they did not come to mind. And yet when you look at their credentials, they are excellent candidates for the position. So I would really encourage you go to diversity.nih.gov, improvement tool, take a look at it. Again, it's not rocket science and we have trained one or more people at each of the institutes and centers at NIH to use the tool. And if you're not at NIH, there's no reason why you can't use it as well. And there's a video that tells you about it as well. Yeah, thank you, excellent. So another opportunity here to perhaps highlight other resources within your office and anything else you want to share relates to this question I'm going to ask next. How are we planning to address implicit bias among review of NIHR1s being conducted at CSR, Center for Scientific Review, for those who are not, you know, speaking the alphabet soup that we speak here. NIH study section, are we taking on redacted applications for review of grants? So what are your thoughts and comments for that one? So great question. I've been really impressed with Dr. Nani Burns, the director of the Center for Scientific Review and the work that she and her team are doing to address concerns about review. They have looked at the issue of redacting applications. In fact, they have a recent publication in E-Line that shows the results of that effort. What was found actually was not what one would have hoped or expected. It did not make a difference for underrepresented group scientists in their success rates. The scientists who did not necessarily come from underrepresented groups had a little bit less in the way of success rates when it was redacted than when it's the full application. Speaking to what's called the Matthew effect in review, you know, this person or you know where they come from and they get some extra consideration, but it didn't really increase success rates for underrepresented group scientists. And in about 20% of cases, the reviewers were able to guess who the applicants were anyhow. Now CSR or Center for Scientific Review is going forward with other sorts of experiments that at the finalization, one test is looking at what's called two-stage review where first the science is reviewed and then the information about the applicant and the environment is considered. And we'll see what the result of that experiment is. In addition, just as I said about sunshine being the greatest disinfectant, the Center for Scientific Review now posts the data about the demographics of their reviewers as well as their scientific review officers and Dr. Burns was noting that just in posting the information about the demographics of the reviewers they've seen a shift, they made no intervention whatsoever, but it's gotten to be more diverse groups of reviewers in many cases, more proportionately underrepresented group scientists as reviewers than would be the representation in the general biomedical workforce. And then finally starting this at the end of last fiscal year and into this fiscal year, CSR has initiated implicit bias training for all of their scientific review officers and their peer reviewers. We were privileged to help them in the development of that implicit bias training. And as always, everything gets evaluated. We'll see what the impact that is. I'm going to shift slightly. I have this question I wanna ask and give you a little bit of an opportunity to tell more of your story. So I'm gonna ask that question about also going to give my colleague, Mr. Bonham, a heads up that we're gonna shift to some of the genomics and genetics questions and draw you into that conversation as well. So that will be what's next. But in thinking about inclusion and diversity, where is it? How much of it is requires that we bring ourselves to the work. So is there anything you wanna share about your background, who you are as you think about what you're doing on a day-to-day basis, how your career has evolved and how it shapes the work that you're doing related to scientific workforce diversity? Great question. Obviously, I'm a woman of color, been around for a little bit. As I got started, I was always the only one as a woman, as a woman of color. And it ended up being beneficial because I got pulled into all sorts of things. I paid my minority task 10 times over but I had learned so many things as a result of it. And yes, as I got started, was I bringing my genuine self there? When you're early in your career, you just don't know. But over the course of time, it allowed me to become very comfortable. This is who I am. And I could see that I had a responsibility and obligation to make way for others like me to be there so that I wouldn't always be the only one. So throughout my career, that's been part of what I've been about. And the opportunity now to fully, full-time focus in this area is just a great gift. So I'll say thank you. Thank you for the efforts. Being someone who has come behind you, I'll say thank you. Okay, so I'm gonna ask that Mr. Bonham, he turns his camera on. And I know this is kind of a different conversation for the NIH Genomics and Health Disparities scientific interest group. But I do think it's important that sometimes we take a step back and host these conversations. But we do want to tie it back to some genetics and genomics questions. Genomic data science allows the extraction of practical insights from large-scale data. How might a diverse genomics workforce serve both the generation and interpretation of these large-scale data? And I've asked my colleague, Dr. Joseph, to join also in this conversation. So Paulie should be a part of this discussion also. So I think one of the issues that we always have to think about and whether it's genetics and analysis of genomic data or any other research question is the understanding of how questions are framed and the interpretation of data. And so the value of having diverse scientists involved in those issues is extremely important. And so data science and genomics and the questions are asked and how data is interpreted requires us to bring the experiences, the scientific experiences of individuals from different backgrounds. And only when we do that do we ask better questions from my perspective. So this issue of the importance of having diversity of the workforce does get to the scientific questions and the quality of the questions and then the interpretation of the data. I don't know, Paulie, you wanna add your thoughts on that? And I just wanted to add also like the idea of recruiting more diverse populations into genomics research and just like we will have diverse scientists, we also need diverse populations. So having programs like the all of us research just starting to tackle some of these issues and questions that we're interested in. And in terms of the workforce, Dr. Bernard, I think your office has been really tackling some of these questions and how do we recruit even more individuals into this branch of genomics as well. And if I might just add in my prior life and in the aging institute, we led the aging institute leads the federal efforts in Alzheimer's research. And we had a great example recently of the first drug in years approved for treatment of Alzheimer's at a can of mad and data based upon studies that really didn't have a diversity of population include that was 89% on Hispanic white, 9% Asian whereas the highest prevalence of Alzheimer's is in African-Americans and Hispanics Latinos. And I would certainly assert that have there been more diversity among the scientists involved in that? And I know that it's a field that doesn't have much diversity that questions about even the drug and how usable and accessible it would be for multiple populations and applicable multiple populations would have been raised and that they would have had a more diverse group of people who were involved in trials. Thank you. One more genomics question and then I'm gonna with the time we have left circle back to a few more questions that have been added to the Q&A box. But I also wanna ask this question increasingly access to genomics is seen as potentially very important element of optimized healthcare especially for precision medicine. How can the field anchor education and training and equity and access to genomic and precision care across the career path but also transform care delivery? So I'll start out and I wanna just acknowledge all our colleagues at the all of us program what they're doing on both with regards to making sure that their cohort is truly diverse socially geographic ancestral background and the importance of that. And then the work that they're doing to make sure that their data and who is conducting the studies represents that diversity also. And so when we think about precision medicine it's raw and clinical care going forward that we really do need to make sure we have clinicians that are from the diverse backgrounds. The field of genetics and genomics and as a field I think we recognize this has a long way to go with regards to the level of diversity of clinicians. We can look at genetic counseling programs and look at genetic counselors that we have currently it truly is not representative of our country. And if we think about medical geneticists we have the same situation the numbers of clinicians and clinical researchers in the field of genetics and genomics from diverse backgrounds is not there. So we have a lot of work to do and that's one of the reasons we're really excited that the NHGRI with our action agenda and the steps that we're taking to both with regards to new training programs research opportunities to expand the tent of who's doing this work in this really exciting field. So there's a lot of work to be done but I think the cost genomics and precision medicine is so important and so exciting and is all part of our lives today. A recognition that we need to make sure that those that are doing the research and those that are participating in the research really represent the diversity of our country and the world. Thank you. Dr. Joseph, do you have any no additional comment there? So let me take a go back to this previous concern around recruiting underrepresented individuals. So this question speaks to what can be done to proactively recruit underrepresented postdocs at NIH. When are we not permitted to do targeted advertising to specific questions? So how do you navigate some of these other rules and how do you optimize your recruitment? So my understanding is that when it comes to recruitment we at NIH need to have every position open widely but you can follow up in that wide recruitment solicitation with targeted recruitment as well. So that's what you see happening with many of the funding opportunity announcements that are out particularly led by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. I recognize as well that getting postdocs to NIH is kind of a haphazard process. It's not like our Statman recruitment or Alaska recruitment in many cases as a matter of who knows whom. So that's something that we can potentially as we are thinking about processes and systems stand back and be examined. It's an area that we can think about. So I'll tie that in with a question that I have here about minority serving institutions and I know you mentioned a few during your presentation but why is it important? Can you share some of the background of why it's important to kind of have these partnerships with minority serving institutions to increase the diversity of the scientific workforce? What history is there? What legacy is there that makes that a logical step? Well, there's no question that the minority serving institutions particularly your historically black colleges and universities, your Hispanic serving institutions are a great source of scientists from diverse backgrounds. I was recently acquainted with the fact that Spelman University for instance or Spelman College, I say not officially University but Spelman College graduates the largest number of black women and other women of color with PhDs so it's a natural thing to go back to those institutions and to think about them as sources for people from underrepresented backgrounds. There are also some data that suggests that scientists who've gotten their foundation in those areas are really well supported and confident in their scientific identity in a way that may not be the case for scientists from underrepresented backgrounds who have not had that same sort of support but that's the reason for our working on these issues of inclusive environments and support across the country. What do you think, what do we stand to learn? You mentioned having a level of confidence having gone to MSI, what do we stand? What do larger institutions stand to learn from MSI? Yeah, I think that there is the opportunity for larger institutions, particularly this collaboration in the first initiative between University of Alabama, Birmingham and Tuskegee. There can be a lot learned about what it is that's done to support the scientists there, just as there are things that potentially the Tuskegee folks can learn from University of Alabama in terms of the way that they're handling things. It'll be very interesting, particularly with the coordinating center to see what comes of all of that. I'm excited. Yeah, that sounds very exciting. We are down to, unfortunately, down to our last few minutes of the meeting. I'm going to again thank Dr. Bernard for joining us for your presentation, for sharing of yourself, for answering these questions. And I also wanna thank my colleagues, Drs. Bonham and Joseph for contributing to this discussion. And I'm gonna pass it over to Dr. Joseph to close out the meeting, but thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you again, Dr. Bernard, for such a wonderful presentation and engaging conversation as well. Thank you to everyone that was able to attend today's meeting. And we really invite you to our December 16 presentation for the Genomics and Lecture Series, who will happen at 3 p.m. on December 16 to continue some of this important conversation around genomics and health disparities. And with that, I invite all of the trainees that are present to stay on so we can continue these discussions with Dr. Bernard as we hear from your ideas, questions and concerns that you might have regarding diversity here at NIH. So thank you everyone again for being present and for this engaging conversation.