 HPC judges welcome back. This is part of our HPC voices of STEM excellent series where we invite conversation with the best and brightest from historically black colleges and universities in terms of baccalaureate or graduate training who are making acceptable moves in the science technology engineering and mathematics field. Today our special guest is Dr. Ebony Madden. She is a program director in the NIH Division of Genomic Medicine in the National Human Genome Research Institute and a proud graduate of Howard University. So Dr. Madden it is a pleasure to have you on today. Thank you very much Sarah. So your work in genomics it is something that is widely known in the scientific field but to the lay person who hears a lot about public health these days may not be intimately familiar with the importance of genomics or what that field of study does. Can you kind of explain to our listeners and particularly young people who are at HPC now and considering fields that they may want to enter as careers why genomics is so important and particularly to minority communities? So first genomics is important to everyone because it's pretty much the map of how your body will respond to everything. How your body will respond to the environment is the map of how your body functions and so genomics is the base of everything the coding that you have as you know we share our coding as humans there is almost exactly the same we just have a small amount of variants that may change how we respond and how our body reacts so it's very important. It matters to diverse communities especially communities that are affected by well communities that have had health disparities such as the community black communities communities and lower lower socioeconomic levels is that if you have certain environments your variants and you have a variant that gives you susceptibility to certain diseases and you then happen to be in an environment that is then gives you more risk for that disease then you're at a higher risk than the normal population with that variant because of one being a black person and or one being a socioeconomic level and a black person under the stresses as you know that we go through in life for just being black puts us at then even a higher risk than the normal population so it matters a lot to understand your coding and understanding your genetics and how your body will react. How did you get or become interested in this field? Tell us a little bit about your upbringing your earliest exposure to science and where did he get steered towards genomics as a as a specialty and then your journey to Howard University for both your your master's and your doctorate and how that really shaped your career and and leadership at NIH. That's a great question so growing up my mother is a teacher and she felt strongly about getting us involved in different things especially in the summer and so I have a twin brother my twin brother and I were in this program called ACE starting from middle school and it actually involved you and it exposed you to the sciences and you would go to different summer camps and be able to work with investigators to run different studies and I love that I love just learning about how things work in your body and actually you know seeing how the experiment ends seeing how medicine works and that just excited me at that point I thought I wanted to be a physician I went to UNC Chapel Hill as undergrad I in all my education genetics was my favorite course but I still thought I wanted to be a physician until I did an internship and I actually worked in the cancer institute and Dr. Golly is the person that asked me about genetic counseling and I had never heard about genetic counseling and I looked into it and it seemed just such a great field where it brought into science but then you actually work with patients and going to a predominantly white university I my brother went to predominantly black he went to HBCU North Carolina Central University and he always would talk about how wonderful it was going to HBCU so I wanted I really really wanted to go to HBCU for graduate school and that's what led me to Howard University in the masters of genetic counseling program and what I learned when I was doing my masters is I love the science the counseling was not exactly what I thought it would be you did not spend the time with patients that I thought you should spend it was all about billing and not the pediatric counseling but the prenatal counseling and a lot of that it was it was very it was structured very different than what I had envisioned and my love for science brought me to just go on and get my PhD in genetics and human genetics and just go the science route wet lab route those of us who are parents who've had babies we some of us are familiar with that term genetic counseling so that's that's so encouraging to see that you know their sister would even consider getting involved in that because that's something that's that's very important particularly for black families um talk about some of the the differences not necessarily better good but what was different about your experience at Chapel Hill from Howard and I know it's two different programs and it's two different cultures from an undergraduate to a graduate student but what are some of the things that you would say that affirmed Howard as a good choice for you and and also you kind of took an opposite route a lot of our best stem talent they started hbc using their kind of guided to predominantly white institutions you kind of flipped it around was that was that part of the mentoring at Chapel Hill that said hey consider Howard or was that something you discovered on your own with you know obviously with your brother's influence um well that's the difference in going to a predominantly white university especially majoring in the sciences our classes were 300 plus um even your very advanced classes were that large and so you really did not have a mentor to guide you like hbc use do have a professor really has interest and make sure you're doing well and that's something that i constantly heard from my friends and my family in hbc use that their professors always looked out for them they knew when they weren't in the classroom we had a joke in among my friends that they knew we weren't in the classroom because the couple of dots in the group of 300 were gone you know so it was a difference of your professors knowing your name compared to okay i don't see the color you know the couple of these black yeah and so i think that's what really led me and even though i know graduate school the classes are so much smaller i had a group of five in my class the professors really wanted to see you um have success and they were invested in guiding you and giving you that success and i don't think it was just because you were on the graduate level i think those professors just really cared and they wanted to see where you go even um unfortunately the director of my program he has passed but i kept in touch with him all the way till he passed he wanted to know where what i was doing how i was doing we all he always reached out and we all we had the students even he connected me to people who had finished the program who were doing similar things and had a similar drive to me and just the passion i think hbcu professors have for their students in that drive they're not their most large predominantly white university especially research intensive universities they're there to do research and then teaching is what they're required to do hbcu's even though you may have some very um advanced researchers and they're getting a lot of grant funding they're still very invested in their students in the teaching of those students and guiding the next group of diverse researchers to come under them so i think that was the difference so you would say that the the teaching element is what makes hbcu stand out a little bit because you have world-renowned researchers and practitioners that are one-on-one with students because that's not you know i think people always wonder why is it you know hbcu's produce all these stem professionals why are they so good at you know you know this particular kind of profession and black students can go anywhere but yet you see this tagline that runs from hbcu's all over the plate all over industries and you would say that that's the actual one-on-one teaching element i would say that and also the mentoring element not only the teaching the mentoring element where professors they knew you enough to say okay this is your drive i know about this have you thought about this um i graduate schools and i have friends that went to graduate schools they cared about the research and how well you did in your lab but i don't know if they were really invested in you per se is and and my professors i had um professors that were not black i mean but still they worked at hbcu hbcu for a reason they really wanted to develop and feed in diverse people into what they were doing and they cared and i i think and i i work with investigators all the time at NIH and i work mostly with um these very research-intensive institutions and it's the research that drives them not that they're not caring people but it's the research that drives them rather than the actual people that sit there friends what would you say it's so we obviously know that every industry is better suited when we have more diverse representation more women uh more people of color obviously but for the the field of genomics specifically why is it better suited when more sisters like you are involved and and offering research offering practice offering management and guidance why is that so essential for america at large in the world at large to have a broader spectrum of expertise involved um one is the point of view um i have sat in on meetings and the diverse point of view um and thinking about underserved populations it's just not there because they're not living in that world um and so they forget to think about okay what does that mean for communities that don't have the access to this technology they're just trying to build the technology rather than thinking of disseminating it making sure everyone um can actually benefit from the um technology and i think when you have diverse people in the room that voice is then heard another is just research participation and not just genomics across the board if you want diverse people to participate in the research you need leaders heading up that research that look like them because there it's the trust level and we've heard that feedback so much whenever we're doing surveys to try to understand you know why or why are you not participating what will help you to participate and get involved we hear this message so much is there's nobody that looks like me you know i i don't think you understand where i'm coming from but unfortunately um there i think they blame it on the pipeline but i think the pipeline is there it's just giving people um the chance i think um i'm not saying that we have a lot of um people of diverse ancestry or um a lot of people in color but we do have some and actually if we put those people of color in these leadership positions more people will see themselves in those positions and want to um actually um go there as well and then the final thing what what advice would you give as i mentioned before to an undergraduate or even a graduate student um who is considering an hbcu for their career what what what advice would you give them about how to maximize that opportunity and why an hbcu could be depending on the program in their area of interest could be um the ideal place for them to jump start you know their professional life um i would my first advice is actually make sure you're talking to the directors of the program and the professors and letting them know your interests and where where you want fill them out that's the first thing i did and i think once you have a relationship and they know your needs and wants they will look out for that as far as um hbcu make sure of the program that you are doing look at um the access for the research experiences and all of that make sure that you are your own advocate and making sure your research experiences guide you to where you want to be in your career but i i would do it all over again i think it's funny when i came out of Howard University my um i was a program director at a research lab and then i came in the NIH and the director of my program came to me and she was like i have never known anyone with the education that you all have had at Howard she said everyone i have met because um and i don't know if it's just Howard because hbcu's are so invested in they know the people that are training it's their reputation the people that come out you know they're representing them they're going to make sure you are equipped and i think that's one of the benefit of hbcu's is you represent them you don't just represent yourself and they're going to make sure you represent them well dr me man uh NIH program director of genomic medicine we appreciate your time sister thank you so much for your hard work and for your example thank you so much have a great day