 So good afternoon everyone. I am so pleased to introduce Dr. Marie Bernard. Dr. Marie Bernard is the former deputy director of NIA where she was in that leadership role for a number of years and prior to that she was a physician and geriatrician at University of Oklahoma. We are so excited to have Dr. Bernard here today as the chief scientific workforce diversity officer for NIH and the head of the Office of Workforce Diversity. So Marie? Well, thank you very much. It's really a pleasure to have an opportunity to meet with you today. And I was asked to give an update on what was going on in my office and I can't avoid talking just in general about DEIA activities across NIH. So over the course of the next 20 to 25 minutes I'm gonna give you very high level view of what's going on with the DEIA strategic plan, what's happening very specifically in my office with our recently released strategic plan and a few highlights from the NIH Unite Initiative. So the DEIA strategic plan is something that is really being actively developed at this point. It was generated by report language for the fiscal year 21 NIH budget. So that came out in December, 2020 that directed us to develop a diversity equity and inclusion plan with short and long-term goals to address racial, ethnic and gender disparities at NIH and to identify and address barriers and access to NIH funding by investigators researching health disparities. We then had a change in administration and shortly after the Biden administration took over there was executive order 14.035 that called for all federal agencies to develop a diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility plan for the federal workforce. The government-wide strategic plan was released November 23rd that gave a roadmap for implementing this executive order. It charged all agencies to develop a DEIA plan by March 23rd. We here at NIH had a little bit of an anxiety attack when we first saw that but recognized that this was speaking to HHS, our overarching organization and as what's called an operating division or octave within HHS, we have the opportunity to take a little more time in developing our plan. I will also say that the mandate for a plan from Congress that was released December of 2020 called for that plan to be developed within 180 days of the legislation being passed. That was a little challenging for us as well but we were able to negotiate with Congress that we do quarterly updates with leadership in the House and Senate for allocations and appropriations and that has worked out well for us. So it's anticipated that late spring, early summer this plan will come forward. The overarching principles of our plan are to communicate a vision and aspirations for all of NIH to be broad in scope. This is the umbrella that brings together all of the things that are happening in the DEIA space. We've been working hard and articulating clear definitions of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility more easily said than done because there are a lot of definitions out there and some lack of clarity in some areas particularly if you want to do research where to report example accomplishments convey our priorities for the next five years have these priorities to be broad with sample activities be accountable measuring our progress and getting input from internal and external stakeholders. The scope of the plan is to articulate our vision for strengthening diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility I'll call it DEIA year forward to capture activities that the NIH workforce will undertake to meet the vision of this strategic plan and to harmonize it with the NIH wide strategic plan and thus it's organized around accomplishes, needs, opportunities and challenges in three key areas. One area is the DEIA workforce. This is organized a little differently than what you would see in a usual NIH plan where the research is first but since this is a workforce focused one we thought it appropriate that that be the first objective looking at the NIH workforce and looking at the workforce at institutions that are supported by NIH. Our second objective it's probably very familiar looking at stewardship partnerships and engagements, accountability and confidence, management and operations. And then our third objective is the research objective looking at a workforce research and health disparities research. The process is that we had an RFI that was out and I think close to the beginning of April we're carefully reviewing the results from that RFI. We will have a presentation of the June 10th advisory committee to the director meeting. And again, we're hoping by the end of June, early July to get that published. So from the Cosworth perspective we are a component of DEIA. We have been working really hard in developing our strategic plan. I was impressed by Dr. Zank's discussion of the NINR strategic plan. Iris covers the similar time period from fiscal year 22 to 26. Our vision is to enable NIH and NIH funded institutions to benefit from the nation's full range of talent and to foster creativity and innovation in science. It is our mission to be the NIH thought leader in the science of scientific workforce diversity using evidence-based approaches to catalyze cultures of innovative excellence. How do we do that? We do it by building the evidence using NIH oftentimes as a test bed, by disseminating the evidence across the biomedical research workforce ecosystem and by acting on the evidence, advancing integrated institution-wide systems as indicated. And when we talk about diversity, we're thinking very broadly in keeping with the notice of special interest in diversity that was published in 2019, which includes, it's not an exclusive listing but includes 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, individuals with disabilities, individuals from a disadvantaged background. And if you've looked at this, there are multiple criteria by which one could be considered from a disadvantaged background and you meet two or more of those factors or women at the graduate level and beyond in scientific fields. We are looking really throughout the organizational and talent scope, focusing within NIH and beyond, looking at recruitment, development and rewards and retaining. This is very much in keeping with the NHGRI, NHGRI diversity action agenda that looks at developing and supporting initiatives, providing early exposure, connecting undergraduate and graduate education to careers in genomics, developing and supporting training, career development and research transition programs and evaluating progress, a very important component of both plans. So examples, building the evidence. We have a program called the 21st Century Scholars Program that's looking to develop an inclusive culture around diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, DEIA. So we are looking to develop a cohort of extramural staff who are focused in this fashion. They're getting a lot of extra mentoring, they're building community, they're enhancing their work skills. It's modeled after the very successful Distinguished Scholars Program but applied to extramural workforce. As I said to have reinforcing culture, mentoring and support, focusing on the science of scientific workforce diversity, extramural staff or administrators, but there is a body of knowledge and evidence that these individuals are going to master so that they can be ambassadors with DEIA. And our group, Participant and Mentor Cohort launched just in March. We call this our proof of concept here. If it proves to be effective in these monthly gatherings for the next six months, we will look at doing this over the course of the next four or five years at least with the hypothesis that if you can develop this critical mass of individuals who are well-informed and advocates in this area that it may translate into differences in the way that FOAs look to differences in who ends up being funded by the various ICs. And we're very grateful to NHGRI for lending the skills of Dr. Hindorf as one of our six mentors for this group. We have 13 participants. It's going to be a very intense several months. In terms of the disseminating evidence, we have something that we call the Scientific Workforce Diversity Seminar Series that we launched last fall. And the last of the 21-22 season offerings will be just tomorrow. So there's still time to sign up if you haven't had the opportunity as yet. We're going to be addressing the question. How does diversity impact science? I'm looking at the data. So we'll have opening remarks from Dr. Jadaita Eisler from the Office of Science, Technology and Policy. Dr. Laurel Smith-Dore talks about gender diversity. Dr. Richard Freeman is going to be bringing forward some really interesting data that he's seen related to the COVID pandemic. Dr. Jennifer Kwan is kind of a combination of what Smith-Dore and Freeman do. Dr. George Santangelo is going to talk about mentoring and same sex versus opposite sex mentoring. And Dr. Shirley Tillman, past president of Princeton will provide some concluding reflections and remarks before we open it up for general conversation. Again, focusing on the data. So I encourage you to join us if you can. If you can't, we will have the video cast, the slides and eventually meeting proceedings posted on our website diversity.nih.gov. And then acting on the evidence. We have good data that demonstrates that mentoring can make a difference in the success of scientists, particularly women, individuals who are underrepresented in racial and ethnic groups who do not necessarily have built-in networks that will advance their interest. And yet we know that mentoring is often uncompensated. So what we did this year was put out a notice of special interest for administrative supplements to recognize excellence in DEIA mentoring. We had an overwhelming response. More than 1,000 inquiries, many, many applications. A lot of the inquiries were because it was open to a wide range of mechanisms where how can I be eligible? R01 recipients. An R01 recipient would not be eligible for this if it was not already an objective in the grant that was actually reviewed or they had a plan to enhance diverse perspectives which is part of what the NIH Wide Brain Initiative has put forward. I will talk about it a little bit more shortly. Or you had an active diversity supplement associated with that grant. And the process of review is active at this point. ICs will provide us their list of recommended applications for funding. And we will prioritize mentors who will enhance outreach to scientists in keeping with the NIH notice of special interest in diversity. I'll also say, given the robust response we'll probably do something like this again next year. And then there's NIH Unite, the very ambitious initiative to end structural racism. Publicly unveiled February 26th, 21 at a special meeting of the advisory committee to the director. We often just talk about five interacting work groups that account for the acronym. Another way of thinking about it is these primary content areas as we talked about in a nature medicine commentary last fall, health disparity, minority health and health equity research, looking internally at the workforce, getting our own house in order for what it is that we expect of the external workforce. So some high level things. From the standpoint of health disparities, minority health and health equity research, Dr. Zank kind of stole my thunder. There is the common fund initiative that's committing up to $58 million over five years. This is a concept that came out of Unite. There were 11 awards announced last October. Six of them looking in general for transformative research, address health disparities, five of which were looking at that topic at minority serving institutions. And there has been an additional competition for this fiscal year. I think that the closing date is right around now. Additionally, as she mentioned, Compass, this is again a concept that came out of Unite. We're really delighted to see so many ICOs involved with this that common fund is gonna devote a lot of money towards this. I think, being the geriatrician that I am, that this is a wonderful initiative because it's looking at community-driven health equity structural interventions. In other words, they're gonna be local health equity research assemblies that will say what they see as their needs. There's gonna be a coordinating center that works with the National Health Equity Research Assembly, again, national group of community activists and community members to state what they need. And then these health equity research hubs was signed to export and partnership, which should take us a long way in addressing the things that people of the community level see as challenges. And as Dr. Zank mentioned, a lot of money is being committed to this, 23 to $52 million per year over the course of the next 10 years. I'm not telling anything out of, inappropriately here, this is all what was presented at the council of councils meeting on January 27th. And if you wanna see more, you go to the video cast and take a look. So we're expecting that FOA to come out for fiscal year 23. And then in terms of our own internal workforce, there's a lot of work that's ongoing, one of which is this lovely project that you will see evidence of when council sessions return to be on the NIH campus. It's called the Power of an Inclusive Workforce Recognition Project. It's the brainchild of Dr. Sedona Jackson, shown here second from the left on the bottom. She's a intramural tenure track scientist at NIH and she's written very eloquently, was published in STAT recently about how it made her feel walking the halls of NIH and not seeing herself reflected, not feeling included. So the intent of this is to represent the whole range of individuals who are necessary for success in biomedical research. Scientists, non-scientists, people who are early in their career, late in their career, disabled individuals, the colors and the textures are to represent that richness of variety. This is building 31 lobby prior to the installation, following the installation. Most ICs have their headquarters there. And this is just outside the door of my office in building one. I'm on the third floor building one, just above the NIH director and just outside my door is this installation of Institute and Center Directors. And I wanna take a moment to acknowledge Francis Collins. When I came to NIH as Deputy Director of the National Institute on Aging in 2008, you didn't see nearly this variety of Institute and Center Directors. But now, and we know Francis stepped down back in December, but this is his work over the years. We have 10 women directors. We have two African-Americans, two Hispanic Latinos, three Asians, quite a bit of diversity at this level, not nearly as much just below. And there's a lot of work that we need to do along those lines. And then switching to the external workforce. I know the part that's most important to you, I will say there's a lot, there are a lot of other things that are going on internally, but in the interest of time, I'm not gonna belabor those. Happy to address questions. For the external workforce, of course, there is the FATHI Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation Initiative. The overarching goal of this is to create cultures of inclusive excellence, again, modeled after the Distinguished Scholars Program, the whole premise for the 21st Century Scholars Program. The goal here is to do faculty cohort recruitment. Data show that when you bring in groups of scientists as opposed to one-off searches, you're more likely to find diversity. You make greater outreach when it's a group recruitment. You tend not to say that this scientist who specializes in the genomics of the right kidney doesn't fit this job for someone who specializes in the genomics of the left kidney or something ridiculous like that. It's looking for integrated institution-wide systems to address bias, faculty equity, mentoring and work-life issues and it called for coordinating and evaluation center. And please let me just go back to that one-off statement I made. I was exaggerating just to make the point. The estimated funds for this will be $241 million over the next nine years. The first set of cohorts were announced in October. There are high-resource institutions, low-resource institutions, a collaboration between Tuskegee University, University of Alabama and Birmingham. The solicitation with fiscal year 22 funds is done. The summary statements are being reviewed. The funding list is being developed and the solicitation fiscal year 23 is open, maybe closing soon. At the end of this, we will have at least 14 cohorts, at least 140 early career scientists who are gonna be supported at their institutions to become successful NIH grantees. And Morehouse School of Medicine won the competition to be the coordination and evaluation center that helped us to see what are the generalizable principles from this experiment. I alluded to the plans to enhance diverse perspectives. This was something that was unveiled actually a month after UNITE was publicly announced. It's an initiative that came from the NIH-wide Brain Initiative that for the first time allows consideration of the diversity of the scientific team to be part of the scoring. Diversity here is defined very broadly, diversity, discipline, geography and keeping the notice of special interest in diversity. They published about this in neuron last fall. The thing that NIH-UNITE has found fascinating about this is that it's an opportunity to make sure that everyone is at the table and it's being encouraged that multiple institutes and centers use this language in other FOAs. And to my knowledge, that is something that's ongoing. I will say that yes, evaluation of this is also ongoing because I've heard loud and clear from Melanie Burns, head of the Center for Scientific Review, concerns that, again, you have humans who are doing these reviews and will the humans on a review panel score an application from Manoga Laureate who doesn't do well with the PETPS it's called lower than a comparable application for someone who's not a Nobel Laureate and only time will tell. That's something that in terms of applying for these administrative supplements to recognize excellence in DEIA mentoring if that is associated with it, that's something that we'll consider. And then there are a lot of other opportunities to increase career paths for individuals from underrepresented groups that are ongoing, such as expanding the Science Education of Partnership Award Program that's focused on K through 12 STEM education where you see quite a bit of variety among the student population and recognizing that science identity is often established by middle school and much gratitude to NHGRI in taking the lead and expanding this. We have now 17 institutes and centers that have signed on to join NIGMS in this program. Additionally, there are a number of other FOAs and prizes that are being considered like institutional climate self-studies. Rather, I'd like to call it the first initiative, Light gives the idea here is to give institutions the opportunity to evaluate their climate and begin to make changes. It doesn't give all of the funding that FIRST provides. That's under consideration and development that was presented at the December 10th advisory committee to the director meeting. There are also plans for structured institutional needs assessments and action plans for development grants at minority serving institutions. Plan to develop grants for minority serving institutions for instrumentation. Looking at expanding the sponsored administration services activities for minority serving institutions. This is something that's already being done in a more modest fashion through the diversity program consortium. And under development is an excellence in DEI investigator award which be an accompaniment to the administrative supplement. The idea here being that you can apply for this competitive award whether you have NIH funding or not. This is again very aligned with the NHGRI strategic plan and yes, there are key members of NHGRI who are involved with United Room was moving things forward. Finally, I want to make sure to bring to your attention an open RFI on the development of a prize competition for institutional excellence in DEIA. The intent here is to acknowledge transformative cultural systems, projects and processes that have been developed to achieve inclusive excellence. And to highlight practices that have resulted in measurable change and created a more inclusive environment for students and faculty. As I said, we are seeking input. The topics that we're interested in are how the prize competition should be structured, what should be the outreach, the judging criteria, the timing, how we should disseminate the winning submissions and what may be barriers to applying for this. And the deadline for response to the RFI is July 28th. As you see, it's coming to my office. We are taking the lead on this on behalf of NIH. But again, very grateful to NHGRI for joining with multiple other ICs and supporting this and making sure that it goes forward. As I said, I'm just touching the surface. If you'd like to know more about what's happening on the United side, you can go to urlnih.gov slash ending structural racism or just Google NIH Unite and take a look at the milestones and progress page. So I'll close with our favorite adage, Great Lines Think Differently and I'd be happy to answer any questions since you might have. Okay, thank you, Dr. Bernard. Can you, Rene, can you take down? Thanks very much. Okay, Gail, go ahead, please. Thank you. That was really an excellent talk and I'm very excited about the work that you're going to do. But I did wonder, I didn't hear you in your definition of diversity address gender identity and expression minorities. And is that not part of the work that you are doing? How does that fit in and why did I miss that from the definition? So what you saw was the examples that are put forward in the notice of special interest in diversity that was put out by NIH in 2019. And as noted there, these are examples, but not exclusive. If you take a look at our strategic plan, we very specifically address the fact that we work closely with the SGMRO office and other entities. And we think very broadly when we think about diversity. I will acknowledge that some groups are easier to quantitate, you know, you can look at a person and think that they may be African American or Black or you know, but there are some groups that it's harder to quantitate. And I'm really excited about the National Academy's report that came out recently that will give us some structure to systematically gathering data. I'm also really interested in what's going to happen from a subgroup that we have to the advisory committee to direct a working group on diversity that's going to come forward with some recommendations with regards to disabilities because that's not perfectly visible. And some recommendations, well, there are going to be suggestions until the advisory committee to the director accepts them as recommendations to help us to move forward. So it's an exciting time, looking forward to doing a lot more over the course of the next five years because there's a lot to do. And do you anticipate? So for example, I have a T32 training grant and we report disability when we ask people, we ask our trainees and the same thing for ancestry or race, but we do not ask about gender minorities. Do you anticipate that those questions will be reported in the future? So I don't have that authority to say for sure what's going to happen, but given the National Academy's report with recommendations as to how we should document, I know that there was a lot of discussion about how to incorporate that into routine work here at NIH. So we'll have to see what happens over the course of time, but people are very aware of it and very aware that we need to do a better job of gathering the information. Yeah, that's really fantastic because of course that group also has educational and medical health disparities as well. So thank you for paying attention to this very important problem. Dr. Beard. So thank you very much. I'm going to bring up a group that is really not listed is, which is mothers of, you know, are a group that are generally underrepresented in many groups. And, you know, we have these issues of the way our careers are supposed to go that parenting and motherhood really kind of impacts on it. And is there any influence? And I know during COVID, mothers left the workforce at a higher degree than fathers did. So is there any thoughts about, you know, what we do regarding that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you for asking that. So, you know, that's where the opportunity to collaborate and leverage is so valued by us. We work closely with the section of Minority Research Office. We work closely with the Office of Research of Women's Health. We work closely with the Office of Action Rural Research. And last, you know, not last fall now, it's already the fall of 2020. We took the lead working with all of those entities in those surveys of COVID impact that hopefully many of you saw. We had 47,000 individual scientists to respond a 19% response rate to the solicitation. We had 34% of administrative leaders, associate vice president for research and several equivalents to respond. And we're able to demonstrate, you know, it's not surprising to anyone, but to demonstrate the impacts of the pandemic. And yes, it was women who were particularly impacted, individuals caring for children, particularly less than school-aged children who were really impacted. And we hope to have those data on our website soon for everyone to jump into and explore. We had long discussions with our colleagues in the Office of Action Rural Research in particular about what sorts of things need to be done, can be done to help with that. And I think everyone's aware of the policies extending F and K eligibility and childcare increases in stipends and making sure that there's support for conferences and carefully monitoring what's happening with R01 and other submissions. Surprisingly, at least through 21 applications or submissions were being maintained, as has been pointed out, that's probably because there was a lot of residual opportunity then and applications seemed to be beginning to go down this fiscal year when I hear from Mike Lauer. So that's something we're gonna have to continue to monitor and think about and consider what other sorts of interventions can be brought forward that would be helpful. But I will certainly say, as a mother myself, in fact, the single mother when I was building my career, I'm very sensitive to these issues. And a lot of us are trying to pay attention and make sure we do the right things here at NIH. Other questions? Thanks, go ahead. Marie, can you talk a little bit about the diversity catalyst program that you lead for individuals across NIH? Yeah, thank you for the question, Vince. So the diversity catalyst are a group of individuals who meet with my team, the Coswood office on a regular basis. They were first brought together under Valentine's leadership as the Coswood to advise the Coswood office as it was building programs. As I stepped in as the acting Coswood in October of 2020, wow, seems a long time ago now. And as fortunately was able to be appointed as a permanent Coswood in May of 21, we started thinking about using the group a little differently. These are people are recommended by the leadership at the institutes and centers as being knowledgeable in DEI-A issues. But what I was finding as I was taking on this role is that many times the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing. You knew that you were doing great work at NHGRI but you didn't necessarily know what was going on at NIA and vice versa. So of late we've been using this group as a means of making sure those connections occur and we're beginning to meet on every other month basis. We're beginning to have people bring forward initiatives that they would like to work on collaboratively with others. We're trying to make sure that we hear what else is going on in our ecosystem like we had the Howard Hughes Medical Institute folks to come and talk about their new initiatives. And we're now setting aside a little bit of time at the end of each meeting for chief diversity officers to meet. So for those of you who aren't from within NIH, this fiscal year there is a diversity equity inclusion and accessibility performance standard for each of the institutions and center directors including the expectation of the development of what's called a racial and ethnic equity plan. Expectational ICs is stepping back, looking at their environment, making sure that they are as equitable as possible for all staff. What we're seeing is that many of the institution centers are planning to have a chief diversity officer appointed to lead that and other efforts. And as those people are coming on board, we're also using the diversity catalyst as an environment to help them to see what's happening across NIH to connect with each other. It's really been kind of exciting because there is so much that's going on. Hey, Dr. Bernard, thank you for your presentation. Thanks for spending time with us today. We really appreciate it. My pleasure.