 The next session here that we're just starting is on national efforts that are underway, and the connection we want to make between the three leaders that we have invited to this panel is what is really relevant to our team of this conference which is about leadership, and it's underrepresented groups. And most of what we will be talking about about national efforts, you all three speakers have been very, very, very active in so many areas here. So that's what we're going to talk about. And our first speaker is Dr. DePas. And Dr. Anthony DePas, I would like to introduce him here. The larger biography is on the thing, but I'll just give you some highlights. So I'm the reason I'm very interested in what he brings to the table is that he has been evaluating programs for middle schools, all the way to postdoc that provide professional development training and Richmond. And it's a very unique organization, a journal called Understanding Interventions that he is the CEO and the director of. And that broadens participation in science. And the interesting part is that it focuses on interventions, not just on research, not just on practice, but on the on the bridging of research to practice, and what interventions work. So I think that's going to be very interesting to hear his perspective he's a CEO of career, not a dear, where the focus is on individual students, wonderful videos for students to say, Where do I want to go with my life. And so it's also working on an individual front for them. He's gotten Dr. DePas has gotten grants from the NIH NSF Sloan the educational testing service the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. So he's got lots of credibility and lots of lots of leadership in many areas and he has a PhD in biology. He has been a professor in biology. He brings to our panel, a very broad perspective in how to create leaders in our stem community from underrepresented groups. So I think his perspectives are going to be extremely interesting. So with that, let me welcome Dr. DePas. I think you have some slides that you're going to drive from your. Yes, yes, thank you. Go ahead. Welcome. Thank you. So I'd like to first two things, thank the organizers for inviting me. This is really privilege. There are a number of individuals that are on here I won't go through all the names but quite a few of them are on the screen right now that I that I've had tremendous impact on my life and my professional life. And many have been mentors for years the the kind of mentor that you pick up the phone when you have to really make a serious decision. Thank you. I want to, to, in this talk, talk about approaches in terms of leading this effort to broaden participation science we've been doing this for 4050 years and we have not had the impact that we had intended. So part of that I think is simply because we the approach that we've made you know we typically we see what someone does across the street and and not really sure how effective it is but they get funded so gee whiz let's just do that. And we're not really sure if we're selecting and and making sure that those are going to be successful is successful or if we're actually developing. What I'm going to talk about today I'm going to give a little bit of my story and a little bit of what we do to really touch on two themes that I think are desperately needed in the broader story in terms of broadening participation and the first is being informed and also contributing to the body of knowledge in our approach and being disciplined and and doing things in a way that we can be truly informed and the second is making something entrepreneurial about this I mean you know there's a reason why we have probably in this country, one of the best sort of defense systems. It's because the government don't make everything. We have nor Northrop Grumman than a whole bunch of other companies that compete for contracts to make the best weapons. Why don't we think about that instead. So, I'll start talking a little bit about, you know, telling you a little bit of my history so I was actually born in Jamaica and I'm an immigrant. I came to this country as a teenager, grew up in the very humble circumstances. I remember one of my earliest memories is actually my father taking me to to pre K. And we went on his bicycle. And it wasn't because my dad was a fitness nut it was because that was a family vehicle. And over the past forward several years. I decided to retire a year ago from my from a full professorship at Long Island University because I wanted to, to apply my skills in a different way, because I think I'd done what I needed to do from the faculty perspective over over a 28 year career. You know, in to go back to my father, you know, he he passed it about 22 years ago, and one of the questions I had for him because we all knew he was dying, unfortunately, was, did he have any regrets and one of the regrets that actually the single regret he told me about was the fact that he never really knew enough to leverage what he had to expand his impact he was a shoemaker to have a much number one larger business. And also to really build moats around ways that his business was susceptible, his business model collapsed as a shoemaker, when we all went to start wearing sneakers in the 1980s. He didn't build the moats he didn't have the diversity in approach to really foresee or adapt as quickly. Eventually he adapted he started selling sneakers so then, you know, but well let's just keep that keep that in mind. Through the presentation itself. So I'm going to share with you a some slides. As I talk about some of the efforts that that we're pursuing to really apply some of the principles that I that I just referred to and the first one. I'm going to start with a story. And the story takes us back to the early 1940s and there's a guy Richard Cabot from a wealthy family he was a physician. And essentially he wanted to, to have an impact on youth that were marginalized delinquents and these were kids that were getting into trouble. And he set up a program where these kids preteens would receive a variety of interventions they receive counseling tutoring they got mentors they got summer camp. And the interesting thing is that he had a person who was coordinating this her name was John McCord and John McCord actually happened to be a graduate student who decided to build a study out of this so what she did was that she had another set of boys about 250 or so boys as a diagnostic pair. They were similar with these boys in terms of background in terms of where they are the kind of trouble they were getting in. And this study. Phenomenal study probably the longest of its kind had data collected over 70 years way beyond John McCord's life. And essentially what they found was that everybody in the well not everybody but the control group actually the hell of a lot better than the experimental group for things that sounded really logical. In terms of making sense to stop these boys from entering a life of delinquency and and prison and so forth. Now, that's not to say that the intent wasn't good and that the interventions couldn't have been effective. It just meant that there's a whole bunch of things that were learned from this. My point here is so simply because something sounds like it might work. And it might be the perfect thing doesn't mean it does. And what it does now to relate back to what we do is as scientists. Too many of us apply science and everything else that we do except when we look at training students and diversifying science. We go by intuition. I participated in a summer program or I did this so this must be good. And because this other person did this, and they had some students who went off and got PhDs, not really paying attention in terms of where those students were when they came into the program. Did I really add value. And that's what understanding interventions addresses, it's really informing practice with scholarship and moving those in the practice field to be contributors to scholarship so when we think about asking the why questions. And also understanding what context means. So one can see what happens at UMBC but UMBC has a unique sort of set of circumstances, not only the leader, but also the institution and also institutional priorities. And the fact that that happens at UMBC doesn't necessarily means it happens at XYZ institution. So what understanding interventions does. Number one, it creates a space for these conversations. And these conversations. In terms of doing translational work where the work can be disseminated and and conversations can be had where not only research can can inform practice but also practice informed research so we have conferences we have workshops that train those on the ground. Integrating a certain level of discipline and scholarship in the work that they do. We provide a variety of resources we for people to know where the journals where things are published where this work is published. We do reports we have an a curated database, we identify seminal papers so people can get up to speed in this area. And this work actually is being supported by an LSM regional Center of Excellence grant. So even those are being augmented significantly. We have a journal. And our approach here is different than what we're used to seeing in terms of journals. So typically you would apply or submit your manuscript and you either get accepted or accepted with revisions, or you're told to go somewhere else. So that's not our approach. Our approach is, yes, you can be accepted or accepted with revisions but once we see that the work that you're doing reflects a lack of practice in the scholar area. We let you know that it's not going to be accepted now but we provide you with a mentorship to get it to the point where it can be accepted. That might not be the best thing for impact factor. But we feel that the people who are doing the work who have their training in the basic sciences, where this work now goes into the social and behavioral sciences, we should be helping them not turning them away. So the UI Journal does that we do UI learn so we provide workshops and webinars and so forth to train those in the basic sciences to then start implementing some of those methodologies where they can can do this work. We also have UI impacts UI impacts came out of work that I did where I was evaluating all these undergraduate training programs that Cliff talked about. And by the way, thanks clip for all the work you did that made UI possible where we had students being trained at tremendous expense by NIH NSF and others. And guess what, because they weren't coming from the schools that predicted success, they weren't, they weren't being accepted into summer programs they weren't being accepted into some graduate programs, even though we have this dearth of minority in many of these spaces. So we started by trying to, to have sort of a, a matching service. It's now evolved into a social media platform that this is the first announcements I'm making on this kind of stage that we're now open for business. So what this is, it's a social media platform that creates a essential square for STEM that doesn't exist. So individuals from high school all the way to professionals can go on put information within an e portfolio papers that I've submitted or presented talks, whatever I've done, along with my interests and my, my background, so that I can meet friends I can form affinity groups and guess what the institutions that are claiming that they can't find us now have a place where they can come find us. And we're looking now for this to be adopted across at all levels. And so UI impacts calm is a social media platform I encourage you to get on it to register. It's brand new off the presses, and let's, and let's work on it. And finally, with UI impacts, we see that we're developing tools that actually change the reality now right now we have places where we can go and hopefully find people form groups people can find mentors people can have conversations. Students can get information about programs because programs can also have a presence here, and they can also come on here and recruit. We also look in terms of the work that I do in developing tools that also help our students. I never met someone with a PhD until I went to college. I knew that I kind of wanted to pursue an academic career, because there's a TV show which by the way, we all used to collect at the neighbor's house because the neighbor had a TV but we didn't to watch a TV show that was called paper chase it was about a Harvard law professor. And I loved watching the intellectual jousting between John Houseman and his student characters. And I knew I wanted to be in that environment. I had no way of knowing what professors did I had no way of knowing what STEM professors did because I also had an interest in STEM. What we have developed is something called Korean avid here and what Korean avid here does. First of all, it has students or individuals adults, go to an answer questions and six lifestyle areas where you want to live. What kind of house you're going to live in our apartment. We're going to do for transportation public transportation drive what are you going to do family, how big is your family going to be. How many times a week are you going to eat out. How much are you going to spend in the supermarket and also vacations. And then for the first time using Department of Commerce data, you can know listen if this is the lifestyle I want. Here is what it's going to cost here's how much I need to earn. And that plus information at educational levels that you aspire to working activities do I want to work with computers do I want to work outside. You can choose priorities there as well as work values independence is a value recognition is a value. It gives you a browser experience through occupations from over 1100 occupations covering 50,000 job titles. Now you can narrow those down into stem or health science or law or finance, and the information from that. The tasks, not only tell you but it also gives you a measure from one to 100 as to the importance of the task skills abilities, certifications, and as well as videos and podcasts related to that a day in the life of that type of thing. One of the things that our students, even those more privileged like my, my children, my children have a view of a slice of a slice from interactions they've had with me and my friends and colleagues. But with real information about employment projections and and salaries and so forth. Our students can now be informed in the decisions that they make we can't just give them stem and say put you in a lab and think magically they're going to be drawn to it when they're economic and other realities that tell them otherwise. I think I'll stop here. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. the past that was incredible. I really liked your comment that you didn't meet a PhD person until you went to college. I teach students, and I'm telling you, I have been amazed. 80% correlation that students bachelor, undergrads who are still seeing a possibility or even have a view of going to grad school for anything someday in stem 80% correlation if their parents are professionals and went to grad school. The reverse is true. Everybody who's in grad school who's a teacher person like us who have achieved anything who's been to grad school. 100% of the kids who are in bachelor's programs and stem are planning to go to grad school. The reverse is true and the other side is true that they don't aim for that. So I'd be very interested later in our conversation across our three panelists on these type of subjects.