 People ask me a lot why diversity, why is it important? And of course it's often conceptualized as an affirmative action, but I think we've moved far beyond that. It is important to maintain and improve the excellence of academic institutions. We are now facing in healthcare some really complicated issues and for solving complex problems you need a diversity of thought and diversity of perspective. As Scott Page in his wonderful book about difference puts it, if you put a bunch of high-level experts together to solve a problem that are of a homogeneous group or you put a high level group, not so high level group for heterogeneous group, the heterogeneous group wins out all the time for coming up with creative solutions. I think the NIH invests a lot of money in training people, but the number of people who end up being principal investigators and the diversity of the principal investigator pool does not reflect the diversity of the people who are being trained even. The women don't make it to the PI ranks, people of color don't make it to the PI ranks. I think you want to have as inclusive a research workforce as possible because there are, you know, having a different background is going to influence your science and so you need a diversity of opinions to move the science forward. I've found that black investigators are significantly less likely to receive an NIH funding compared to whites and we can explain part of the gap, but we certainly can't explain all of it. The implications of the findings are that it's either proposal quality or bias problems with the review process and, you know, we're doing further studies to try to understand exactly how to best sort of address these issues. So I think that regardless sort of providing applicants with the unwritten rules of how do they successful in the grant process would be helpful. It would be, you know, you don't know, in diseases you always don't know the mechanism with the disease, but if you know the treatment, if you know that a treatment works, you give a treatment, see if it works. I would recommend that the NIH consider something like that. People actually are wired, I believe, to look at role models in order to encourage them in anything that they do. And so, for example, if you come into academic medicine and you don't see many other professors who are of the same racial background as you, and for that matter you don't see many residents and so forth, then when faced with challenges, which might actually be normal that everybody else is faced with, an underrepresented minority person is more likely to feel they have to leave and not have the resilience to stick with it and to stay the course. The approaches to increasing diversity both in terms of gender and race are a little bit different, although I do believe that if you approach it in terms of the lens for women and do all the things that we think are important for recruiting and retaining women, a lot of them will actually have a very positive effect in the recruitment and retention also of underrepresented minorities.