 All right, so for those of you who don't know me, my name's Judy Simcox. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and it is my great pleasure to host this talk by Dr. Maggie Werner Washington. Maggie is a nationally recognized expert in both yeast metabolism, diversity, equity and inclusion. She is homegrown, so she received her PhD in the Department of Botany here at UW Madison and she did her postdoctoral work with Betty Craig. She went on to join the faculty at the University of New Mexico and she has received too many awards to even mention, but a few of them are the NSF's Director's Special Service Award, the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring and the AAAS Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement as well as the Harvard Foundation Scientist of the Year. She's been a leader in diversity, equity and inclusion and she's most proud of mentoring more than 500 students who have achieved advanced degrees, including well over a hundred PhDs and 50 MDs. She's also recently been working to increase the STEM industry in New Mexico by starting STEM boomerang. A lot of this work she's not gonna talk about but she is gonna talk about a bit about her journey and her work in diversity, equity and inclusion and I'm so proud to host her as a friend and colleague. Maggie, you can take it away. All right, thank you, Judy. I am so happy to be talking to you all but and I'll probably like lapse back into my Wisconsin accent but I'm so sorry I'm not there. It has been, I have had a wonderful time talking with a lot of different people, friends, new friends and colleagues at the university and it's always great to get back to Wisconsin and I know you had homecoming. I'm sure you guys were all out on the field. I think there was a football game and I just remember the fire engine going by going da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. I'll get going. Today I'm gonna talk about what thermodynamics taught me about diversity and inclusion and the talk has, so let's see if I have to figure out how to get to the next slide. So the talk has four parts to it and the first part is gonna be some history of mine and then I wanna talk about what we call hard problems. Some people call them wicked problems and the importance of imagination and then my use of thermodynamics to try to understand a little bit about the hard problem of diversity and inclusion and then I wanna talk about deconvaluating the two faces of bias. We often talk about implicit bias but they're actually different parts to the kinds of bias that we experience. Out-group discrimination and in-group favoritism are the two major ones I'll talk about and finally I wanna get to discussing inclusion. So inclusion is more of a relationship and I wanna talk about turning diversity which is just people of all different colors kind of standing there together into what we might look at as we so that when we say we, we mean everybody in the room. Let's see how do I do this. Okay, good. So my family and I don't think many people knew this at Wisconsin when I was there because there weren't many other Hispanics when I was there but my mom came up from Mexico with her family and this is my mom on the, I don't have the pointer set up, I don't know if you can see it but my mom's on the left, my grandmother's in the middle and those are my mom's siblings all around her. So it was 1914, it was a Mexican revolution. My grandfather worked in the mines, Wilson said he wouldn't protect the nationals and so he was a US citizen. They started killing people and kidnapping kids and the British set a train and took my grandparents and their family up to Veracruz and from there they went to New Orleans. When they got to New Orleans, my grandmother put her arms around the kids and she said, no losing everything was the best thing that ever happened to us. She said, now we know what's really important. It's what can't be taken away and that's our family, our education and our face. Thank God for nothing and thank God for nothing was really a motto in my family for a long time. And I grew up in Iowa, it's a long story, I'm gonna try to keep it short. I went to Stanford after 12 years in Catholic schools because I saw a magazine that called Stanford the Farm and being from Iowa, of course, a new farms. And my grandparents cook had once been Leland Stanford's cook. My grandparents cook in Mexico had once worked for Leland Stanford. So I thought we had family connections and this is a problem I have sometimes assuming I have a stronger relationship than I do with something and in any event, Stanford was an enormous shock. I didn't realize that I had not really, I guess never seen really wealthy people and so that was a big shock. And the other thing is that even though I knew I was Mexican, I don't look Mexican. I grew up with Chicano foster brothers. I didn't realize I was not identifiable and so I had a lot of challenges at Stanford. And when I finished and I had a scholarship so I stayed at that cabinet in school. But anyway, so when I finished, I went immediately to Mexico. And when I hit Mexico, I was really home. I understood how people made their decisions. People were so wonderful to me and I understood their priorities and I just fit completely into that culture. It was a great feeling and it's also where I became a scientist. So I was in Oaxaca, which is in the southern part of Mexico. It was the first time I'd really been around intact indigenous tribes. And the women in Tijuana Pec were purple, wepeals, the blouses. And I thought, well, that's strange because purple's the royal color. And it turns out that the men in their village had learned that they could take cotton fibers down to the ocean and agitate mollusks. And they gave off purple dye and the saltwater acted as a mordant. And for some reason, that just opened my mind to all the things that were around me that the indigenous groups were using to heal and to close and to feed themselves. So I got very interested in the co-evolution of plants and humans. And I met with, you know, every curandera, brujo and anybody I could and I made it by land. I was hitchhiking all the way down to Columbia and Ecuador and actually to Venezuela at one point. These are some people that I lived with in my little village in Columbia. And it was all this time I thought, you know, I'm a sponge of indigenous knowledge. And I really, what I need to do is get back to Western science. It didn't happen immediately. I went to Alaska with my first husband and that's another long story. We ran out of supplies and had to live on what we could hunt and gather. But while I was out hunting one day, I had this blinding flash that worked for the evolution of photosynthesis that nothing that we knew other than sludge on rocks would exist. So I was bound sort of in my soul to being a botanist and what happened. I went from there basically to Hawaii where I got my master's degree. And it was a wonderful place and there was a Tropic school. So there were kids from Central America who came and so I could teach biochemistry in Spanish. That was very fun. And I went from there to Madison. And I think what in Madison definitely didn't know was that by the time I got to Madison, I had been friends with or lived with or I'm bowling teams with, oh, sorry, I'm sorry, my computer's giving, I hate these messages up here. I think I just a minute. I can't figure out how to get to it. Okay, here we go. All right, friends are bowling teams with people from, let me go back here. No, I won't go back, this'll go back. People from at least 25 different indigenous groups from New Zealand to Minnesota, from Columbia and Venezuela and Ecuador up to Alaska. And so that had been my experience. And when I got to Madison, it was just so different. And really, I didn't know any other Hispanics. I didn't know any other Mexican-Americans who were interested in science. And as I told people, many people that when they had a Hispanic meeting in Madison, it would be me and the janitor. What are you doing, girls? It was very fun. So when I interviewed in New Mexico for job, oh, I worked, I did my PhD with Ken Keekstra and Botany and then with Betty Craig for my postdoc. And when I got to New Mexico to interview, I fell in love with the students. I mean, they were just beautiful to me and I heard Spanish and there were lots of Native Americans and it just felt so wonderful to me that I realized that that was where I was gonna have to be. And so the other things to remember in this career is that music and family has always been very important to me. I've always played a lot of music in my life. I was a scientist, not because I understood academia or anything like that. I was just passionately engaged with learning and with science because of my experiences. And in terms of faculty and academia, I always lived in an intersecting but really a not identical world. So my priorities were quite different. All right, enough of me. I wanna talk to you about hard problems. I love hard problems that they're fascinating to solve. And hard problems are like climate change, education, war, targeted hate groups, polarization, diversity and inclusion. These things that we just like, they seem like you can't solve them, right? And my definition of hard problems is that they're chronic, they're complex, they usually involve people. The proposed solutions that people have for them are usually too obvious, they're knee jerk and they don't work, right? So with education, it was fire the teachers, the kids are lazy, the parents are doing new jobs. They're often stabilized by non-obvious forces. So you want to go right at the face of this thing, but that's not gonna work because really it's something underneath, usually with something with human nature and sometimes with evolution that has stabilized it. And once you figure out what's stabilizing it, you can often imagine how to disrupt it. It might not be a hard thing to do, but it's not easy because so many people are convinced that it can't be solved. And communication of real solutions can be very, very difficult. So oftentimes when I have a hard problem, I try to think of it in different ways. And so this one I'm talking about today is going to be using thermodynamics and then a bit of evolution. So I have to thank Wayne Becker and Tom Records for teaching Gibbs free energy correctly to me twice. It was just a thrill. What happens is that, so let's go, that's the equation. Okay, so Delta G, this is just I at Gibbs down here at the bottom and he's somebody I really hope to meet if after we die, there's any chance of that. But anyway, so Gibbs free energy is the amount of energy available from a reaction. And the patient that I love, which I often tell my students as the guardian angel of the cell is minus RT, the natural log of the equilibrium constant plus RT, the natural log of the concentration of products over reactants. So chemists and physicists really like to work with constants, they have to, right? See if they compare apples and apples. So what they do is they make products equal reactants when they're trying to figure out what the Delta G zero prime is. So it's constant pressure, which is our constant temperature, which is in degrees Kelvin, right? That's no problem for biologists for the most part, but they also make products equal reactants. The natural log of one is zero. So this whole second term is gone then with a Delta G zero prime. But for biologists, the concentration of products over reactants is where the action is. Because if you have, for example, very little product and a lot of reactants, then that is a fraction, right? And the log of a fraction is a negative number. So the Delta G actually increases in a negative fashion so that you get more energy out of a reaction. So you can make reactions go one way or the other way simply by changing the amount of product over reactants and eukaryotic cells can do this. So it's really unbelievably amazing and it allows things to happen inside cells that we really could never imagine. And it's important to know that life isn't based on constants, but it's weak interactions and it's flexibility, the reversibility of reactions. And so it's, you know, all things are possible because of this equation explains why all things are possible. The second thing I need to ask you to do as we're thinking about all this is to remember your imagination. So Albert Einstein probably should have gotten the Nobel Prize for helping us remember that we need to be creative and how to achieve that. He said imagination is more important than knowledge. And in fact, he figured out relativity by imagining himself riding on a particle of light. I mean, you have to know physics, but you have to have imagination, right? So in my classes, once I figured out that one of the problems we were having with education was that the students weren't using their imagination, I would start my classes by having us all close our eyes and imagine walking from our classroom in over to some restaurant in your campus or you could walk to Babcock Hall or something like that. And we would imagine, okay, get up, you go to the door, how do you know you're at the door? What are you feeling in the hallway? What are your feet walking on? What do you hear? What do you smell? And really get them to think of all their senses, not their eyes, but they're smelling, feeling and everything, we'd get to the restaurant and I would say, you know what? You didn't memorize that walk, you learned it in your bones. And then what we would try to do is say, okay, imagine your whole body is a peptide. And imagine, so you have all these R groups coming out from your arm and imagine you have a serine on your arm and how does that feel having that polar group there? And what happens if it gets phosphorylated? How does that feel? So that they can imagine themselves being the same size as the molecules that they're trying to study. And when you have a phosphate on your arm, if you've ever gotten electric shock, you'll know it's like prickly, you know? And so it's like everything wants to move around to avoid that. And then we would like become 10 nanometers and go inside cells and ask questions, but it's really important. Imagination is a muscle. And the other thing to remember is that the laws of physics scale. So that's one of the ways that we could really solve some of our problems in biology was knowing that atoms, molecules, cars and stars all have to pay attention to the laws of physics. So that we, if we had a problem that we couldn't imagine how to solve at the molecular level, we could go up and say, well now how do grocery stores do it? And then use that as a way to go back and kind of rethink maybe what happened inside the cell. So imagination and reframing are really superpowers. And I'm gonna talk about beans today. And the reason I'm talking about beans is that, oh, let me see, I think I can, let's see if I can get my pointer to work. Let's see it. Okay, I don't see how to do it. All right, I'm gonna talk about beans because we're not emotional about beans. And so it's easy to talk about diversity and human stuff, we'll just talk about these other things. So here's a pile of mixed beans up at the top. And you can have three potential outcomes from this pile of mixed beans. You could get a pile of beans assorted by type which is an A. You could get the mixed beans back which you see in B. And you could get a pile of white beans that you would see in C. And this is where I first started thinking about thermodynamics. But let me just say what happens is that you are, it seems unlikely to get A and C out of a pile of mixed beans, right? So entropy plays a part there. It doesn't seem reasonable that you would get order out of disorder. It doesn't happen in the universe. But I thought about it. And in New Mexico, I see A all the time. I mean, my kids, when they were going to school in elementary school, they were just a big mix of kids and lots of different kinds of friends. When they hit middle school and started walking from classroom to classroom, they all started pulling out by identity groups. And there's a book about, why do all the black kids sit together in the cafeteria? But you see this in neighborhoods. Now, sometimes it's because of redlining. So this can be imposed by laws and other things. But people want to be with people who are like them because it's easier. Daniel Kahneman calls it cognitive ease that makes that desirable. And it's important actually for the stabilization growth and development of culture and languages and traditions that people who are alike get this chance to be together. And I think sometimes feel guilty about that happening. But I think we have to say that that's just sort of a natural thing that happens in human populations and not really try to feel too bad about that. So even though these are these two Xs to mean that entropy doesn't favor A and C and C, we see all the time. We see it in the Forbes 500 boards. We see it in the country clubs, this faculty, administrations, government. We see it all over the place, medicine for sure. And B, we don't see that often. And it made me start thinking. I mean, A made me start thinking especially because there's this whole implicit bias. And I thought, you know, there's two parts to this. And I think I can begin to look at it and maybe thermodynamics can help me. So what the deal is that we haven't spent enough time. If human populations, you know, if human populations tend to go to A, what we need to figure out since we believe in our hearts and there's like evidence for data for diverse, effective teams being much more innovative and successful coming up with a variety of solutions that hadn't been thought of before. If we believe that diversity in our daily lives and our workforces is really important. And if we tend to get to A, we have to think more about what it takes to get from A to B. And we have to think more about what it takes to get from B to C. So the challenge then is to really think of these things as reactions and try to figure out how to increase reversibility. How to look at the flow across A, B and C is sort of like, I don't know, enzyme transition states or something like that, right? And if you think about the propensity to get A and C, which we see all the time, I would say if you're gonna think about equilibrium constants, that's got a huge equilibrium constant. So it makes it even difficult if you don't have B to imagine that you would get B, right? So we've got to be more stable, more attractive as a solution. So first of all, we're gonna figure out what forces stabilize A and C. And then we wanna talk about what would make B more stable, sort of self-assemble, for example, so that this would be a compelling force for diversity. So the things that stabilize A and C, there's two parts to it and it's evolutionarily a big deal. And it's even seen, you see it in animal herds and things, but in humans, in groups can form extremely quickly. They sometimes come from identity groups, sometimes, and there can be deep reasons for an in-group farming or it can be a very superficial reason for an in-group, but they generally provide comfort and stability to the people that are in the in-group. And the rules in an in-group transfer invisibly. That's the challenges that you often just have agreed upon rules or within the group and you may not be able to see it from outside. And the in-group itself can have power and that's where it gets to be a challenge for everyone to some extent. So out-groups, you know you're in an out-group. If you're asking, what are the rules? Who has the power? Why can't they see me? Why don't people hear what I say? And out-groups can easily identify in-groups. And it's really, Harvard visitor of you just had an article about why having out-group people in your group is really important because they're the ones who aren't swayed by the in-group. They know where the in-group ends and they know they can speak to the in-group even if they're not in the in-group. Okay, so the stabilizing forces then of A and C I think the easiest ways to think about it are out-group discrimination. So the red beans don't want to be with the white beans, right? So they just don't, they wanna keep that separate or in-group favoritism, which is I really want to be with this group that I've identified with, you know? And then we have to accept the possibility that which in terms of A and C I think is unlikely but maybe there's just poor mixing, you know? So maybe there are some neutral groups in there but we just haven't mixed it up enough. And let's see. So in-group favoritism causes us to overestimate the abilities and values of our immediate group and at the expense of the people we don't know. But we're gonna talk first about out-group discrimination and then a little bit more about in-group favoritism. So the out-group discrimination example that I like to talk about is Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey. So in 1945 or before, all baseball teams were white in the national and the American League. There was a Negro League, but if you looked around and you were looking for a second base player for example, a shortstop or something, you know? And you looked all over the country for the very best player. You would always find a white player for your team. And Branch Rickey decided that it was time to really diversify baseball. And so he chose Jackie Robinson because he had been on sports teams at UCLA and he'd been in the military. So he knew he could handle living in a diverse environment and plus he was a good baseball player. So I have 42, that's the movie about it and the late Chadwick Boseman. And I would suggest that you see it one because Chadwick Boseman is amazing and two, because what you see in the movie is that all of Branch Rickey's associates were against bringing Jackie Robinson into the team. And they just were bound and determined to keep him in the out-group. It was not gonna happen. But as we saw Jackie have to go through amazingly difficult, unfair discrimination and racist attacks, you know, basically what you could see is like, bing, this one out-group opens up and all of a sudden Jackie's part of their in-group, bing, bing, bing, until Pewee Reese finally says, you know, you're a good man, Jackie Robinson. And so that he won over the Yankees team. And the one scene I love is the last time Jackie gets clean at first base. And he goes into the laundry room just there. And he goes, Mr. Rickey, why did you bring me into, why did you bring me into the team? And Branch says, well, you know, I was gonna make money and all that stuff. And he goes, no, no, I don't think that's true. What, why did you bring me onto the team? And Branch goes, because you made me love baseball again. Okay, so this ended up, this association between these two men ended up being a positive for the whole team and for both of them. And it also changed baseball. So the red group are whites in baseball, green is blacks in baseball, blue or purple, whatever that color is, are Hispanics or Latinos and the top color orange or something is Asians. And what you can see here is that in fact, this is a map from the Pew Research Center of diversity, the timeline of diversity in the United States. And this is about 2020. What you can see is that this follows that pretty well in terms of diversification of baseball. There's a sort of flattening here of African-Americans in baseball, but people are working on trying to figure out what's happening here. But in any event, Jackie Robbins over here made a huge difference. And it wasn't just in baseball. I mean, they actually made a big difference in all sorts of sports, but we'll talk about that in a minute. So from this thing in terms of racism and the ways that I would see to reduce out-group discrimination, which can be racism, but it can also be anti-Semitism. It can be all sorts of things. It's really forming partnerships, alliances and being sponsors, creating a community. And I see the need for this and it's amazing that social media doesn't seem to be doing that within some groups, but it's important. Legislation is important. Sometimes it has mixed effects, but our civil rights laws and the voting rights laws were very important for reducing the amount of out-group discrimination in our country. Communication and relationship is really important. People have to say when they're experiencing that, and we have to communicate back that that is not okay and that our relationship isn't gonna have that and our relationship doesn't support that anything. And if I tell my students, if you run into that and it's repeated it over and over, then you should just go bring your team, bring your group, bring the people that you work with that are really understanding this thing to deal with it. And for those of you who aren't experiencing this, be the team, be the group that can help deal with this. But I would say over racism and all the other isms, they get our attention because they cause a great deal of pain. And so it's, I think we put a lot of attention onto this part of discrimination. And when you talk about even implicit bias or unconscious bias, I mean, generally people are thinking about bias against. And that's when I was first talking about this stuff, I called Tony Greenwald who's the person that Harvard who invented this, he's at Washington now. And I said, you know, it bothers me that you can't, you don't know if you're biased for or against. And I don't think he realized what a significant difference this is. So now I wanna talk about bias for. Okay, so this is in-group favoritism. And the first thing I wanna talk about, so as I said, in-groups form very quickly. Sometimes you can't tell if you're in an in-group. I mean, you really can't. And you make mistakes because you're in the in-group and don't realize that other people are feeling the edges of your in-group. This is a graph based on work done by Aaron Kloss and his colleagues at the University of Colorado in Boulder. And Aaron is just an amazing computer scientist and he also thinks about social situations to try to understand them. And in this particular case, if a person gets a PhD at one school and takes a job at a school that's less prestigious, then the lines connecting the two schools are blue. And if a person gets a PhD at a lower prestige school and takes a job at a higher prestige school, the lines connecting them are red. So I'm just, take a minute to look at that and realize that most of the lines there are blue. And this is for computer science faculty. He did it for faculty in history and business also. And the question he was asking is, does prestige equal merit? And this is about 5,000 people in computer science between 2011 and 2012. And what he found was that for the top 10 schools, and I have that red arrow at Wisconsin, you're number 12, but the top 10 schools, those people who graduate from there have 1.6 to three times, produce 1.6 to three times more faculty than the second 10, okay? And they produce 2.3 to six times more faculty than the next 10. And the next 10 includes Michigan and Johns Hopkins and some very good schools. So he wanted to know if the people from the first 10 institutions were that many times better faculty, more productive than the other ones. And he found out that they weren't. So it suggested that this pattern of hiring people from very high level institutions is status favoritism. The other thing he noticed was, interestingly enough, the top 25%, 205 schools in this analysis, I think, and in the top 25% of schools produce about 85% of all computer sciences faculty. So that the structure then really has strong implications for how ideas are spread in the academy, in academia. And these things, in my mind, present great challenges to ever diversify the faculty because the labs at these institutions are generally not diverse and they're very large. In fact, the size of the bar, say by MIT, for example, you can see that MIT is producing huge numbers of faculty. And Caltech is up there, it's a very wonderful small school. It produces, it's a prestigious school, but it doesn't produce the huge numbers of faculty that some of the other ones do. So when you think about this, it made me think deeply, more deeply, about faculty hiring, right? So you want somebody from one of these big schools. That's wonderful, one of these prestigious schools. There's an attraction, right? There's a prestige bias from that. Okay, so that's great. Well, then I think about my faculty hiring committees. What did we look at next? We looked at publications. Well, isn't that interesting that it's easier to get your paper into a high-impact journal if you're at one of these prestigious universities than if you're, say, at the University of New Mexico? And so, wow, so they've got, they're at a prestigious school, their publications are in very high-impact journals. They're letters of recommendation. Oh, look, they're from famous people, people we know, we trust those people, right? Again, prestige bias. And then we're interested in the areas of research that they have, and oh, it's really a hot area because of the way that it can be associated with the way the ideas are flowing into the academy. So what I suggest is that in, I don't, I haven't been on a hiring committee in Wisconsin, but the ones that I have seen that there are often we have confounding factors in how we quantify and evaluate applicants. And so I would just say that prestige bias and group favoritism is something I hope the faculty all think about around the country. I'm hoping to write an article about this because I think it's pretty important for changing how we evaluate applicants. But this kind of a thing is also seen in sports. In fact, a lot of the teams or the players are really making a lot of complaints about this. So here's the WNBA, blue are players, red are managers, NBA players, managers, major leagues, baseball, NFL managers, players. And the incorporation of black managers into many of these positions has been, it's very, you can lose three or four in a season and it just, but it's been fairly flat over a long time. And the question is why don't they hire people who actually know how to play the game? And there's no good answer. And so this is something that sports teams are spending a lot of time talking about. But it's also true in the NCAA. I mean, if you look at the people who are playing the games versus who are the coaches and managers. And for example, the athletic directors of the division one sports or 353 athletic directors in the NCAA and 85% are men, 78% are white and 20% are people of color. So, it's just, it's an interesting thing. And I'm not in that group. So I don't know what all the reasons are for having such a relatively low representation in the upper levels. The owners are practically all white. There's one owner of an NBA team, that's Michael Jordan. And then I decided, well, maybe I'll look at schools. You know, maybe universities, let's see what's happening here. So I look at this across the country and there's 45% diversity among undergraduates. We lose the 13% going to graduate school. Lose another 9% looking at faculty. And this is all faculty. So STEM faculty are 10%, there's 10% that are seen as a black, Latinx or other people of color. And 13% of the provost and presidents are people of color. So I thought, well, you know, maybe that's just a blip in time since that was, I think 2020 numbers and maybe it's changing and I'm not catching it. So I went to this, so I had this graph here. I had to move to my office because my internet was not stable. So I'm like in a mess here. It's actually not my office, it's somebody else's office. And so anyway, this is higher education administrators and it's from the Zipia company. And these have about 50, 60% women. So I think it's a very deep dive into upper administrations. But what you can see is that it's about 70% white and it's decreasing very, very slowly. So I thought, well, let me ask her, let me look into this a little bit more and see what I could find out. So here's again the Pew graph about the diversification of the country. So the time to reach the diversity that we have now which is 40% people of color and 60% white, okay? For all faculty, it's going to take 25 years. It's gonna be much longer for STEM faculty, probably could be 50 years or more. For Fortune 500 boards, they're diversifying at 0.05% per year. 0.5%, I hope I said. That'll take 44 years. So 2065, they will get to today's level of diversity. So it'll be about 20% behind here. University administrations, it's going to take 66 years. University presidents, this data is very sparse and it's very hard to find this data. So when I'm done with this talk, then I'm gonna be really trying to dig further into the data, but I could find four numbers for this. And so the time to get to today's diversity of university presidents will be 105 years or never. And so it's 2125 maybe, but the data is very, very sparse. Professional sports managers and owners, it's completely questionable because it's been absolutely flat since 1990. And just to remind you, the Civil War was 156 years ago. So I think, this is interesting. And I can't say, I know a ton of university presidents. I don't know the boards of regents or your chancellors or whoever picks the presidents, but I do know that, remember, that's where we're getting all this information about diversity. I just get a message from UNM president today about it. And we're getting all this data on us about faculty diversity, student diversity, all that kind of stuff. And all I would say is that I think it's time for us to tell the administrations, look in the mirror, look in the mirror. Everybody's gotta work on this if we're gonna get anywhere. And again, it's because one, we can found factors in our evaluation of applications. And two, I think we don't really believe or know how to get to the point where we can count on diverse teams to be as innovative as possible, okay? So in-group favoritism can be difficult to identify. You can find it by, first of all, finding non-random distributions, right? Just like that A beans like you see here. And then you say, well, why? Why is it like that? And it could be laws, it could be redlining, it could be a number of things, but it also could be in-group favoritism where it's not that necessarily they hate another group. It's just that they love being together so much that they don't care about another group. And I've run into this myself, where people just think, diversity isn't anything I ever have to think about. Why are you talking to me about it, right? And so it's something that we can work on. I like to imagine that the in-group doesn't blank what diversity brings to the table. So they don't know, they don't think about, they don't care, they don't know how to start having it happen. I mean, there's a lot of things. I think we need to get to know the in-groups a lot more to actually figure out how to begin to start this process of opening up these groups a little bit. And I think we need to understand the training and the hiring path and the priorities at this level because I had a thing happen at NIH, I was on this advisory council and there was myself and a black man from AAAMC and they were so excited about the diversity. There were 22 of us, mostly captains of industry and heads of departments and universities and stuff. And so they wanted me to talk about diversity. And I started and a person stopped me and said, you know, I don't know why you're talking to me about this because it's nothing I really have to do. And we just stopped talking. And I spent three years going to lunch with these guys and I figured out a way to actually speak to them in a way in a manner that got to them. But you have to really get close and understand what they're thinking about and how they're thinking. So you have to consider, I would just say with respect to in-group bias, consider what you're quantifying, make sure that you don't have confounding factors. It's extremely easy to confound factors. And so that, you know, it's additive and so by the time you're done, this looks perfect because as Aaron Klossett suggests in his papers, you may get some really radically new and interesting ideas from looking at people from other types of institutions, with other backgrounds, with other experience. So if we begin to think about how we do this, you know, you may be able to get to, you know, a much more broader thinking, interesting, I don't know, productive, innovative. I'd love to see the schools really develop into this. And I have to congratulate Wisconsin. I've looked at departments and in terms of gender diversity, every department I looked at had made a lot of progress so that's great. We need to find a mentoring network for career letters. We need to get to the point where ending up as faculty is not the highest point for anybody with a PhD. You know, it's very important that everything be open, every single possibility be open to young people. They need to believe that anything is possible for them within a university system or in a company. And again, communication is the hardest problem, you know, for out-group people, figuring out how to talk to people in the in-group about this because in-group people don't see the problem. And so it's, you know, really anything we can do to begin to open up a conversation about this is extremely important. So I want to finish by, I hope I'm not over them. I think this started with County with Judy, but this is the part that's really important, I think, for me and it's about inclusion. And it's when groups are neutral, right? So skip the other, so we're past the other stuff and we're moving from diversity to inclusion. And it's really about relationships, okay? So again, you have in your department and people aren't feeling one way or the other. You don't have cliques, everybody, you know. So how do you get to a point where you're really making more productive use of being together in a building, for example. And that is in terms of building relationships, increasing the, I would talk about increasing the weak interactions. I was telling Tom record that, you know, when you're all like in your, with your in-group, I mean, if everything's perfectly in your gut, all your weak interactions are perfect. And again, remember the equilibrium constant for associating your in-group is really high. So the only way that you're going to start increasing the stability of B or increasing self-assembly of B is by opening up and kind of having some new binding sites there, you know, opening up. And so you do it by listening and sharing. It takes time. This is not a three-hour workshop. This is not, no, this is over time. You are gonna take time. Everybody have tea or coffee or cookies or something and begin to talk about things that are really important to you. And the other stuff will all come out and the idea is, but it's actually relationship. And so in my program, what I did was we had a set of principles that we talked about. And I think you could use anything, but my principles were know your heart, look for the positive or blessing and everything. And that was like, if someone is really mean to you, you have two immediate positives. One is that you are not that person. And the second is you're not married to that person and the kids would laugh and we'd go, well, see that shows that you don't have to immediately engage with somebody. You can take a moment and, you know, decide what you wanna do. And it goes on and on. There's tons of depth that you can get into with these principles. Embrace who you are and bring it to the table. That is that we have all the DNA from all our relatives in our bodies and we own all that history and we can bring that to the table and then show gratitude. But you can start with what are you worried about? What's bothering you? Just, you know, but it is relationship. What are your priorities? What are your values? All those things are very important. So finally, I would just say that inclusion is a transition from diversity to relationship. It's be self-assembly. It's how you share your survival tools and your rules. You know, who you go to when you need to get some advice for something. You develop a common language and oftentimes principles. And I like to connect the disciplines in this so that my students who were often for many different cultures would understand that they and their traditions and how they saw the world had an absolute right to be in science. In fact, it was important that they were there in science. And even I would tell them even if nobody tells you this ever again, I will tell you that you, it's important that you're here. And the important part of this is also for everyone to grow their imagination. It's a safe, it's a pretty safe place for all of us to be. And not only that, it's an exciting place to be. So in conclusion, I hope that you can see this now a little bit with new eyes. That you remember that the laws of physics scale, use that, that's really cool. You know, use everything you can to imagine and reframe and don't accept the idea that problems can't be solved. I just think that is such a bad way of looking. I mean, even NP hard problems in computer sciences now people are finding solutions. So pay attention. You know, bias just isn't one thing. Watch out for confounding factors, especially in hiring and watch out for really super stable in groups and ask for accountability at all levels. You know, if someone's asking you to make changes, you know, you say, well, that's fine, I'm happy to do it. And you're gonna do it too, right? I'd love to see this. And real change in ourselves and in groups, it comes from, really, my belief is that it comes from positive forces. It comes from us wanting to change, us wanting to open up because we know that if we figure out ways to really relate as human beings and have a relationship with another person that we actually are gonna benefit in terms of our ideas and our discoveries. And finally, the key to inclusion is relationship. I can't say that any stronger. And I think, you know, I'm happy to help if anybody wants to talk about this later. Now, this is for the students. So I can't see who's out there, but I just wanna say, look, students, you know, we have a long way to go and the path is not clear. We're gonna need family and allies. So make sure that you keep track of all your team, stay in touch with them, you know, support them, get their support and don't give up hope. Close your eyes. Remember who you are and where you come from. Keep in touch with that. You know, your heart really does know the way and it's distinctly possible that none of us will be able to see it without you, okay? So I'm just, you are so important. If you run into any problems, you know, make sure that you have some team members to go to. So I wanna thank you very much. Gracias and nitra is a carest for thank you, for women to say thank you. And I want to say that, you know, I couldn't have made it without Saknas. I didn't know until the end of my first year at UNM that there were other Mexican-Americans and Hispanics and Blacks who were faculty members. It's incredible, but it's been a wonderful thing. And these are a bunch of students and everybody has a great job and all but one has a PhD, so we're doing good. Thank you very much. All right, I'm sure everybody's joining in. Thank you so much for your talk, Maggie. I just put a message in the chat. Please feel free to raise your hand and ask questions. We're getting lots of hand clapping. And if nobody is going to start, I will certainly start with a question because I'm always filled with them. But I would like to open it to anybody, especially trainees who are curious to hear from Maggie. All right, so you kind of listed at the end, you talked a lot about relationships and starting to make real change. I guess I'm curious when you start a project after the initial surveying, when you identify the in-groups, the out-groups and how communication strategies work, what are the first actions you typically take when you're trying to start to answer problems? Oh, okay. I close my eyes and I just try to sink into it. And I try to bring all my experiences to bear. So I would say that time at the NIH meeting, that was pretty impressive when the guy just said, I don't know why you're talking to me about, he was a chair of a big department and there was another guy who was a surgeon. And don't talk to me about this, I don't do this. And everybody stopped. I mean, there were lots of people there in that room. And that was an important time to realize that it wasn't that he was being mean. That was really how he saw the world. And so it was like, how do you begin to talk to somebody like that? And went, oh, geez, when I was looking at baseball and I was realizing that, and basketball, I was realizing the players were upset about not having managers that reflected the players. And then I started looking at departments and stuff. And then I started looking at management of nonprofits. And I started looking at all sorts of places and you could just find all these white bean groups. And it was like, really, these are all the guys that are telling us that we have to diversify. So what's the deal here? And I just, I'm so fascinated. Now I wanna know if they just think that they don't, I don't know what they think it's, I'm really fascinated to begin to start meeting and talking to people in those groups, to try to understand why they haven't felt the need to go do something. And often the Branch Rikki actually examples a good one for them, because it'll help them think that, see how they can begin to do something. It's fascinating. I just think they haven't thought about it. Maybe they haven't thought about it. It's really interesting to find that kind of a non-random distribution in society. So I got a message from somebody who would like to be anonymous, but it is somebody asking. So they said, on your journey, have you ever had moments where it doesn't seem like you're being heard or that you struggle to get your message across? All the time, all the time. So let me just say in science, right? You're at the University of New Mexico. You call up Corning because you find there are Psi 3 overlapping floors on the slide, on the spot, only on spots prior to hybridization. Everybody's doing microarrays, right? And Corning tells you, well, it's just because you're in New Mexico, you probably hybridize the slides and didn't know it. And I say, well, I'm working with a guy at Sandia. We've developed a high-perspectal imaging microarray scanner with multivariate curve resolution. We can show you how much it's in there before. So they ended up listening to us. However, they shut down the whole part of the company. We had done all the solutions for them to fix this whole thing. They shut it down completely. So that was just in the science realm. Oh, yeah. So this'll be familiar to maybe some people here. A few years ago, there were some people that had written the paper about we were producing too many PhDs in science. And these guys were from the prestigious universities. And I think they were just used to their students all getting faculty jobs. Some reason they felt it was getting harder for them or something. And I tried to explain to them that these were biochemists and they clearly hadn't written all the equations. They didn't realize all the inputs and outputs of PhDs. And so all PhDs are not gonna go to faculty positions. There are lots of companies. There's such exciting things out there for people to do. And by them saying we're producing too many PhDs, gave a message to minorities because they're the first ones to respond to this kind of a thing that they shouldn't go get a PhD. And I knew it was gonna make my work harder and I couldn't get that out. Yeah, and even now sometimes I get on a committee and there's an in-group or something like that and you just can't get your voice heard. But I think what my goal in that then is to, if it's important for me to get my voice out, is to really try to think of the best, what are the priorities of that group or those people that are in that situation? How can I reach them? And I know there's a lot of people that would just go, I'm not gonna deal with those guys but I'm always trying because I think change, real change happens sort of gradually, I think. And I'm always trying to figure out ways to just logically reason with people. But I think that I have students who I've gotten to be very close with and they say it's because I saw them because they felt seen when I was around them and it's like, I didn't do anything special but I think that you often don't feel seen or observed. One time on that advisory council, for example, it just, there was no diversity really at all because a black guy after that one meeting didn't come back for three years. So we had three women on the committee and 19 guys and it hadn't ever been quite like that. The guys forgot our names. They would attribute something that any one of us had said to some guy who's, and this was an advisory council so it can happen anywhere that your voice hasn't heard and we just have to help each other get our voices out because a lot of really important things are never heard. Can I ask a quick question? I have to leave in three minutes but I have a quick one for you, Maggie. Sure. So you talked about faculty hiring committees and many of us faculty have served on those but there's a broader issue with hiring in general. And I wonder if you, and that issue is biased towards as you nicely highlighted, we have to evaluate candidates based on their past work in other labs. Usually we have not seen or we don't know the candidate directly. We have not, we can't evaluate them on their own independent merits, certainly for faculty, most faculty positions. Right. So it is very hard to resist the bias because we don't, I think it's hard to know what else to look at. Do you have suggestions or strategies? A side of prioritizing diversity which many of our faculty searches do. Are there other concrete things you advise that faculty committees or any hiring committee look at to evaluate independently? Well, I thought about this and you know, actually I think it's not just diversity. I mean, we can have people with all different, you know, color skins in different places and not have a really innovative group. I mean, so what you want to do, I think is find out about backgrounds. One is like, how did the person get there? You know, sometimes I've seen people just kind of, they start at the top of the mountain and roll over and roll over. You know, they've never really fought to get where they are. So that's one thing, it's, you know, what was your path to getting to this point? But I like the concept, you know, I would imagine that if I were chair of an apartment, I would like me personally, I would like the most creative people to come. And so some of the questions I would ask would be, you know, about their research and what they want to do in the future. But I would say, what if you run into this challenge? What if you ran into this challenge? You know, Brandy Diamond, I think was a professor in microbiology when I was here and he was teaching a class. And it was, you know, I followed a lot of what he did, which was you just make up paths, you know, and figure that out. But I think the concept that you can decide who's going to make a great faculty member by looking at a CV is really sort of, it seems like gotta be past its time. And it's not just for, you want diversity, but you want diversity of ideas, you want diversity, you know, what are the, you know, how are they in terms of collaboration? You know, where do they see themselves? I don't know. But to think in your department, and a lot of times we choose for comfort. I mean, I've been in a lot of faculty hires where, oh, I feel comfortable with this choice, you know, and that's when you gotta be kind of like, well, let's think about it. Did they really ask enough kind of out of the box questions to figure this out? You know, I think it's something that, there's a lot of smart people here. And I think that it would be really cool to get an idea from all of the faculty. You know, if you had to ask something outside of the regular questions that you might ask somebody for an application, you know, not just a research statement and a, you know, statement about teaching, but, you know, how would you include creativity in how you're teaching your class? Or how would, you know, that kind of stuff to really get, you know, what would, I don't know. So, you know, one of the people that I went to grad school here with was Robin Cameron. And she wrote Braiding Sweetgrass. And Sheena, I didn't talk to her about being Hispanic. She never talked to me about being Native American. We were all by ourselves really, but she's done a great job of integrating traditional knowledge with Western science. And, you know, I don't know. I keep thinking maybe there's something, if I go back to that book, there might be something I could think about. But I would just say, you know, what is it that we can, you know, what is it that makes a great faculty member, a great professor, a great mentor, you know? I mean, when I hire somebody, if they say they treat everybody the same, I would never hire that person, you know? Because you can't, you have to know, you know, where they grew up, are they urban world? Did they come from this reservation or that reservation? Are they from a little Hispanic town or from the city? You know, all those guys, you know, you talk to them, you work with them a little differently to get them to lift it up. Thanks so much, Maggie. It's always great to see you. Good to see you, Audrey. All right, well, I would love for a trainee to ask a question openly, but if nobody is going to take me up on that. You can put it in the chat. You can put it in the chat. I feel bad that there weren't questions. I mean, did people? I think the fact that there's still 70 people around, even as your answer to the questions means that. Probably people were engaged. Well, I was afraid the thermodynamics might, yeah, they're leaving now. I was afraid, I was afraid the thermodynamics might throw people off. But I thought that, you know, there are all these things that we all need to think about. You know, we're all human beings in this boat. Everybody has their plushes and their minuses. And we'll say, you know, one thing that's fascinating for me, helping now PhDs go off and connect with companies, is that the longer you're in academia, the less you seem to be paying attention to the skills that you have. I was just saying that, you know, if I ask a bachelor's level person and, you know, how they code in Python and they'll go, I'm really great. I'm a five, I've had a half a semester and you ask a PhD and they'll go, I'm probably a three. I've only used it for five years. You know, we kind of lose perspective as faculty sometimes and PhDs lose perspective on what we're capable of. But I think we could come up with some really amazing ways to address this. And I mean, I think we start with asking administrations if they notice that they're not diverse. I mean, you know, you go through so many colleges and the only darker face you see is the diversity officer. I would hate to be in that position. Absolutely. We have one question from Laney von Beck, it looks like. Yeah, really great talk. Nice to see you again. Thank you. I was just kind of curious because I know you mentioned how, you know, initially you hadn't even realized with Robin Kimmerer, I think you said. Yeah. We're like, we're kind of in, you know, the backgrounds of people. And I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on how with like social media and stuff now it can be a lot easier to connect and like see these connections and how maybe you, if there's any way that, you know, social media and just being able to seize out there more could help build diversity and inclusion. You know, social media for some reason it's very interesting to me that you can't solve disagreements on social media. You know, and so I think it's hard to have those realistic discussions on social media. You know, I'm better at it with Zoom and in person. But I do think one of the things that you could have is a tea, we used to have tea breaks and the Metzenburg's lab used to have cookie day, cookie hour or something. And, you know, you could go in there and then just make a commitment. We're going to learn everybody. We're going to learn people's stories, right? So like, I mean, I spent one year, years ago, I just decided to learn everybody's story. And so I went to Shirley Malcolm who's at AAAS and so I was at a meeting with her and I said, well, Shirley tell me about how you grew up. And she goes, well, I grew up in Birmingham and the first thing I remember was the bombing of the church, you know, and that was kind of what drove her to be a professional and be a scientist and stuff. So I think, you know, it'd be fun to go around and just, you know, ask your faculty a little bit about their themselves and hopefully they'll ask you about you. And once you get kind of, you know, have more of a relationship, you know, all sorts of discoveries possible in terms of, you know, thinking about ideas and just being able to help each other when it's needed. Judith, do you have a question? Well, no, my question is I'm supposed to be talking to you next and I wanted to make sure that you wanted to go immediately from your seminar to, you know, a one-on-one with me. And so you like a couple minutes downtime? Here's the deal. So I'm retired, right? And I was home and I thought yesterday was my virtual travel day, but it wasn't. I had like meetings in the morning. It was so great. And then I met with people all day to day. Well, my internet went down three times. So I haven't been in this department because I'm retired. I haven't been in the department for a year and a half over almost two years. And so we just rushed to the department, brought my big old second monitor and I'm set up saying it. So, you know, talking right now is fine. Okay, okay. I mean, I'm not in anybody's office that I know. I think it's a different zoom link that I'm supposed to log into. So I'll log into that, but. All right, all right. Listen, if anybody has any questions, my email, you can find me. I'm all over the web. You know, I've had a very diverse, interesting career and I'm sorry I didn't talk about science. I worked on QIES, non-QIES in sales and stationary phase. I love it, but I really thought that, you know, this might be something that you would be able to chew on a little bit more. So I hope that everybody like it, but you're free to contact me and ask questions or just tell me anything. Tell me, especially tell me your responses because, you know, I was very nervous coming back to the biochemistry department. You guys are big in my heart and Bob Burris and Mel Cleveland and all these guys were huge in my life and even James Crow and I mean, just Wisconsin's an incredible place and Betty and Ken Keekster and everybody. And thank you, Judy for inviting me. No, thank you so much for coming and speaking with our group and with our students. And it's been such a pleasure to host you. So I'm gonna end the Zoom meeting, but thank you very much. Yeah, thank you. All right, Judith, I'll see you next time. Yeah, okay.