 Hello and welcome back to the workshop. I am late to Winfield professor of chemistry and biochemistry and the division chair for natural sciences and mathematics at Spellman College. We're now moving into session to which will be primarily held on slack and online messaging forum for sharing ideas and responding to discussion prompts. If you have not yet joined slack workspace that is dedicated to this workshop or if you have not yet read through the slack guidance, please be sure to do so now before participating in this session. Links for both are found on the agenda. The mission of the chemical sciences roundtables are CSR is to provide a science oriented apolitical form for discussing chemical for discussing chemically related issues affecting government industry and universities. In line with this mission the aim of this workshop is to provide a forum for academic government and industrial colleagues to increase awareness of potential barriers to diversity, equity and inclusion, and gain the information needed to create more diverse, equitable and inclusive environments in their workspaces. The planning committee members felt that because this workshop is virtual due to health and safety concerns. Another tool was needed to encourage and enhance community. Encourage and enhance community engagement beyond just a webinar or webcast platform slack provides a unique way for everyone in attendance to connect and come together to open dialogue and productive conversations around a set of topics. In this session, we will ask that you all focus on your conversations, focus your conversations into the seven channels named channel underscore and a number one through seven. There is a set topic of conversations and a list of goals for each channel. The goals for the channels can be found in the slack guidance document. Again, that is located on the agenda. Please do stay on topic in each of the channels so that the conversation can remain productive, and we can move towards developing actionable and implementable thoughts and ideas. Many committee members will be posting leading questions in the channels throughout the hour to provoke your thoughts to provoke your thoughts and guide the conversation. In accordance with the policies of the National Academies, the meeting are going to organizers reserve the right to remove individuals from slack work spaces. At any point, participants will be removed if the content that they post is disrespectful offensive lude are deemed counterproductive. Lastly, the organizers may reach out to you to delete the post. If the content is not relevant to the channel, you are posting in are relevant to this workshop in general. If you have any questions, please reach out in the NA in the NA SCM support channel on slack or email bro rich at nas.edu. The email is shown on the screen. We will all meet back on zoom at 1 30pm Eastern time. At that point, we will hear from each of the planning committee members, a brief summary of what was discussed in each of the slack channels. Note that not all thoughts or conversations will be captured in this summary, but they will, but they may be captured in the published proceedings in brief are used for potential follow on activities. At this time, and you can find the links to slack on the agenda. If you haven't already registered please do so, as well as read the slack guidance document, and we will move the conversation into the slack channels at this time. Welcome back to zoom. I hope everyone enjoyed using slack and was able to engage in some meaningful discussions with other participants. We will now hear from each of the planning committee members who will summarize the conversation that had that was had in the channels that they participated in. Again, note that not all thoughts or conversations will be captured in this summary, but they may be captured in the published proceedings in brief are used for potential follow on activities. We have five minutes to summarize your discussions from the channel, and we'll start with channel one which was moderated by Cheryl. We started out with very basic discussion of the definition of mentoring. Often we think we know what it is, but there are various perspectives on that one. We came to a consensus that the definition of mentoring is not well articulated in the literature. Some say that a mentor can be an advocate. Others say that mentors differ from advocates. What does a mentor really do? Is it someone who gives advice or asks you what do you think works best for you. Talked about choosing mentors. There was a consensus among the group that assigned mentors. By the way, this is backed up with research, assigned mentors are ineffective, both in academia and perhaps an industry as well. Many students do not know how to choose a mentor, and I would say this is especially the case for underrepresented minority students, and some don't even know that they need a mentor. So what should be done? First of all, graduate student associations have been effective in bringing together faculty and graduate students to interact on a regular basis so that they get to know each other, and the choice can basically be mutual. Do they get along well enough to have that type of relationship? It was also suggested that we should consider mentoring an active aspect of training, and by that we mean we should block off time for mentorship in the same way that students are encouraged to focus on writing and reading, you know, blocking out time. Indeed, we might say that some students may need to learn how to identify relevant outlets for their writing. So topics we did not get to, the notions of concurrent versus sequential mentoring, and by concurrent meaning is one mentor at one point in time enough, or, you know, does one mentor is one mentor appropriate for all. So peer to peer mentoring, some of these programs are proven to be very effective. And again, especially with URM students, talked about mentoring across sectors, equity, government and industry, and the impact and effect of that arrangement. And finally, and we didn't get to talk about this one as well, they, and I don't mean this in a negative or pejorative way, but the burden of mentorship on URM faculty, you know, often faculty are encouraged to mentor underrepresented students. Time is a zero sum game. This clearly takes away from their other responsibilities as a scholar and teacher. And I think this is especially the case with women, but perhaps that can be discussed at another time. So that was, that was our session and I'm, I appreciate the input and impact. Oh, one more thing I meant to mention. We were talking about mentoring through professional societies, a program called minorities striving and pursuing higher degrees of success in earth system science, professional development program. And what this does is to indeed offer access to a network of mentors from academia and government and industry. And what it did was to. Okay, the person who mentioned this said that the program lasted for two and a half years, provided funding to attend to professional meetings and a tour of government agencies in DC. They easily expanded their network by engaging with mentors outside of their university. And the program gave them a safe space to talk about issues that they're dealing with in their graduate programs. And the person suggested this said that they don't know if there's a similar program in other disciplines. So that is the end of our session. Thank you. Perfect Cheryl. Next we'll have channel to which is Jessica. Hello all so the topic of channel to was implementing proactive methodologies for success. This was a bit of a quieter channel, but there was still some great points raised so I will go through those. We started by discussing how one should define success, and the participants of the channel felt that success should be defined by measurable impacts and by achieving set goals. The conversation then moved to discussing the resources available to new programs and initiatives. And those resources that would be available to help them be successful and to not have to start from scratch and recreate the wheel. In addition to sharing some outside resources, the participants also shared advice for internal strategies and practices that one could implement. Also discussed was the idea of scaling up already established and successful programs. A participant shared that a national repository or database of programs should be created as you're not even aware of what others have tried. Multiple participants stressed that DEI work at an institution should be decentralized in order for an organization to increase their success. A participant suggested that having institutions publicly report their data and actions would lead to positive peer pressure in which other institutions would follow suit and begin to report their data. The importance of students joining local chapters of groups such as Stockness and WCC was shared as those groups provide support in a variety of ways, increasing an individual's chance for success. It was noted that the student engagement with these groups has increased during the pandemic due to deep decrease costs of participating virtually, as well as other reasons. It was raised whether or not this trend would continue post-pandemic, but that of course is to be seen. And finally, right before we went to the report outs, a great question was posed in the channel asking if it's even realistic for programs to be proactive when they spend so much time. Sorry, if it is realistic for programs to be proactive when they spend so much time being reactive, especially now that DEI is a hot topic in the news and so many institutions are being called out for one reason or another. I think it would be great if we could at some point come back to the channel and continue the conversation and address that question. But that that was the summary for channel two. Great. Thank you, Jessica. We have channel three Rigoberto. Hello, and everyone. Thank you. So our channel was the topic was overcoming institutionalized barriers, diverse talent. And I suppose that one of the things that is common is that we need to create community. And so I'm happy to say that at least 13 of our members said something about themselves and introduce themselves at the very start. And I think that's really key for us to make progress. So I hope that all of you that are here are feeling yourselves heard. And I hope to continue and will continue to hear you and your suggestions because that's the only way we're going to solve this by working together to find these barriers. So the, there was a recognition among the members of the group that we have barriers or challenges on the one hand for programs to create equitable spaces. And on the other hand for individuals to enter and succeed in those programs. And that perhaps as we think about this challenge or this question we need to think about both sides of that. The one corresponds to what leaders can do, and we'll just have to do to modify their programs. And one is how individuals can navigate that space along their pathway. So a number of was some specificity I think that if we had enough time, we would, I could spend the entire half hour but I'm only going to have a couple minutes and just going to give you a few examples. The issue of the lack of transparency and in fact the existence of unwritten rules. And because of those unwritten rules, maybe only in group members know what it takes to succeed what they need to succeed. And our group members are not able to do that. The what we heard about mentoring, oftentimes mentoring provides a way to remove the lack of access to unwritten rules but perhaps the best thing to do is to not have written rules at all. And that led to an issue among some of our members about, well, how do we hold our ourselves accountable to be transparent in our rules? How do we let others know that we need to make some changes and to be open, etc. And there was a concern that in some cases that when you try to be accountable and when you try to hold someone accountable, because that's another thing that has been a barrier, that the in group members or the leadership then responds by saying publicly shaming you for that we will be publicly shaming ourselves if we held, if we were held accountable and we released information. And so it stops any discussion of releasing the numbers, which is something we've talked about before. And so perhaps we have to move away from this shaming and really allow ourselves to actually talk about the real problems and in that way be able to address them. Another key that kept coming up was this idea of change, that it's very hard in a shared governance activities or shared governance domain or when there's leadership that doesn't necessarily buy in to this change to create and lead change. So one can try to look for incremental change, but that incremental change often involves compromises and can lead to policies are ineffective. So for example, if we all agree mentoring is important. What we just heard from the channel to is that if you, if you assign a mentor, that's not necessarily effective because it doesn't actually create the relationship and trust that you need. You can identify what's needed, but you have a policy that doesn't work. How do we then fix that policy with a less than incremental change. And so, so I think that many of us wondered how to enact change in a in a real way, and how to work with changes and manage that on the one hand to make it happen. And then finally, how do you communicate those changes. So you communicate those through your web web pages communicate that through through emails or through open forums etc. How do you communicate those changes. How do you obtain buy in from the community. Now that that changes happen. So there are both direct barriers, that is policies and procedures that are thwarting the success of individuals equitably. And then there are barriers to implementing the corrections. And so as we look forward to changing policies and procedures, really moving the needle through the policies that we're talking about at this workshop. So those two, both the direct and the meta parts have to be considered. And so I think everyone in our group that contributed. There is a lot. It's a very robust discussion and I only expect that it will increase during the rest of the day so I look forward to learning more from the team. Wow, thank you Rigoberto. Let's go to channel six in. So I had the privilege of helping to moderate channel six. Our topic was preparing young chemists and chemical engineers for success. So, you know, I really build on a lot of the themes that have been emerging from the other channels so far. And I'll say rather than focusing on let's say gaps in technical preparedness right that yield or result in success in the chemical sciences. We focused a bit more on perception, quite frankly and sort of the call it the barriers to entry is thinking about barriers to entry. And sorry, just to sort of back up we looked at perception as sort of a big one there and sort of the extent to which students who are going through the school age years have the ability to see themselves as, you know, future scientists or future chemists in this particular film. And so that gets into elements of what we've already talked about before, which is mentorship, and certainly the idea of sort of demystifying all elements of the process right so so what does becoming a scientist look like what a chemist look like. And not only that but then what do the discrete steps of the process of getting there kind of look like and how do we enable students to envision themselves participating in each step of that process. I think some themes that really emerged were really around the notion of call it academic persistence or perseverance notion certainly that the research is a lot of getting it wrong until you get it right. And so how do we equip, you know, students with call it the mental health skills or the perseverance to call it whether those failures in the lab or otherwise or in the classroom, but to continue to try until they achieve foundational understanding or a level of success that allows them to reach their degree goals or otherwise. So there was like I said let's talk about technical skills and more talk around call it soft skills, effective communication, the ability to demonstrate critical thinking, especially as you look at getting or pursuing career paths beyond your degree so whether you're actually pursuing something in academia or something in industry, what becomes absolutely critical to landing that role. And again that gets into sort of demystifying what actually needs to be true. What are what are folks missing, especially in our underrepresented groups that aren't allowing them to show up as perhaps more competitive or able to land those roles. So looking at notes and if I may just circle back to a couple of either resources or things that poked out as good examples. There was a book that was shared in terms of call it the unspoken rules around how to be successful than graduate school by Jessica Larko a field guide to grad school uncovering the hidden curriculum. So that was shared within our slack channel. And then also a couple of good examples again about sort of pulling back the curtain demystifying the career path within the chemical sciences there was a good example that was brought up. Kind of within the bucket of called it mentors and cohorts. Good example of some stem program in Atlanta, where the participant was deliberate in pairing 30 stem professionals with stem educators for a full year, so that they could more fully bring to life elements of their curriculum in the classroom to make it more real for students. At the end of the day, it resulted in some real success for the students not only some increase in passion but also some success in in things like institutions which I thought was really clever. And then also a great example about a chemistry festival, especially in, I think this example was actually in a third world country so how do you bring the idea of a scientific career path really to life for folks who who have no concept of it because they're struggling to even meet more basic needs on a day to day basis, but yet we still need those folks to be participating and so another good example of how we're demystifying it pulling back the curtain and bringing it to life so lots of great discussion in the slack channel. I really appreciate everyone's participation and I look forward to the continued discussion there. So thank you. And we're going to go to channel seven now, which should be Carlos. All right, thank you, Lita. So our channel channel seven was actually communication, communicating the benefits of the diverse workforce. Essentially, it was actually a very active channel with a lot of interesting insights and conversations and different threats. I will summarize that in three main questions that we asked and trying to answer and discuss. The first one was related to how we identify the potential, the benefits for any organization. The next ones were actually related to the challenges that we have in communicating this and conveying these benefits. And the last one was, you know, what will be the best practices and the strategies to effectively convey these benefits to decision makers, students, staff and etc. And the last one was actually we touch upon what will be the metrics of success in some of these activities. So it was actually very, very interesting to see different points of view from people from academia and industry and national agencies as well. The benefits I think we came to the consensus that which is not a surprise for this group is that we think that the diverse pool of scientists and engineers lead to innovation and discovery. And that's probably the best benefit that you can actually convey to managers and so on and so forth, you know, in different organizations. Beyond actually being the right thing to do is the smart thing to do as well. So just we did discuss a lot of those. I mean, for instance, initially, there's a participant that says well there is plenty of evidence that diverse teams are more generative with academic chemists seem rather resistant to the message or are completely unaware of the data. So it seems to that there is still some resistance among some members of the academic institutions to understand the value of a diverse pool. So I'm coming from one of the participants that says I'm on colleagues. There are those who believe that diversity and excellence are at odds with each other. Another one says the selection of students and hiring processes are highly focused on excellence, and they don't really account for other other factors like lures was talking about yesterday about you know, economical factors, societal factors and so on so forth people might actually be very good scientists but do not have the opportunity because they haven't had the access to an opportunity that some other people have. There was actually somebody from the one on the national agency and says well, you know, they think that agencies see challenges in getting a competitive diverse pool of applicants. Often the more of their work on the representative candidates don't meet the minimum posting requirements for the position where the position is not an entry level position. So there was a lot of discussion surrounding that I mean questions were okay can can agencies actually work together with the universities and trying to actually come up with the, you know, minorities institutions with this national agencies to see if they can have some kind of programs, official programs that can actually help in this respect that the world, there was a little discussions about how we could do that. In fact, I know for instance DOE has some programs already along those lines that has been very successful. I have actually met leaders at DOE that started from very small schools around the country that was were actually contacted by DOE and where, you know, part of these programs and they're actually highly successful leaders nowadays. So there was a lot of discussions about that. In fact, the, I was told a DOE national labs as a sociable minority service institutions and South Carolina State University of Florida International University and so on so forth. There are programs there that can serve as models that we can look at and learn from so to actually trying to improve in this in this particular area trying to empower minority students to actually be better represented when they actually get higher. In terms of best practices, there were a lot of discussions about that and you're not trying to summarize some of those I know that I'm running out of time. So one of those, and it's actually related to what we were talking before about opportunities. It's actually, well, are there opportunities for internships, in particular, internships between, you know, national agencies, universities, colleges, community colleges, and also industry. Right. So, and that's something that was highly discussed and it seems to be one area where, you know, we can make progress to move the needle. Of course, it will need to, you know, it cannot be just a sporadic effort, it has to be probably a coherent effort among different institutions and agencies and industries that we can actually so we can actually make an impact. I think in that respect industry might actually be ahead of the pack, and they're trying to do some of some of that already. And maybe we should actually learn from them by interacting with industry a little bit more in these areas. Another in areas of our universities, I mean I've heard that some schools are implementing the strategies leading to the improvements reorganize and target climate diversity and equity inclusion. Using steering committees, and so on so forth, and that actually allows for accountability and also to increase the environment. I'll just, I will just one more thing before I finish is actually a regarding metrics of success. Most of the people feel that the metrics of success that we currently have to actually gauge the success of our candidates from the minority institutions are not good enough. And they don't seem to be adequate and equitable with other people. So I'm not going to leave it up to that but there was a lot of stuff that I would like to cover but I don't I'm running out of time. Thank you. Thank you Carlos. We're going to go to channel five with Malika. I almost feel like I could yield my time back to Carlos because he has so much to say because channel five was actually a pretty slow channel. The topic was broadening the role of existing resources and networks. And so, you know, I had a couple of discussion points up on the board, one actually initially cross posted to the other channel and got a lot of responses regarding just the existing different organizations that support di and the chemical sciences. And so that's right actually got a lot of input and information and, you know, as people are sitting if you didn't join channel five piece pop in and populate it we just love to know what else is out there beyond the major ones like novice and sadness and you know what other organizations exist that doing di work and Chris panicky actually contributed that no goes up as actually recently can change your name to out to innovate and to be even more inclusive and gave us an updated link for that son that was when I was not aware of and so we're hoping to grow that the second question. That was just asked is, how do we grow and sustain networks to do di work and a lot of discussion on that said that you know in fact it's really the large organizations like a ICH and ACS that can drive this and that need to have diversity and inclusion as major thrust and we know ACS has come out and made statements to the fact that they actually value diversity inclusion, equity and respect. And as a core tenant in their strategic planning and to just look at them to be drivers of this up in the field, but both at the national level, but also at the local level and I actually commented on my own experiences. As an ACS counselor which is really drawing from local, local participants and not very diverse so we probably need more of a top down push through those networks as well. The other question was why is diversity and inclusion initiatives important to the organization and some of the comments around that we're just looking at ethical responsibilities and the fact that we also need to train all of our students to get them ready to tackle problems and we also do need to increase the number of minoritized students who are in these research labs to to keep up with workplace and workforce staffing needs. And so those are some of the discussion around that I'm an interesting point that came up is that we need to also bring up di much earlier in education that a lot of our discussions here are centered around the graduate enterprise the college enterprise the you know the kind of workforce activities, but to look at what can we do at the K through 12 levels to increase diversity and inclusion in high school curriculum, and even getting younger kids trained. And I think that's actually a very important point that you know I feel like kids are just, they're just kind and sweet at birth and they learn to be biased and racist later and if we can kind of get that intervention going earlier I think long term will save ourselves some trouble. That was pretty much it in terms of the activity on the channel the channel is still up active channel five. If you didn't get a chance to check us out and want to add to our conversation, please, please jump on some of these threads and fill this out. Thank you. Thank you for that Malika. So, we'll go to channel for which is the channel that I facilitated on fostering inclusive classrooms and workspaces, and our goals were to identify effective strategies for fostering such an environment, and figuring out how we can empower individuals on these initiatives to advance the culture of inclusion and and adopt inclusive practices throughout the organization. So, I summarize these into actions that organizations are currently taking, and those actions that are still needed. So, in terms of what's currently being done individuals indicated that at the provost levels initiatives have been established in connection with the teaching and learning centers to develop professional training and development opportunities related to the there's also an expectation of D I that is being assessed through tenure and promotion and performance reviews at some campuses, other campuses indicated they don't have such criteria at this time but would like to see something like that occurring. Some campuses are creating what's called equity action plans, and others are utilizing climate surveys to gain feedback on where they are, as well as student insight related to D I practices on campus. There are some organizations that have lunch D I lunch chats are lunch and learn series. Others are creating committees at the departmental or agency level related to D I. Some goals of these committees are to establish objectives for the key constituents, as well as related to actions and timelines and measures of success so how does successful D I practices look at each level, as well as promoting personal accountability for D I and committees contain can contain a range of constituents throughout the organizations. One participant wrote that for many companies a key component includes inclusion is the existence of performance management systems which take into account, take, which take account of both what one does and how one accomplishes that. Others are thinking about including guidance within faculty handbooks and organizational handbooks for employees with that the actions that are still needed include buying at higher levels of administration and leadership within organizations. One interesting comment that came up was a need to map network works that influence D I to understand how those networks work, and what is the impact of those networks on decision making related to D I. There's also a need for transparency related to training and promotion and pay, and how those decisions influence or advance D I. The funds are also needed for outside trainers and consultants to come into the organization and help create a narrative and language and actions related to D I. To that in general campuses and organizations are in need of language that effectively describe what D I is for an organization, how a culture of D I would look as well as providing guidance to constitute constituents on how they can achieve the expectations that are being set by their campuses and organizations for D I such language currently is vague or either it's it's not existing.arity is needed for our needed regarding how these efforts will be evaluated and accountability is needed be on the D I officer so as we are hiring individuals to lead these efforts. We want to make sure that it just is not placed upon the appointee who's leading these efforts to make sure they come to fruition and are effective. We need to ingrain these efforts inside of our performance reviews which I think has been said, one point that has was brought up that I didn't hear and others were, how do we effectively deal with bullying and other aggressive behavior. And we need to acknowledge and reward invisible or our emotional work which tends to be where most of the activities reside. And with that, I will stop here with my report out. I think we're, we have a break that schedule for 215. And we will return at 235 for our session three. So you're on break now until 235 at which point, we will hear from Judy Kim from the University of California as San Diego. Thanks everyone for participating in the session and see you at 235.