 Dr. Clifton Poudre, who is a courtesy professor at University of Oregon, where he participates in the instruction of an ethics course for graduate students. He was also a professor of biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he also served in several administrative capacities as a rotating program director for Developmental Biology at the National Science Foundation. He developed the Minority Supplement Initiative that was implemented widely by the directorates at NSF and later at the National Institutes for Health. He was the director of the training workforce development and diversity division at the National Institute for General Medical Sciences. He developed a new research design to understand the efficacy of interventions and thus inform future planning of student development activities. He has also developed the Native American Research Centers for Health program in collaboration with the Indian Health Service as a senior fellow in the science education department at HHMI. He led the Gilliam Fellowship program and an experiment for adoption and adaptation of the UMBC My Health program. Dr. Poudre is a native of the Dona Wanda Seneca Indian Reservation in Western New York. He earned both a bachelor's and a master's in biology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. And he received the PhD in biology from Case Western Reserve University. These points I would like to invite Dr. Poudre to make his presentation and welcome. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. Thank you so much for the invitation, thanks to the group that put this together. This has been a rich and stimulating conversation and the presentation is thus far has given me at least given us a lot to think about. It's really an honor to be part of this activity along with people today who I hold in the highest esteem. My path, like many that we've heard of in the last different sessions, my path to leadership was definitely not intentional. That is, as a young faculty member, I never imagined myself as a leader, even in roles as small as chairing a small committee. I learned early on that the committee chair gets stuck with all the work. More importantly, and this may be cultural, I believed that people coveting leadership were exactly the kinds of people who shouldn't be leading. So I didn't want to be coveting a leadership kind of activity. Over the years, I did get appointed to various positions, department chair, acting dean, even served for several years as an associate vice chancellor, and the offices of admissions, financial aids, a learning center, equal opportunity, and the colleges were reporting to me. These were not part of my expertise, they weren't even part of my interest to be truthful. But I saw leadership as a necessary service. To me, leadership was a duty to perform, something that I should do. Lucky for me, I had excellent staffs, as mentioned. The staffs are often where the leadership activities take place. I was asked, did I have role models who were Native American? I'm not going to go into much of this, but at the time that I was growing up at both my baccalaureate and master's, there were no other Natives in the sciences, and as far as I was aware, there were not even any Natives in the whole institutions. When I was already a faculty member at Santa Cruz, my colleague Frank Talamantes introduced me to someone who went to grad school with Frank Dukopu Ahope. He was the first Native that I had ever met that was a scientist. He in turn introduced me to Donna Schopenek, who was at Haskell Indian Nations Tribal College, and I went there to visit with him because it happened to be a school where my grandmother was sent as a small girl during the boarding school days when students were taken from their tribes. Over the next several years with Don and Frank, we collectively knew five Natives in science. There are quite a few more in engineering, but in terms of other scientists, it was at that time only about five. I'd like to describe a couple of situations that may have helped shaped my ability to stay in the course, and just for context I'll tell you, so way back, I was raised on the reservation by five different families from the time that I was from age one to age five, and Natives to say we were very, very poor. I was good, but not a great student, and one invent in a seventh grade class is one that I'd like to tell you about, it may have made a real difference in my life. The teacher was talking about weather, and he'd asked a question to the class about water movement globally. Well, no one answered, many of us are kind of head down, and since there was a good long silence, I raised my hand and offered an answer. After my answer he said that's incorrect, but good thinking. I was nervous speaking up to begin with, and I got it wrong. But that was okay. In the way that he responded to me, including the way that he just looked, maybe he smiled I'm not sure, but there was something in the message. He indicated that it was okay to make mistakes, to be mistaken. As long as you were thinking, I believe that that message was a pivot point in my life. I'd like to jump ahead quite a bit to graduate school, and my advisor, Professor Howard Schneiderman, Howard just exuded a joy in life. He was curious about many things, he was excited about new ideas, and he made grappling with the problems of the day seem like an exciting venture. He was also highly respectful of others. My skills at the time, at finding fault in others, vastly exceeded my skills at finding value. He was patient with me. If I thought something was wrong, or someone was wrong, he challenged me to find four, perhaps hypothetical, to find four situations in which they might be correct, or find four ways that something that I believed might be wrong. He asked me to really think and articulate things. Question assumptions, especially your own, I actually even questioned other people's assumptions as well. Our lab at that time was very diverse and inclusive. People international, people of different races, genders, it was not only diverse, but it was, I felt very inclusive. So much so that I wasn't even aware of it, I didn't recognize it as special. As one example, Lowell Davis, African American, who taught me electron microscopy and he later went on to become a professor at Syracuse, I had no awareness at the time of underrepresentation of natives or African Americans, or how special he was, because he was part of the team. He was included, included was the norm. Howard Schneiderman was curious. He enjoyed ideas and working those ideas with people around him. He would say, I'd rather have my mistakes revealed here among colleagues, among friends than out there in a review and a manuscript. I don't know if he was what David Assai mentioned in an earlier talk, whether he was a collector or a nightlight. But he was certainly someone for me to emulate. Over the years, there have been many individuals, someone, the panelists here, that I've met and admired and there are people that I would hope to emulate. And of course, I've met others along the way who are on the do not emulate list as well. But to fast forward to my years at NIGMS, where my colleague, Yvonne Maddox, an African American, encouraged me to take the Kennedy School of Government course for senior leaders in government. While I wasn't excited about doing that, she was very persuasive. And the experience opened my eyes in many ways. And I have been ever grateful for her advice. I had a great relationship with my boss, my supervisor, the director of NIGMS at the time, Marvin Kasman. Marvin could be very direct, just as Professor Tapia is very direct. Marvin could be very direct. And after hearing my plan for a postdoc program that would benefit minority serving institutions, he told me that's the dumbest thing I ever heard. But he allowed me to bring in an ad hoc group to advise on the idea. And at the end of that meeting, which came a couple months later, he told the group, when I heard Cliff's idea, I told him it was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard. But after the conversation today, I changed my mind. And I think it's worth a try. That idea became the Iraqi program, postdoc training program. And my point is that Marvin, as direct as he was, he had an open mind. And he listened. He argued, but he listened and he kept an open mind. In my division, in order to make a memorable point, we began to describe the bottom up approach to improving representation as the fix the student approach. No one likes the idea of being fixed. So we looked to move beyond fixing the students and suggested fix the faculty and fix the institution as ideas. I was told that the way to influence is to keep things as three ideas. So that's why our message was fix the students, fix the faculty, fix the institution to get people thinking about it. And to soften the message, we called fix the faculty part, faculty development. And we referred to institutional change. I now wish that we reframed that issue differently. You see, while it did let us emphasize the importance of faculty development and institutional change, we weakened the continuing importance of student development. I wish we'd emphasized the importance of learning, of growing, and of having a growth mindset. Enforced change, fixing someone is a fence, but enabling growth and development should be natural expectations, expectations of us that are students. So let me just summarize the three lessons learned in my life, just pick three. Number one, it's okay to make mistakes as long as you're thinking. I think this keeps us going so that we're not afraid of thinking, of trying. Two, always question your assumptions and you can question the assumptions of others. And three, emulate people who embrace the joy in life, the curiosity, and with humility and respect for others. And I'll break my rule of three and one more, model and nurture a growth mindset. I was asked to mention a couple of things where are we now in preparing leaders. One of my observations was that I was asked to One of my observations is that there are numerous courses available, many online courses for leadership development. And I'd like to highlight two very different objectives that I see in the leadership training. One is getting there. So part of the training helps people to achieve the positions that they're looking for. Getting there. The second thing is serving well. So two different objectives to leadership training. One is to is getting there. And the second is serving well. These have different motivations, I believe. And they lead to different kinds of leaders. Courses of bound with strategies for networking for presenting oneself influence and get ahead. Fewer courses help develop or reinforce the commitment to service to doing a good job in service of a cause or ideals of a team or organization. What do we need to do going forward? It's not easy, but I think we should change expectations. We should emphasize service as an essential part of the job. We should avoid incentives like the plague. We should change the job description. Unexpected rewards may be a technique, maybe a useful technique, unlike incentives, unexpected rewards can highlight values. One that I keep seeing on the TV this time of the year, the Walter Payton Award, which, which rewards people for the service, the public service and public good that they've been doing. Finally, are there questions where research is needed? I'll say that I don't know in my ignorance. I'm curious about which of two motivations for learning mastery versus performance is more important, more desirable for leadership. And whether those two approaches, mastery versus performance, whether those approaches are ingrained in us, are those, are those teachable? Are they, are they coachable? It's important that leadership development be evidence-based, and I think that the new tools may be needed for rigorous research. I think I'll leave other comments for discussion. Anyway, thank you very, very much for allowing me to be a part of this conversation.