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Producing the Right Technical and Professional Science Workforce: Ensuring Inclusivity, Increasing Diversity, and Improving Training
If the future is all about human capital, said Kim Hunter Reed, Louisiana’s commissioner of higher education and moderator of the third session of the symposium, “how do we think about developing science and technology talent that is more inclusive, more diverse, and has the skills and knowledge necessary to meet demand? How do we take a big-tent approach and broaden the club?” To answer this question, the panelists in the symposium’s third session—in this case, all from academia—examined best practices to ensure equity and ways of expanding opportunities so that more people participate in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.
OPENING UP THE CLUB
To open up the club, people need to be invited in, said Angela Belcher, James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering and Materials Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Furthermore, they need to be invited in not only at the undergraduate and graduate levels but throughout their education, even in kindergarten.
Belcher said that she has a particular passion for teaching 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds about science and engineering. Several years earlier, she had been asked to teach about the rain forest, and she thought, “I actually don’t know much about the rain forest, . . . but I know a lot about water.” Even with very young students, she can use hands-on materials like dodgeballs to teach about hydrogen atoms, oxygen atoms, and hydrogen bonds. A dodgeball can be an electron, a proton, or an atom with which to make amorphous or crystalline materials. Some atoms are greedy for electrons while others are happy to share their electrons. Teachers and their students can sing songs, make up stories, engage in activities—“and we always use dodgeballs, because they’re such an important tool for teaching science.” Once children learn about hydrogen bonds, they can learn about DNA—“the secret to life.” Once they understand hydrophilic and hydrophobic molecules, they can learn about compartmentalization and cells. Once they learn about how electrons move, they can build solar cells and batteries.
By getting students excited about knowing, it is possible to communicate with them about the important issues associated with science, Belcher said. Furthermore, they can understand that they have the power to become scientists and engineers themselves and solve critical problems. Children know and worry about emerging infectious diseases, climate change, poverty, and shortages of food and water; when they see how scientists can help solve such problems, they get excited about becoming scientists themselves. “Never has there been a more important time to be a scientist or engineer.” Whether in food, water, health care, climate change, infectious diseases, or many other fields, “there’s never been a point where we have the opportunity to make a bigger impact.”
This approach works at all levels of education and with all populations. However, students, and particularly students from underrepresented groups, need support and mentoring if they are to succeed. In particular, mentoring is crucial in helping students understand that they are good enough. “I had fantastic graduate and postdoc mentors, but I also had a lot of really hard experiences, where people told me, ‘She’s not good enough. She doesn’t have the background. She can’t do it.’” Those negative comments and ideas need to be corrected, Belcher insisted.
Peer mentoring is especially effective in that it can help both the students who are doing the mentoring and the students who are being mentored. “This generation of undergraduate and graduate students are so invested in peer mentoring that we have more peer mentors at MIT who want to work and will work for free.”
PREPARING EVERYONE TO CONTRIBUTE
The son of Ghanian immigrants, Kafui Dzirasa, who is now associate professor at Duke University and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, was an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he joined a scholarship program originally geared toward increasing the number of African American men getting Ph.D.’s in the sciences. As an undergraduate, he got so interested in biomedical engineering that he decided to get an M.D.-Ph.D. at Duke University. There he worked on neuroprosthetics that can interface with the brain, and when he received his M.D.-Ph.D. he had the “unique opportunity” to become a psychiatry resident while also starting his own research laboratory. He had his first R01 grant at the age of 34, which is about in the first percentile in terms of age, and he was also one of the small percentage of U.S. scientists who are African Americans. He was living in a world that he would scarcely have been able to imagine as a child, and he “wanted to change the world that I saw ahead of me.”
Dzirasa was also an athlete in college, which taught him that “if we’re going to compete, we should compete to win.” In thinking about the next 75 years of global competition, he drew an analogy with the women gymnasts who have represented the United States in recent Olympics. All around the United States, children are tumbling or climbing on equipment, “because we have decided that in order to compete, there has to be access, and it has to be everywhere for people to come and engage.” Very few of the children in those gyms will become world champions. But some will become coaches, and others will become parents who will involve their own children in gymnastics. The gymnasts who eventually represent the United States in the Olympics come from throughout the country, and some are immigrants from other countries. “We take all these young people and teach them how to work together to compete for something that is bigger than themselves.” That will become increasingly important in the sciences as well, said Dzirasa.
But many young people in the United States are facing great difficulties in pursuing such ambitions. According to recent data, 20 to 30 percent have had profound feelings of anxiety and depression, and one in six has had suicidal thoughts. If they manage to get through college and into graduate school, many are burdened with onerous student debt. The United States thinks of itself as number one, yet it is 18th in the world in science achievement among primary and secondary students and 34th in mathematics, Dzirasa observed. “We’re not preparing people to compete,” and the problem is intensifying as the U.S. population becomes more diverse.
In his presentation, Dzirasa described a new world that could come into existence in future decades as a result of advances in science and technology. All information could be accessible to anyone, including massive amounts of data from projects like a cancer moonshot or brain initiative. People could have ways to do science in venues that are adjacent to, but not necessarily embedded in, the academic world. “Once the papers and the publications are available, what is to stop the guy or the girl at home from taking the data and solving the problem? What happens in that case? Do they publish it? Is the reference their home address? What happens to the grant funding? How would we support
and incentivize a space like this? This world, where we are open to the possibility that the solutions to cancer and heart disease and COVID and mental illness lie within the brains of our talented youth, would transform our systems.”
PRODUCING A WORLD-CLASS WORKFORCE
Keith Yamamoto, professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco, identified two questions that underlie approaches to broadening participation in STEM education and careers. First, how can society produce the science and technical workforce needed for the future? Second, how can graduate research institutions produce the best science and technology? Together, these two questions “traverse the whole pathway to have at least a response, if not an answer, to this challenging topic.”
“Humans are innately scientists,” he said. “They’re curious, creative, thrilled by discovery, thrilled to learn about hydrogen bonds and shared electrons.” But science education tends to squelch that natural interest. “Science is about memorizing the 206 bones of the body, and that’s what’s going to be on the test.” Science education needs to capitalize on the excitement of discovery and focus on ways to leverage that excitement.
Science will also contribute to, if not lead, society’s response to existential challenges in areas such as health, climate change, energy, and food and water security. “Our current approaches to solving the problems embedded in each of those areas are not sufficient to bring us to addressing those problems at the pace that they need to be addressed if we’re going to continue to exist,” Yamamoto said. Science teaching needs to convey to students that their contributions to knowledge could be key in helping to ensure the well-being of future generations.
Yamamoto also urged expanding the breadth of what he called “citizenship in the science and technical ecosystem.” In biotechnology and biomanufacturing, for example, researchers and engineers are engaged in discovery and development. But the biotechnology and biomanufacturing ecosystem also includes growers and processors of novel sustainable biomass for creating biobased products, the biomanufacturers of those products, the transporters of those products into communities, and so on. “The ecosystem of people who can think about themselves as part of the scientific and technical enterprise is much broader than we’ve traditionally thought,” Yamamoto said. “The public at large thinks of scientists as people who are trained to put on a white coat, look through a microscope, and spend time in a university laboratory discovering esoteric things. [But] it’s broader than that, of course. . . . It includes lots of people who don’t think of themselves as part of that ecosystem. If they did, they will be proud to be part of it and will be motivated to move forward as members of this workforce in effective ways based on the principles and progress of science.”
Moreover, the public deserves and needs to learn the context of science, Yamamoto said. For that to happen, scientists should be trained to communicate to the public both the significance and the imperative of scientific progress and the broader context in which science occurs.
Regarding the second question of how graduate research institutions can produce the best science and technology, Yamamoto made the case for broadening the domain of scientific inquiry. First, he noted that a diverse scientific community produces more innovative science. The research community often assumes that a trade-off exists when doing science at the leading edge of knowledge and addressing a lack of diversity and access. “There’s no good evidence that is true,” Yamamoto observed. “If we can release ourselves from that tacit assumption, that destructive assumption, only then can we move forward to build the diverse communities that we need in order to do the best science.”
He also advocated for bold thesis projects and open, transdisciplinary science. Students pursue science because they want to do something important and consequential, but their advisors tell them not to aim high. “You won’t get into graduate school, you won’t get a graduate fellowship, you won’t be able to publish papers, you won’t get a good postdoc, you won’t get a job,” said Yamamoto. “We teach our trainees to pull their punches and not do something bold and crazy—and we lose from that.”
Thesis projects should tackle extremely difficult problems whose solutions demand both specialized expertise and broad literacy. Such projects require students to think strategically and effectively about segmenting big problems into soluble smaller ones, while knowing enough about other fields and approaches to draw upon them as needed. In the process, they also develop a network of contacts with diverse expertise and perspectives.
Finally, hiring and promotion policies and practices should promote behaviors that produce the best science rather than careerism. Incentives to build prestige and power, publish in the right places, and be the first author on papers are “destructive and demoralizing,” said Yamamoto. “We need to pull back from that and think about replacing those incentives with those that reward doing the best science and being the best science citizens.”
BARRIERS TO OVERCOME
During the discussion period, the panelists discussed some of the greatest barriers to overcome in broadening the STEM workforce. To incorporate not just people from diverse backgrounds but the ideas generated by a wider range of people requires challenging dominant frameworks in science, said Dzirasa. “Our fixation with how things were prevents us from moving forward,” he said. “What we need to do is prepare ourselves to hand over three things to the next generation of scientists. We need to be prepared to hand over the resources. We need to be prepared to hand over the environment so they can create better spaces for how they work and operate. And we need to be prepared to hand over the questions. How can we bring more people into the enterprise to define what our boundaries are going to be?”
Yamamoto agreed, noting that scientists think of themselves as a special group separate from the rest of society. “We need to relieve ourselves of that and become part of the social structure in ways that the public at-large will increase its trust in what we have to say.” Rather than proclaiming truth from the mountaintop, scientists can talk about evidence and discovery in ways that enlarge the pool of people who consider themselves part of the ecosystem. “Tapping that energy of inquiry,” he said, “would have a profound impact.”
Belcher observed that the pandemic had the effect of involving more people in science because they had to learn more about scientific concepts and about ways of drawing conclusions from scientific evidence. “It raised the level of scientific interest and science literacy.” Perhaps other ways of engaging people in science, such as a national competition to produce and apply solar cells, could similarly generate interest in science and the scientific method, she said.
BUILDING TECHNICAL SKILLS
This conversation led to a discussion of the wide range of technical skills needed to enable science and technology to advance. In some cases, these skills require high-end training, observed Yamamoto, “but in other cases that’s not true at all.” People can come out of community colleges and technical training centers with the skills needed to become part of the science and technology ecosystem, and when they do they will be supportive of the other parts of the ecosystem. “That is going to make them proud of the skills that they have acquired, that are filling that need in society,” he said.
Belcher pointed to a growing interest among students and policy makers in vocational and technical schools, which have undergone a substantial evolution over the past decade. Degrees in such areas as advanced manufacturing and robotics did not exist in the past. “That’s a wonderful place to have engagement at a younger age.”
Finally, Dzirasa described the potential to engage a broader range of young people by expanding their opportunities to experience research. As a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, he can bring students from many different backgrounds into a laboratory that is working on some of the most important topics in science with some of the best equipment in the world. “I’m thinking a lot about how to bridge these environments such that our nation can continue to capitalize on some of the best talent out there.”
Box 3-1 is a transcript of the pre-recorded remarks provided by Texas Representative (D), Eddie Bernice Johnson, during the symposium. Chairwoman Johnson’s remarks underscore the need for supporting a diverse workforce highlighted by the CHIPS and Science Act.
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