NEUROSCIENCE TRAINING

Daniel Colón-Ramos, Yale University

"When science does not have spaces for scientists from different backgrounds to be able to fully participate or benefit from the scientific enterprise, the world is less. Science is less."

Kimberlei Richardson, Howard University

"When they leave Howard, I want [students] to be proud of their Blackness. But I also want them to be able to confidently defend their science. Ultimately, this is how you train young people to succeed in spite of the racist culture."

Kaela S. Singleton, Emory University

"My dream is to have a lab where Black women are celebrated…your identity is not unprofessional and should be included in those spaces."

Barry Everitt, University of Cambridge; Society for Neuroscience

"In terms of training…I think it is our flagship diversity program which is particularly important. This has supported about 1,000 underrepresented minority researchers over the nearly 40 years that it’s been running, and the program aims to increase the likelihood that trainees who enter the neuroscience field continue in the field and advance their careers."

Michele Jones-London, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke

"Humans are involved in this process, and that’s where you get these things showing up. We like to think of science as this very pure system, that everything funded is meritorious and it’s the best and there’s some sort of pureness to the decisions that we’re making. But they’re inherently full of implicit and explicit biases."

Ayana Jordan, Yale School of Medicine

"We can talk about diversity. We can talk about inclusion. But what we are forgetting is belonging. You can put me there. You can invite me to the party, but if I do not feel included, if I do not see anybody that looks like me, if you are not understanding what it means to be the only, if you do not experience my pain or my pleasure and the world that is not respectful of the humanity, it does not matter how many pipeline programs you have. No one is going to stay."

Elizabeth McNeil, bluebird bio, Inc.

"...anybody who is coming up for promotion who has students who they are mentoring, I want them to tell me all of the opportunities that they have offered to the students they are mentoring…offer[ing] persons of color three different development opportunities may sound great until you realize that everyone else was offered ten different opportunities."

Rosalind Segal, Harvard Medical School; Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

"How do we do [the work of DEI] without making our students do the work and making it an additional impediment to their success? The students are most aware of and able to identify well the issues that they are confronting, and from an institutional perspective, this is incredibly helpful…what we don’t want to do is make the students not only come up with what they need, but also the answers."

Gentry Patrick, University of California, San Diego

"If you come away from this [workshop] thinking, wow, well, we still have a lot to do, that is the truth. We have a lot to do. There is a lot of work to be done and I hope that we are all up for that challenge."

AZA Stephen Allsop, Yale School of Medicine

"I think that's something that leaders can always think about, not only just creating space for trainees to actually have a voice and a seat at the table, but then how is that voice going to be translated into decision-making?"

Rita Balice-Gordon, Muna Therapeutics, Inc

"Today's workshop will frame the impact of the global pandemic, which has affected scientists across the spectrum of career stages, as it has everyone in society, as well as the impact of a societal refocus on issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, which have highlighted systemic fault lines in the culture of science, that predated the pandemic and in many ways have been amplified by it."

Daniel Gonzales, Purdue University

"I think there is a really straightforward answer to how our current standards for success inhibit inclusion, and it's simply by our current standards do not value efforts to build communities, to provide effective mentorship, to build up the next generation of scientists. So that's why we're inhibiting equity in academia, by simply not valuing efforts to increase diversity and inclusion in academia."

Cristin Welle, University of Colorado

"[A]s neuroscientists, as members of the STEM community, I think that we have indulged ourselves a little bit too much in the notion that we can just focus on the science, that we can kind of come to lab and be in our science bubble, that we don't really need to address the rest of life…if anything this year has shown is that this approach doesn't work. It's not effective, it's not healthy, and it is holding us back from really growing as scientists."

Katja Brose, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

"Listening is incredibly important, but action is probably more important. So we definitely hope that you will take these discussions back to your local community, your labs, your departments, organizations, and consider what concrete steps you all can take or can contribute to."

Walter Koroshetz,, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke

"[T]he future depends on the young people. So I think we can't just assume that things are going to happen they did in the 1970s, and we have to listen to the young scientists now, and ensure that they see science as a fulfilling career… that is the secret to the future."

Kelsey Martin, University of California, Los Angeles

"And then I just want to add that the other aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic is it really created this, again, stark lighting where the killing of George Floyd and other acts of police violence really, it could not ignored. It really highlighted a structural racism that our country has lived with for centuries, and I think it's forced a reckoning in academic institutions around that."

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Stanford University

"There are so many wonderful things you can do. Many people who start doing a PhD want to continue in academia. We know the statistics. We know that by the time they graduate, many more of them have opened their minds to other opportunities to see how they can use their training in other fields, whether it's in teaching or in biotech or the pharmaceutical industry, in disease foundations and scientific publishing, in patent law, in government."

Mahmoud Bukar Maina, University of Sussex

"When I first came to the UK, I kind of felt like I didn’t belong… like I can’t succeed. But because of the passion which we are talking about, my imagination, I was able to then see that this is actually what I want to do. This is actually what I can do."

Lucas Cheadle, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

"I think the first step is that we have to value diversity. We have to recognize the power of getting a group of people together from really different backgrounds, really different places. Sometimes there are geographical differences, sometimes there are racial difference, class, gender, and that includes transgender folks as well."

Bianca Jones Marlin, Columbia University

"I now understand that I can be a mother…and also do excellent science that is infused with my life and, therefore, is going to honor that reflection of what I have been doing in my life and make the science even better, and have that perspective that I can now share with my trainees."

Carolyn Rodriguez, Stanford University School of Medicine

"I think it’s important for institutions to really think about [structural and financial support for DEI efforts] …These are important things. And it actually makes a big difference in how you feel as a scientist to be able to feel that your work is valued."

Lori Chibnik, The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

"It doesn’t matter what level you are; you can be somebody else’s champion... I wish we didn’t live in a world where champions are necessary, but it is one of the ways we compete. And so just think of yourself as trying to be able to promote other people."

Lesia Crumpton-Young, Morgan State University

"I also think it is critical that we work on belongingness. We talk about belongingness, but really understanding how to implement that at an institutional level is critical. We know that we can easily do things that will help students to feel less isolated and actually see themselves actively engaged in the science that we are encouraging them to pursue."

Husseini Manji, Johnson & Johnson

"So, we have actually tried to be very deliberate in all these things to make sure that we are paying a lot of attention. Certainly, we want to increase the front end of the funnel in terms of the minorities we recruit, women we recruit into the STEM fields, but then once they’re here they are our responsibility."

Erin Schuman, Max Planck Institute of Brain Research

"Women still shoulder a disproportionate share of childcare responsibilities. We can’t emphasize enough how important childcare is. It is something that should be so simple that we should be able to solve, but we need affordable childcare, high quality childcare that is available for long hours."

Brittany Williams, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

"We all know that if something were to happen to us today or tomorrow, the work would still go on. You just have to have that type of balance and mindset to know that you cannot be the best you in the lab unless you are taking care of you outside of the lab. At the same time, you have to remind yourself who you are, what you are capable of, why you are there. We are all going to have those doubts, but use those doubts as your passion, as your flame."

Ubadah Sabbagh, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

"In terms of things to look for in a postdoc, I think the priority for me was to find… an environment that values postdocs because the industry already undervalues them, and also to find a lab environment and culture where I feel like I can thrive. That is the theme of how I selected the labs I spoke to and ultimately, the one I chose."

Robert Bell, Pfizer

"You are never going to run out of mentors. You should always be trying to build your network and have more, because it does not stop after your postdoc. If you become a PI or a lab head or a department head, having mentors in your career is important."

Ethan Hughes, University of Colorado, School of Medicine

"There are large disparities on how academic postdocs are paid versus industry and government positions. I think this is really holding back academic science because while the current postdoc salaries are inching up slowly, they are not equal to the value for which postdocs are bringing to the table."

Caleb McKinney, National Postdoctoral Association; Georgetown University

"At an institutional level, I think it would be important moving forward to help institute parameters and policies for the postdoc experience to help negotiate that conflict so that faculty could get their work done and advance in their careers and be productive while at the same time providing an equitable training environment for their trainees."

Adriana Bankston, Future of Research; University of California

"It is important to foster this culture of being able to talk about what you are working on to different audiences, even writing a lay summary about your research…this, I think needs to happen across academia both at the PI level as well as more broadly."

Stephen Korn, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke

"Everybody wants to do science. And the question is how can we change the approach to things to get the faculty approaching bigger science that they can work on together and then we can have the postdocs being more in a collaborative situation than just working for a mentor."

Leslie Vosshall, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; The Rockefeller University

"Postdocs are the engine of innovation in biomedical research. We need to do better by them. We need to provide more support, more financial support, and more intellectual freedom to allow them really to blossom into the next generation."

Kafui Dziras, Duke School of Medicine

"[I]f we can all agree that intellect is universally distributed, then we have to really ask the question how come our population of trainees doesn’t look more like the talent pool that we should be drawing upon, particularly thinking about our nation."

Alik Widge, University of Minnesota

"We really don’t teach scientists… how to be both team members and team leaders… How do you get that reflectiveness and intentional practice?... Some institutions build it into things like the individual development plan and teaching people, as they are grad students and postdocs, to begin that self-discovery so that they will be ready for that if they are a PI or some other form of leader."

Anne Urai, Leiden University

"[This] flexibility is great but it also gives individual labs a lot of power in determining their local lab culture, and I think institutions as a whole could take a bigger lead in incentivizing people to take time off, to take family leave, take holidays, rather than kind of pulling their hands off and telling each PI to figure it out with their postdocs."

Sharon Milgram, National Institutes of Health

"I think if we want to change the culture of science, we need to go back to that first principle that you are not hands with a keyboard or hands with a pipette, you are not somebody who writes papers; you are a whole human being with a family and identity and contextual factors and joys. We really have to re-embrace that we are human beings."

Emery Brown, MIT; Harvard Medical School; Massachusetts General Hospital

"I think we have to acknowledge that we have to solve both problems essentially, or that just thinking in terms of team science won’t necessarily provide solutions to diversity and inclusion, and looking at the problem of diversity and inclusion won’t provide solutions for team science... So, I think the two have to run in parallel and I think they have to cross-pollinate."

Andrew Welchman, Wellcome Trust; University of Cambridge

"[W]e know that we have a problem with diversity. We know we are only solving one part of the space. So, we need to think a bit more imaginatively about how we might get people in at early points in their career because investing in those people now is going to pay dividends in 10- or 20-years’ time."

K. Ranga Rama Krishnan, Rush University

"Everything is geared towards an individual and we really don’t have good metrics for team science. People are building them, but it is very hard for traditional universities and traditional committees to think that way… There has to be intentionality for it to change."

John Krystal, Yale School of Medicine

"We are in the midst of a change in the way we think about the structure of science and what our aspirations are for science, how we consider the impact of science, and how we prepare people for careers in this very changing world."