To dismantle structural racism in science, scientists need to learn how it works

It’s clear there are diversity issues in science, both in terms of who does or doesn’t receive research grants, as well as who is or isn’t represented at the highest levels of scientific research. When Caleb Weinreb and Daphne Sun began their PhD program at Harvard University Medical School in systems biology, they took this on as an issue. They learned from others in their department, and they eventually created a course on the topic for incoming first year PhD students.

As they worked on improving their course over the years, they saw that in science there was a focus on narrowing racial gaps by correcting for implicit bias. For example, there had been a well-known study in which resumes with stereotypically African-American names weren’t considered as seriously as those with stereotypically white names. But the two PhD students realized that efforts to overcome such implicit bias weren’t moving the needle. They recently published a perspective paper in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology called “To dismantle structural racism in science, scientists need to learn how it works.” Caleb Weinreb is now a post-doc in the neuroscience department at Harvard Medical School.

Read the full paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-023-01534-2

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