Stanford.Berkeley.UCSF Next Generation Faculty Symposium

About this event

The Stanford.Berkeley.UCSF Next Generation Faculty Symposium is a platform designed to highlight the work of exceptional early-career scientists in the broad field of quantitative biological and biomedical sciences, with a track record of research productivity and demonstrated contributions to enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM.

Register

For more info, contact [email protected].

Background and motivation

Faculty at public facing institutions have a responsibility to their students and to the communities they serve to address society’s most pressing issues with urgency, clarity, and competence. Yet, in 2020 after watching another Black man get murdered by a white police officer, it can be challenging to imagine how academic scientists might leverage a seemingly distant expertise to address a problem so horrific yet completely systemic and persistent in our country. In times like these, it becomes uncomfortably clear how faculty that lack diversity are ill-equipped to relate to issues of racism and have little shared experience with our students of color. This lack of diversity in STEM faculty is at the core of our national dilemma. It is both a symptom of historic racism in our country and a cause that perpetuates the system. When most Americans see a Black person, they do not see a scientist or an engineer. They do not see a doctor, a computer scientist, or a tech entrepreneur. This is because when they look at the faculty of our top research universities, in the highest reaches of the ivory tower, they do not see Black people.

In the U.S., historically underrepresented minority (URM) groups make up around 30% of the population and in 2014 just over 27% of undergraduates enrolled at 4-year institutions were from URM groups [1]. Meanwhile, URM students make up only 11% of graduate students in STEM [1]. The numbers become vanishingly small for STEM faculty. In 2017, at the top 50 STEM research institutions, 5% of tenure-track faculty were from URM groups [2] and only 1.6% were Black. While the attrition of Black scientists through the academic pathway does pose recruitment challenges, this is no excuse for institutions that rank among the top in the world. The problem is not the depth of the potential applicant pool, it is a failure of our current biased processes for recruiting talented and diverse scientists to our applicant pools. To fix this problem, we must prioritize the same mechanism that every other profitable industry invests in: recruitment. Our goal is to enrich our applicant pools in STEM by generating a network of scientists that simultaneously offer the most promising and innovative research programs while representing a diversity of backgrounds and experiences.

Symposium

The Next Generation Faculty Symposium is designed to reform recruitment with targeted efforts prior to the announcement of faculty searches, thereby increasing the diversity and quality of our applicant pool. Research seminars highlight the work of a cohort of diverse late-stage graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Speakers are selected based on demonstrated scientific excellence, evaluated based on prior research achievement and significant prior contributions to increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion. In addition to the presentations, the Symposium features one-on-one and small group discussions between Next Gen Scientists and a scientific advisory board made of up faculty from related departments at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UCSF. In this way, the Symposium is structured to provide meaningful mentoring for junior scientists that will directly impact their career trajectory while simultaneously providing search committees with early access to a highly coveted candidate pool. Moreover, we hope the Symposium will nucleate a community within a talented diverse cohort of scientists, providing them with a peer network that can provide mentoring and support as they confront the challenges associated with launching an independent research lab. Our primary goal with this program is to dramatically increase the number of talented candidates in faculty search pools, who not only demonstrate promise to become great scientists, but who will also become the next generation of great professors.

[1.] Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 2019 | NSF - National Science Foundation. https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf19304/.

[2.] Nelson, D. J. Diversity of Science and Engineering Faculty at Research Universities. in Diversity in the Scientific Community Volume 1: Quantifying Diversity and Formulating Success vol. 1255 15–86 (American Chemical Society, 2017).

Next Gen 2021 featured attendees

Keynote speakers

Erich Jarvis, PhD

Head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics of Language, Professor at The Rockefeller University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Special guest speakers

Persis Drell, PhD

Provost, James and Anna Marie Spilker Professor of Engineering, of Material Science and Engineering, and of Physics at Stanford University

Catherine P. Koshland, PhD

Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost (EVCP), Wood-Calvert Professor in the College of Engineering, Professor of Environmental Health Sciences in the School of Public Health, and a Professor in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley.

Dan Lowenstein, PhD

Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), the Robert B. and Ellinor Aird Professor and Vice Chairman in the Department of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and Director of Physician-Scientist and Education Training Programs for the UCSF School of Medicine.

Featured speakers

Fayal Abderemane-Ali, PhD

Current Institution: University of California, San Francisco

Department: Cardiovascular Research Institute

PhD Institution: University of Nante

Basem Al-Shayeb

Current and PhD Institution: University of California, Berkeley

Department: Plant and Microbial Biology

Joel Babdor, PhD

Current Institution: University of California, San Francisco

Department: Microbiology and Immunology

PhD Institution: Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI)

Mairin Balisi, PhD

Current Institution: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; University of California, Merced

Department: Life & Environmental Sciences

PhD Institution: University of California, Los Angeles

Arnaldo Carreira-Rosario, PhD

Current Institution: Stanford

Department: Neurobiology

PhD Institution: UT Southwestern

Valerie Darcey, PhD, MS, RD

Current Institution: NIH NIDDK (National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases)

Department: Laboratory of Biological Modeling

PhD Institution: Georgetown University

Maria Maldonado, PhD

Current Institution: University of California, Davis

Department: Molecular and Cellular Biology

PhD Institution: University of Cambridge

Natoya Peart, PhD

Current Institution: University of Pennsylvania

Department: Department of Medicine; Biochemistry and Biophysics

PhD Institution: The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

Juliane Sempionatto Moreto, PhD

Current Institution: California Institute of Technology

Department: Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering

PhD Institution: University of California San Diego

Maxine Umeh Garcia, PhD, MSc

Current Institution: Stanford University

Department: Neurosurgery

PhD Institution: University of California, Davis

Jaimie Marie Stewart, PhD

Current Institution: California Institute of Technology

Department: Computing & Mathematical Sciences

PhD Institution: University of California, Riverside

Claudia Vasquez, PhD

Current Institution: Stanford University

Department: Chemical Engineering

PhD Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Yvon Woappi, PhD

Current Institution: Brigham and Women's - Harvard Medical School

Department: Dermatology

PhD Institution: University of South Carolina, Columbia