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Stanford.Berkeley.UCSF Next Generation Faculty Symposium
![four keynote and special guest speakers.](/sites/pharmacy.ucsf.edu/files/styles/pharmacy_third/public/events/composite.jpg?itok=our8Lp9J×tamp=1634057531)
Top to bottom: Erich Jarvis, PhD; Persis Drell, PhD; Catherine P. Koshland, PhD; and Dan Lowenstein, PhD.
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.
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