Dr. Valentine’s talk focused on statistics that showed the need for diversity initiatives within public health research fields. She reviewed studies that showed how people from disadvantaged or underprivileged backgrounds tend to fall through the cracks between stages in a research career, usually at transition periods such as the move from earning a Ph.D. to landing a postdoctoral fellowship. This leads to disparities in the numbers of women or people of color serving in high-level research director roles, which can in turn dissuade students of similar backgrounds from pursuing research careers. An internal study at NIH also found that researchers who identified as African-American or black received proportionally fewer R01 grants than researchers from other ethnic groups.
As a result of these and other studies, the NIH has begun focusing on mentoring programs to help researchers of all levels—from students to mid-career—that are especially geared toward people from underrepresented backgrounds. Dr. Valentine also highlighted several new NIH-funded training programs that are actively measuring the effect of mentorship on students’ career trajectories. Likewise, she pointed out the need for a “blind” review, similar to a blind audition in the classical music field, where the author’s identity is not known to the reviewer. Blind auditions led to a 30% increase in the proportion of women being placed in top-tier orchestras around the world. Similar effects could be seen in the sciences.
Dr. Valentine also stressed the importance of diversity itself for the field of research. Studies have shown that diverse perspectives—which often derive from diverse backgrounds—lead to stronger, better science. Researchers at Harvard University surveyed 1.5 million scientific papers published between 1985 and 2008 and found that papers written by diverse groups receive more citations and have a greater impact than papers written by people from a single ethnic group.
NIH-funded programs like Research Opportunities for Undergraduates: Training in Environmental Health Sciences (ROUTES) are essential to bridging these gaps by providing mentorship, community, and research opportunities to underrepresented undergraduate students at Northeastern University. To learn more about our program’s focus, visit our Mission page.