Abstract

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter Movement and the disproportionately deadly impact of COVID-19 on communities of color, researchers and stakeholders in STEM and Biomedicine have called for an end to structural racism in scientific education, publishing, and funding to ensure that the practitioners and content of science represent the identities and concerns of the whole. This symposium brings together meta-researchers and leaders at the American Medical Association [AMA] and the National Institutes of Health [NIH] to discuss recent research about structural racism in publishing and grant funding as well as possible steps towards institutional change. Dr. Aletha Maybank, the Senior Vice President and Chief Health Equity Officer at the American Medical Association, has written about the paucity of overt discussions of racism in top Biomedical journals as well as steps that the AMA can take to eliminate structural racism in biomedicine. Dr. Carole Lee will present research, based on a prize-winning idea to NIH’s Peer Review Challenge, on Black-white disparities in NIH scores and funding and will evaluate alternative funding models from a DEI lens. And, Dr. Kenneth Gibbs – who is the chief of the Undergraduate and Predoctoral Cross-Disciplinary Training Branch in the Division of Training, Workforce Development and Diversity at the NIH/NIHMS and manages the grants on the Science of Science Policy in the Biomedical Research Enterprise – will address NIH initiatives to address structural racism including UNITE and new funding opportunities.