Reflecting on a work in progress

By Janjay Innis and Jim Fessenden

UMass Chan Medical School has invested steadily for years in initiatives that promote access for populations traditionally underrepresented in medicine, biomedical research and advanced practice nursing. These outreach, pipeline and recruitment programs brought many new faces to campus.

But the campus community, like the country, has changed, and with those changes have come increased expectations that more can and should be done. The murder in 2020 of George Floyd Jr. at the hands of police in Minneapolis, and the subsequent protests, rallies and demands for change catalyzed a movement: Black Lives Matter. At UMass Chan, the student-led group White Coats for Black Lives was at the forefront of an initiative to improve diversity, equity and inclusion on our own campus.

“Things at UMass Chan are different today than they were two years ago,” said Brian Lewis, PhD, the George F. Booth Chair in the Basic Sciences, assistant vice provost for outreach and recruitment, and professor of molecular, cell & cancer biology. “I think people on our campus— senior leadership included—look at issues of diversity much differently now than they have in the past. We have started to have these difficult conversations about diversity and ethnicity, conversations that can make us uncomfortable.” For example, according to Dr. Lewis, the percentage of African American faculty at the Medical School today is the same as it was 18 years ago, when he joined the institution.

BRIAN LEWIS, PhD

Photo by ROB CARLIN

Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences PhD candidate Sarah Cleveland is among those at UMass Chan committed to making sure those conversations, however uncomfortable, take place. In addition to the rigorous work of pursuing a PhD in immunology, Cleveland participates in numerous groups dedicated to recruiting and retaining diverse learners in science, nursing and medicine and served as one of the diversity and inclusion co-chairs of the Graduate Student Body Council with her fellow student and cohort mate, Qiu Yu “Judy” Huang. She was actively involved in a student-led response to the initial statement UMass Chan issued after the murder of George Floyd. Students representing all three schools insisted on something more than a statement, which some described as “vague and insincere.” They wanted a comprehensive plan to increase the number of Black, Latinx and Indigenous people working and studying at UMass Chan.

In a series of meetings with campus leadership, Cleveland and fellow students, including Abiola Ogunsola, MD/PhD student; former student trustee Zachary Dyer, MD/ PhD student; and nursing student Anisha Chauhan, focused specifically on recruitment and retention of diverse learners and faculty. They requested—and readily received—more money to support underrepresented students, including expanding eligibility for Chancellor’s Scholarships to students in the biomedical sciences and graduate nursing and creating diversity supplements to cover moving and initial housing costs, as is typical at many peer institutions.

While a number of the students’ proposals were ultimately implemented, Cleveland noted one important point: Students feel they are being heard.

“So it’s now a process of figuring out what works best here,” she said. “How do we support the students who are already here? And how do we bring in more students and make sure that they’re supported once they’re here? I do feel like there have been changes.”

Cleveland expects students will continue to work with leadership to keep the focus on change.

“The more people who are involved in these conversations, the more we can learn and the more comfortable we can become having them,” Cleveland said.

SARAH CLEVELAND, PhD CANDIDATE

Photo by BRYAN GOODCHILD

Lewis agreed and said the institution had committed sustainable resources directly to diversity. For example, UMass Chan initiated a pilot faculty recruitment program led by Milagros Rosal, PhD, vice provost for health equity, that cohorts multiple tenure track positions with the aim of enhancing diversity. There are also significant new efforts in faculty recruitment and retention designed to help tenure-track professors transition from postdoctoral studies to running independent labs. At the forefront of these efforts is an expanded Diversity and Inclusion Office that has committed to an active role in the recruitment and retention of faculty and staff, as well as in student outreach and admissions.

MARLINA DUNCAN, EdD

Photo by ROB CARLIN

A strategic approach

Key to this commitment is Marlina Duncan, EdD, who joined UMass Chan as vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion in late 2020. She has recruited a team with professional expertise in communications, education and training, human resources outreach, and analytics. Her vision is to help the entire organization take a more strategic approach to increasing diversity, advancing equity and fostering a sense of belonging at UMass Chan.

“Diversity is a skill, like any other,” said Dr. Duncan. “Developing a skill takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. Our goal is to help people here develop that skill and normalize having difficult conversations about race and gender and ethnicity until it becomes second nature.”

When Duncan took the position at UMass Chan, an important part of her approach to diversity, equity and inclusion was the addition of a data analyst to measure the success of the Medical School’s diversity efforts. “Information is critical to what we are doing. It informs what we do and how we plan,” said Duncan. “In order to make well-informed decisions, we must know what we’re doing; is it working; who’s coming here; who is staying and who is promoted? It’s how we evaluate the job we’re doing, address deficiencies and build on our strengths.”

Duncan also brought on board a communications specialist to develop unified messaging and storytelling to “bring to life the stories of underrepresented groups whose presence, voices and gifts we want at the table,” she said.

“We want to approach diversity from more than just a surface, ‘Let’s increase our number of underrepresented groups,’ approach,” said Duncan. “We want everybody at UMass Chan to be seen and heard. But that’s no small task. Doing that takes the talent of a very dedicated staff, which we are fortunate to have here at the Medical School.”

A big part of Duncan’s strategic effort was codified in early 2022 when Chancellor Michael F. Collins and senior leadership added diversity, equity and inclusion as a new pillar to the Medical School’s IMPACT 2025 strategic plan. This pillar makes it a priority for the Medical School to support, allocate resources, and explore collaboration to address underrepresentation of marginalized groups in medicine and the biomedical sciences. It also puts diversity, equity and inclusion on equal footing with other institutional priorities such as education, basic science research, translational research, community and global impact, and operational excellence.

“This creates visibility for diversity, equity and inclusion,” said Duncan. “When I arrived at UMass Chan there were a lot of disparate initiatives going on. It was very diluted and if you didn’t happen to bump into one of these initiatives, you didn’t really know what was happening on campus for diversity.

“If faculty, staff and students have to actively seek out support for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, then it’s only natural to wonder how important those efforts are,” said Duncan. “Having DEI as a pillar in the strategic plan signals to the people on campus, and the people thinking of joining UMass Chan, that diversity is a priority, there is more than a small pocket of people who are involved, it is a cause that the entire campus is behind. And it is that full engagement that ultimately moves the needle.”

Academic and administrative departments have been tasked with developing a plan, specific to their area of function, that addresses diversity, equity and inclusion. Each department has its own strengths and unique challenges that vary across the institution, Duncan said. Department leaders must initiate their own plans, think about their roles in the institution, how diversity fits into their institutional function, identify gaps and then work to fill those gaps.

To jumpstart this process, roughly a dozen academic and administrative departments and units have agreed to participate in a pilot program. Together, they will model the development and implementation of departmental strategic plans, called Diversity and Equity Action Plans (DEAPs), for the rest of the institution.

CELIA SCHIFFER, PhD, AND MARY MUNSON, PhD

Photo by FAITH NINIVAGGI

Setting benchmarks for effectiveness

The goal is to take deliberate steps to cultivate a truly diverse, equitable, anti-racist and inclusive community that is central to achieving UMass Chan’s mission. To reach the deepest levels of change, according to Duncan, these priorities must live and breathe in the work of individual departments and units. Each department will gather information; conduct self-assessments; and develop a diversity, equity and inclusion vision with concrete goals and strategies to be measured by data. The DEAPs will be reviewed in conjunction with the Diversity and Inclusion Office, adopted, implemented, and assessed annually with benchmarks and timelines for effectiveness.

The Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biotechnology was one of the first to initiate a DEAP. The department was already taking steps to create safe places for conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion. Its Diversity Action Committee had been focused on achieving a more diverse, inclusive and supportive department by recruiting; retaining; and advancing students, postdocs, staff, and faculty from historically underrepresented backgrounds.

“In the wake of the racial unrest that was happening at the time, there was a group of faculty members in the department who started getting together to talk about the news and its impact on us, our trainees and the staff,” said Mary Munson, PhD, professor of biochemistry & molecular biotechnology and vice chair for diversity. “When we learned about the DEAP it seemed a natural step forward from some of what we were already doing internally in the department.”

“Diversity is important for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that different people approach problems from different perspectives,” said Celia Schiffer, PhD, the Arthur F. and Helen P. Koskinas Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biotechnology, chair and professor of biochemistry & molecular biotechnology, and director of the Institute for Drug Resistance. “Whether you’re a man or woman, where you grew up, your social and economic status, ethnicity—our backgrounds in general—have an impact on how we each view and solve problems. Having a diversity of experiences on faculty will bring our science to the next level and elevate the discoveries being made at UMass Chan.”

The department is also working with the newly created Office of Health Equity and eight other academic departments on a pilot cluster hiring initiative meant to broaden the diversity of candidates considered for tenure track faculty positions.

Led by Dr. Rosal, the Imoigele P. Aisiku, MD’97 Chair in Health Equity and Diversity, and professor of population & quantitative health sciences, the initiative is recruiting junior faculty for tenure track positions across interdisciplinary departments in neuroscience, immunology/ infectious disease and health equity. Candidate applications are screened by a multidisciplinary group of faculty based on an evaluation of the candidate’s anonymized research plan and diversity statement (both requirements of the application). High ranking candidates are brought forward to hiring departments where their expertise matches for a full review of their application by a departmental search committee. Finalists are then forwarded to the chair, who makes the final hiring decision.

The cluster hire initiative doesn’t require that candidates be from underrepresented groups, explained Rosal, but they must have a compelling diversity statement in order to be considered. UMass Chan is in line with national efforts to increase faculty diversity at universities and medical schools. For example, the Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST), an RFA first issued by the National Institutes of Health in 2020, aims to help institutions build a “self-reinforcing” community of scientists through recruitment of a critical mass of early-career faculty who have a demonstrated commitment to inclusive excellence. The NIH effort will invest $241 million over nine years in a dozen universities and medical schools to support clusters of newly hired young faculty members in inclusive, sustainable environments.

The cluster hire pilot represents a concerted effort to minimize some of the biases that are often thought to pervade academe in general and “hard” sciences in particular. All steps of the candidate evaluation use standardized evaluation tools and rubrics. All faculty members involved in the evaluation of candidates received training on implicit biases. Interviewers were mentored on how traits such as the way people talk, dress, use body language or conduct themselves may inform or prejudice opinions of them.

“There are biases that creep into our evaluation process and we aren’t even aware of it,” said Dr. Schiffer.

Schiffer explained that there is a bias in academia to select faculty candidates from “top tier” universities and medical schools. It is presumed these institutions must have the best trained and smartest graduates. But of course, there are exceptional scientists coming from universities around the country and around the world, with unique viewpoints.

“We want to recruit and hire the best faculty,” said Schiffer. “UMass Chan has a reputation of being very collegial. It’s a special place and we want to hire special people who will thrive in this atmosphere, not just scientifically, but people who want to actively participate in our community.”

MILAGROS ROSAL, PhD

Ensuring equity in opportunities

According to Rosal, there’s been a recognition over the past 20 years of the need to support access and exposure to science—the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields. And yet, extensive pipeline initiatives at the high school and college level have not translated to increased diversity among faculty at universities.

“Although we have a more diverse pool of graduates, they aren’t finding their way into higher education,” said Rosal. “We’re losing those graduates to other industries because many don’t see a place for themselves in academia.”

A more diverse faculty begins with the recruitment process, said Rosal. “Where do we look for applicants? How do they learn about us? Do they see a place for themselves at UMass Chan? We can’t just publish job listings in traditional journals or use the same networks and word of mouth and expect to find different, diverse candidates.”

Rosal has been actively approaching social organizations and institutions during the recruitment process that are dedicated to promoting diversity, such as the Intersections Science Fellows Symposium, which showcases outstanding research contributions of postdocs in the biological sciences, including those from backgrounds historically underrepresented in academia.

Recruitment of diverse faculty is only the beginning. Ensuring equity in opportunities for career advancement and long-term retention also are critical, Rosal said. “To support the career advancement, cross-collaborations, and integration of our cluster hires into the larger UMass Chan scientific community, we also are piloting a new Independent Career Advancement Program (iCAP) available to all new junior faculty hires.”

Implemented through the Office of Health Equity, the iCAP is co-led by Dr. Munson; Catarina Kiefe, MD, PhD, the Melvin S. and Sandra L. Cutler Chair in Biomedical Research and professor of population & quantitative health sciences; and Cynthia Fuhrmann, PhD, associate professor of RNA therapeutics. iCAP participants are matched with mentors and sponsors and provided with tailored workshops (e.g., setting up a research lab, navigating NIH review, managing up) and individualized writing support via a science writer, as well as opportunities such as writing accountability groups and cross-departmental research discussions.

“If we provide junior faculty the resources they need to grow, it increases the chances that they’ll be successful and stay in academia,” Rosal said.

More than 300 applications were received this year as part of the cluster hire pilot. Two candidates from underrepresented groups in medicine have accepted positions at UMass Chan so far, and two offers are pending. The goal is to hire a cluster of at least three new faculty members from traditionally underrepresented groups.

The lessons learned from the pilot cluster hire program will form the basis for a proposal to the National Institutes of Health for funding to expand this initiative.

“We’re scientists,” said Rosal. “We follow the data. The idea behind the NIH-funded FIRST Cohort program is to see if cluster models are effective at promoting faculty diversity.”

As part of the cluster hire, an additional tenure track faculty position is being made available to a department with no tenure track positions this year. Should UMass Chan be successful in securing NIH funding through the FIRST Cohort, Provost and Dean Terence R. Flotte will make three additional tenure track faculty positions available for the cluster hire. “This is a significant investment of resources,” said Rosal. “Starting packages for new faculty require an allocation of resources. This sort of financial commitment to promoting diversity is an indication of how important it is to UMass Chan and shows potential candidates how much the institution values their contributions to our community.”

ESI A. ASARE, MBA

Photo by ROB CARLIN

Building relationships

Esi A. Asare, MBA, director of admissions for the T.H. Chan School of Medicine, describes a similar strategy to increase the pool of underrepresented medical students. On “Second Look Day,” for example, when accepted students visit campus and meet students and faculty, there’s now an opportunity to meet with representatives of the Diversity and Inclusion Office and faculty and students from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in medicine. Another initiative has the admissions team working with pre-med counselors and advisors at colleges and universities serving predominantly underrepresented populations, including historically black colleges and universities.

“We want all of these prospective students to know that there are stakeholders at UMass Chan who want to make sure they are successful when they come to us as medical students,” said Asare, “so that prospective students have a clear picture of what we have to offer and how we can help them overcome challenges on their paths to becoming exceptional health care professionals.”

PhD candidate Sarah Cleveland chose UMass Chan as a result of a similar approach. She met Lewis while she was a member of the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program, which helps prepare traditionally underrepresented students with strong academic potential for graduate study. As part of their program, McNair Scholars visit universities with graduate programs and participate in tours and discussions with representatives of the schools. Lewis co-hosted the McNair cohort here.

Cleveland said that UMass Chan and Brown University were the only two schools the McNair Scholars visited where she saw professors who were people of color. Serendipitously, the faculty member she met at Brown was Marlina Duncan.

“That for me changed the way that I looked at which school I was going to. UMass Chan has a very welcoming atmosphere. The buildings are newer, everybody was very organized. So that was all part of it,” Cleveland said. “But Brian reached back out to me after. And he was one of the only people who did that. So I felt like I was building a relationship. And I felt like the school wanted me.”

The common thread that all agree on is that promoting diversity is more than just increasing the numbers of underrepresented groups at UMass Chan: It must be about creating a culture that embraces differences and is built on relationships.

“At the end of the day, we want UMass Chan to be synonymous with diversity the way it is with collaboration,” said Duncan. “Whether it’s a new assistant professor coming out of her postdoc or an undergraduate considering medical school, we want them thinking that UMass Chan is the place to go because we’re going to support you and nurture you,” said Duncan. “This is a place where your voice will be heard and valued.” ■