Success for our Nation’s Scientific Workforce: Sustaining the Diversity Program Consortium

By Hannah A. Valantine

In 2014, I became NIH’s first Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity – with three data points seared in my mind:

• Black/African American (B/AA) scientists are 10 percentage points less likely to receive an NIH R01 grant, compared to White scientists
• Only 10% of predoctoral and postdoctoral students supported on NIH fellowships and training grants [1] are from underrepresented groups [2]
• 507 students from underrepresented groups receive STEM PhDs nationwide, per year [3]

These three data points, reported in 2012 by the Advisory Committee to the Director Working Group on Diversity in the Biomedical Research Workforce, sounded an urgent wake-up call to NIH and the biomedical community that it was time to look much more closely at both individual and systemwide contributors to our nation’s persistent lack of scientific workforce diversity.

Heeding the call to key recommendations from that Working Group, NIH established my position and office within the NIH Office of the Director; my team and I have worked hard with partners across NIH, the federal government, and the non-profit sector to address the group’s 13 recommendations. Five years later, while NIH has not overcome biomedicine’s lack of diversity, we are making substantial progress by all indicators...

To read more, visit Valantine's blog.