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Authors:
Kala M. Mehta, Niquo Ceberio, Sonthonax Vernard, Yazmin P. Carrasco, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, Tung T. Nguyen, Peter Lê, Jasmón Bailey, Audrey Parangan-Smith, Kelechi Uwaezuoke, Robert C. Rivers, Kenjus Watson & Leticia Márquez-Magaña
To the Editor — Last year, scientists across the world participated in the 10 June protests and used hashtags such as #ShutDownAcademia, #ShutDownSTEM and #Strike4BlackLife, which called for non-Black academics to take action towards eradicating anti-Black racism in academia, including the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). This resulted in an outpouring of stories by Black academics detailing the racist experiences that they have endured. Their stories underlie an urgent need for transforming academic structures to be more equitable.
To make a positive change towards this goal, last year we created the Virtual BUILD Research Collaboratory (VBRC), an online summer program focused on diversity and inclusion. Summer programs are crucial for students as they are a critical step towards building scientific careers. The VBRC was developed out of the SF BUILD (Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity), a six-year-old program for undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds in biomedical research, typically held in person. Given the disruptions caused by the pandemic, our team had to transform the regular in-person offering into an eight-week online summer coding program, which took place from 22 June–13 August 2020. As we were able to pivot rapidly to a new solution, we offered it to nine sister National Institutes of Health (NIH) BUILD sites across the country. The objective of the virtual eight-week summer coding program was to teach students to use the statistical programming language and software R/RStudio to perform research related to health disparities due to COVID-19...
Read the full article online: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-021-00063-6
