Background & Motivation
Faculty at public facing institutions have a responsibility to their students and to the communities they serve to address society’s most pressing issues with urgency, clarity, and competence. This is particularly important when addressing systemic anti-Black racism in the academy and supporting students of color. Furthermore, as we have seen over the past few years through a global pandemic, it is more important than ever that there is public trusts in our scientists, doctors, and researchers. In times like these, it becomes uncomfortably clear how faculty that lack diversity are ill-equipped to relate to issues of racism, have little shared experience with our students of color, and are therefore unable to effectively build trust with a public composed of diverse communities. This lack of diversity in STEM faculty is at the core of our national dilemma. It is both a symptom of historic racism in our country and a cause that perpetuates the system. When most Americans see a person of color, they do not necessarily see a scientist or an engineer, a doctor, or a tech entrepreneur. This is because when they look at the faculty of our top research universities, in the highest reaches of the ivory tower, they do not see people of color. This cyclic and systemic racism is pervasive in our research institutions, our hospitals, our funding agencies and our classrooms, and it impacts not only scientists of color, but the communities our research and education impacts.

In the U.S., historically underrepresented minority (URM) groups make up around 30% of the population and in 2014 just over 27% of undergraduates enrolled at 4-year institutions were from URM groups [1]. Meanwhile, URM students make up only 11% of graduate students in STEM [1]. The numbers become vanishingly small for STEM faculty. In 2017, at the top 50 STEM research institutions, 5% of tenure-track faculty were from URM groups [2] and only 1.6% were Black. While the attrition of Black scientists through the academic pathway does pose recruitment challenges, this is no excuse for institutions that rank among the top in the world. The problem is not the depth of the potential applicant pool, it is a failure of our current biased processes for recruiting talented and diverse scientists to our applicant pools. To fix this problem, we must prioritize the same mechanism that every other profitable industry invests in: recruitment. Our goal is to enrich our applicant pools in STEM by generating a network of scientists that simultaneously offer the most promising and innovative research programs while representing a diversity of backgrounds and experiences.

Symposium
The Next Generation Faculty Symposium is designed to reform recruitment with targeted efforts prior to the announcement of faculty searches, thereby increasing the diversity and quality of our applicant pool. Research seminars highlight the work of a cohort of diverse late-stage graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Speakers are selected based on demonstrated scientific excellence, evaluated based on prior research achievement and significant prior contributions to increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion. In addition to the presentations, the Symposium features one-on-one and small group discussions between Next Gen Scientists and a scientific advisory board made of up faculty from related departments at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UCSF. In this way, the Symposium is structured to provide meaningful mentoring for junior scientists that will directly impact their career trajectory while simultaneously providing search committees with early access to a highly coveted candidate pool. Moreover, we hope the Symposium will nucleate a community within a talented diverse cohort of scientists, providing them with a peer network that can provide mentoring and support as they confront the challenges associated with launching an independent research lab.  Our primary goal with this program is to dramatically increase the number of talented candidates in faculty search pools, who not only demonstrate promise to become great scientists, but who will also become the next generation of great professors.

[1.]  Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 2019 | NSF - National Science Foundation. https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf19304/.

[2.]  Nelson, D. J. Diversity of Science and Engineering Faculty at Research Universities. in Diversity in the Scientific Community Volume 1: Quantifying Diversity and Formulating Success vol. 1255 15–86 (American Chemical Society, 2017).