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Overview of New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF)

Arun Sharma (AS): Great to chat with you again, Raeka. We got to know you and the NYSCF team last summer at the in-person event in New York City. I was blown away by what I saw at NYSCF—all that automated cell culture and the amazing science you and the team are doing.

NYSCF, in part through your leadership, is leading the charge in not just the science side of things, but also outside of science. This includes building this really strong culture of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, or DEIB, at this cutting-edge stem cell institute that you have in New York City.

Could you just give an overview of what NYSCF is all about?

Raeka Aiyar (RA): We're a bit of a unique kind of organization, and that's what kind of makes it really fun to work here. We're the New York Stem Cell Foundation. We're both a foundation and a research institute, which means the fun sort of never stops. Our mission as a nonprofit and independent research institute is to accelerate treatments and cures for the major diseases of our time using the power of stem cell research.

We accomplish that mission in three major ways. One, which is the central piece, is the research institute. The research institute centers around technology development and enabling technologies for the entire stem cell community. All of those fun robots that you mentioned are a big part of that, and just being able to do stem cell research at scale with the reproducibility that we know is lacking so much when we go from lab to lab. We want to be able to look at the differences between patients with a certain disease, look at inter-individual differences, and make sure those are accounted for in our research, as we're trying to both understand and develop better treatments for these diseases.

Alongside that technology, we have a lot of dedicated research teams who are working on areas like Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, Parkinson's, and ovarian cancer. They're much more integrated and collaborative than what you'd see in a typical academic environment, which makes it really cool. Everybody's working together, with the biologists next to the engineers, next to the software developers, next to the data scientists, and just trying to come together to really accelerate and do things that you can't necessarily do in a typical sort of academic or even biotech environment. The goal of all of that is to serve as that bridge between academia and biotech, to bridge the knowledge, to translate, and to see what we can do to address those gaps as a nimble nonprofit.

Another major area that we work in is community building. We have a global innovator community of over 200 scientists that we've built up through our grant-making programs for early career scientists, stem cell research, and neuroscience.These are really incredible scientists at the edge of the field. You guys have had tons of them on your [ and ] podcasts. Folks like Paola Arlotta, Feng Zhang, Ed Boyden, and so many more who have really transformed the way that we do our research.

And the third piece of it is education and outreach. Within that, we have our annual conference that we host on translational stem cell research. We also do a lot of student and teacher education programming for the lay public, really just trying to get the excitement of science to all audiences that we possibly can. I would say our DEIB work bridges across all of these activities.

When it comes to your specific role as Vice President of Scientific Outreach and DEIB, what do you do on a daily basis? What's your life like on a daily basis?

RA: This is a really broad and multifaceted role, but it’s such a blast. It entails maybe four major areas.

One is science communications, which is about getting our message out there to all of the audiences that matter. That means our fellow scientists, the general public, students, teachers, funders, and all of the above. It’s about translating our science into language that's both appealing and accessible to all of these audiences on our print and digital platforms.

Another piece of it is event programming. I work with a really great team here to figure out the topics we want to focus our events on, the speakers we want to highlight, and the questions we can ask. We want to be tailored to these different audiences, which includes hosting the conference that we get so many great people from this community at every year.

And then another area is in grant funding. We raise grant funding for our intramural research institute where we have traditional PIs. We’re running research teams, and much like any other academic lab, we're applying for NIH grants, for other foundation grants, and all kinds of things. We collaborate with people all over the world to facilitate those projects and those funding chances. On the flip side of the grants is that I also work on our extramural grant making, which is through our fellowship and investigator programs for early career scientists. I provide scientific guidance and DEIB-related guidance to make sure that we're doing the best that we can in selecting the rising stars who we want to support in the field and think are really going to make a difference. Adding a DEIB lens has been a really fun and rewarding part of that.

The fourth major aspect is, of course, the DEIB work. We’re figuring out how we can embed that across the entire organization. That's the high-level view when it comes to the day to day. I can be spending my entire day on one of these [four] things. Most often I'm bouncing back and forth. With grant deadlines, things will change dramatically. With events around the corner, things will change dramatically. It requires a real diversity of tasks, no pun intended, but it's something I really enjoy. The core of all of it, to me, that brings it together, is communicating about our science and connecting with our community. That's what inspires me about this work, both at NYSCF and more broadly.

From Research to Science Communications

How did you make the pivot from a career in research to one in science communication, and why?

RA: I trained in genomics, which was another very technology-driven field. I started getting into research at the time of the human genome project being published. That was such an exciting time to get into research. I was always drawn to research for the impact that it could have on really understanding why certain people get diseases while other people don't, and how we can treat them better.

And in my mind, when I got into it, genetics was the answer to that. It's like those individual variations are what's responsible. As I went through my career scientifically, I gravitated towards stem cells because the more time you spend in genetics and genomics, the more you realize that's not the whole story, actually. You don't necessarily know how they're impacting the cell and the biology of an individual just because you know what those variants are. Stem cells are kind of that scaffold that you're sort of needing to interpret the genetic data.

In terms of the communications aspect of things, I did my PhD in Germany and ended up getting recruited into editing tasks for my lab because I was the only native English speaker. People would be like, “Can you fix my English in this manuscript, in this grant? And what have you…” In the process of doing that, I realized I really enjoyed that aspect of just telling a story, interpreting data, and building a narrative of what this means for our field and for the studies that can come next. I ended up just building a career around that, because I think we can all appreciate that science needs good communication and that we encounter disastrous effects when there isn't that good communication. I think the pandemic has laid that bare for all of us. It showed the consequences of when it's not done correctly. I felt that was a calling. There needs to be more scientists who understand the science, are getting the word out there, and can do so in a responsible way, in an accurate way, and hopefully in an engaging way, too. We need to spread that excitement and get everyone on board who needs to be on board.

What led you to NYSCF?

RA: I spent my whole life in academia and academic research, and I absolutely loved it. It's really great to be at that edge of discovery and everything.

I started to feel like in my science communication career path, there isn't a whole lot of navigation you can do. There's specific kinds of roles you can fill that people will kind of make exceptions and fill for you. I feel like that's maybe changing a little bit since I was in academia, but by and large, it was pretty hard to figure out what I can do and how I can grow. I was always a team of one and there's only so many hours in the day, even as an academic. So I was looking further afield to see how I can do something that's going to be even more impactful. And again, further along that pipeline of translation, because that was something that I was passionate about.

In just looking around, I encountered NYSCF. I had a former classmate of mine from my PhD who was working here, so he told me all about it. It sounded really great. I came here, got to visit, loved the nonprofit environment, especially how passionate everyone was. I liked that sort of hybrid identity that we have as both a grant maker and a grant receiver.

I loved the research aspect, where you can be really close to cutting-edge research and the technology. With my background being in genomics and seeing what the genome project did for that field, I felt like the same kind of thing was starting to happen in stem cell research. It’s a little bit later than genomics, but we're very much in that same trajectory now where you're seeing it just transform everything. And that's because of the Yamanaka factors and then everybody building on that to be able to look at all these different cell types. And, gosh, it was just so exciting to learn about that. So it was like, “Okay, I could see myself here.”

Working in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging

Could you talk more about DEIB, where the New York Stem Cell Foundation fits, and also about your own path towards working in this space?

RA: The DEIB work was not something I necessarily envisioned myself doing when I was in academia, and I didn’t even know what it was to be frank. I think in 2020, we, like so many other organizations, were going through sort of a reckoning of like, “Okay, well, what are we going to do about this? There's certainly more that we could be doing.”

Not to say that NYSCF had been totally out of the game, but prior to my joining, Susan L. Solomon, our founding CEO, had started the NYSCF initiative on women in science and engineering. That was really around how we can advance gender equity in the field and make sure that women are getting access to opportunities the same way that men are. It was in 2020 that I got pulled into it. I think it was sort of a byproduct of all the communications work that I do. Both internally and externally, we were trying to understand what to do as an organization and where we could have the biggest impact.

One of the hardest things with DEIB work is that there's so much that needs to be done. We have so far to go in so many ways. You obviously can't boil the ocean. So, especially as a small organization of only 120 people, it's really about figuring out what we can do that has the most impact and is aligned with our mission.

In conversations with Susan, she just suggested that I take this on as a part of my role. She believed I would be really great about it, be really thoughtful about it, and hopefully have good judgment about it, which I hope I still do. We were really asking ourselves about how we can use what we call that convening authority that we have at NYSCF to spotlight some of these issues, draw attention to them, and try to come up with things that we can do together. Again, we’re not able to boil the ocean alone, but what can we do with this amazing community to start to right some of these wrongs and level the playing field?

The way that Susan put it, which really resonated with me and still does, is that if we're going to achieve our mission and if we're going to deliver on our mission of accelerating treatments and cures, we need all of the brightest minds in the field to have the opportunity to contribute and the opportunity to succeed. That's simply not going to be possible unless we actually are able to level the playing field and integrate that equity of access. We like to say science is a meritocracy, but that's not the case. And we have a ways to go before we make it so.

The Impact of Efforts to Address DEIB

What are some major successes that you'd like to point to when it comes to DEIB that you think NYSCF has really pioneered and really pushed forward?

RA: Great question. I want to preface that by saying that you kind of always wish [scientists] could be doing more in this work. So that's kind of a hard question to answer because I focus so much on what we could be doing, but there are some things I can say for that. I mentioned the initiative on women in science and engineering that Susan launched around 2011 or 2012, which was way before my time. She convened some of the leaders in the field to think about what we can do to make institutions advance gender equity to level the playing field for women. They came up with seven actionable strategies, which were published in a Cell Stem Cell paper in 2014 or 2015. These are low cost or no cost strategies that institutions can adopt and they're really something actionable.

Some examples are Extra-Hands Awards for people who are having changes in their life—families, or that sort of thing—to be able to hire additional help when they become a primary caregiver for someone. There are recommendations and ways to get around that. There are also things around psychological and cultural change, such as making sure that you're recruiting gender-balanced review committees and speaker selection committees. That all sounds a little bit obvious now, but it was not at all the case at the time that this was put out. People were not doing this.

One of the biggest things that came out of that, which we still continue today, is an institutional report card for gender equality. We used our “carrot” as a grant maker to gather this kind of data as benchmarking data for the entire field to understand what is the state of gender equity across the pipeline. We can understand when certain interventions are made, what kind of impact they're having, and again, really go toward those most impactful interventions possible.

This institutional report card is something that we implemented right away in our extramural grant-making programs. We require every applicant to fill this out. Their department has to submit information about the breakdown of gender balance throughout the academic pipeline, from students all the way to the tenured professors on decision-making committees and so on.

We've been collecting a lot of that data. A few years ago, we published our first data set from over 500 institutions in nearly 40 countries and found that there was no real improvement over a four-year span. There's this leaky pipeline. From the data, it's very much a thing. We have solid, beautifully, horribly linear data that shows the drop off of women at every stage in the academic pipeline as you advance. We saw the total lack of women in decision-making roles. So, of course, one kind of leads to another. We also survey for policies that institutions have in place to be able to combat these disparities and so on. We did see at the end of that period that some institutions started to take on some policies, including some of the ones that we had advocated for in those seven actionable strategies.

What makes you excited about the DEIB initiatives the NYSCF has accomplished over the last couple of years?

RA: One success that came out of that, aside from the really cool data slash really terrible data that we can show as a demonstration of the state of things, is that at the very beginning, when this was happening, the departments didn't even know where to find this data and they didn't want to provide it. We kind of said, “Well, you can't apply. You’re just not going to be eligible for the grant if you don't submit this data.” Of course, we don't judge anybody based on the data because nobody would get the grant because all of the data is pretty terrible, but we just say, “You have to have it for your application to be complete.”

We got a lot of pushback at the beginning because people just didn't want to bother getting the data or didn't want to share the data with us. Now, it is something that's become pretty standard because we've had it around for so long. I just got an email from one of our investigators the other day saying that because of this, they actually have started tracking this data more regularly themselves and are using it to kind of benchmark where they are as a department.

We hear a lot of stories like that, so I would consider that to be a pretty great achievement in what the Initiative on Women in Science and Engineering (IWISE) has done for the field. And we're continuing to analyze that data. Hopefully, we'll see an improvement over the past few years, although we had a pandemic that was obviously not great for women in science, but let's see.

Is there some inaccessibility within the academic world causing an exodus of scientists?

Nicole Quinn (NQ): So I think I might know where some of these women are going. At �����ƽ��, we have a 56% female population, which is super awesome, and we're very proud of it. We provide a great place to work for people of all different backgrounds because there are benefits, work-life balance, and some of the things that are not offered in academia. But I think on the flip side, the reason we have so many women coming to �����ƽ�� is because of some of the inaccessibility within the academic world. There's a lot of opportunity to do great work without some of those barriers in place that are there in academia.

RA: I think that's something that we're seeing a lot, of course, beyond women as well. I think a lot of what we're seeing with the postdoc crisis, this sort of exodus of postdocs from academia, is because of these environments that are being unsustainable for people. People are rightfully fed up with this position where you're exploited, you're paid the worst possible salary that you can pay a PhD-educated person, and you're in this horribly toxic environment where you're just expected to shut up and take it because that's what you need to get to the next step in your career. No wonder that a lot of these postdocs are going to biotech and to all kinds of other areas.

One other aspect of industry that I think is so interesting, that I've learned as we've gone through this work, is that industry has been so much better at addressing DEIB in a systematic way than academia has. From what I understand, it goes more toward the bottom line that there's so much literature out there now showing. We need more of this literature in academia. At least in the corporate world, there's a lot of literature showing that diversity leads to innovation and that equitable environments lead to innovation. So if you want innovation, your bottom line, and your profit, it's just not going to happen unless you really address this.

The bar has moved a lot higher in industry and we have some catching up to do in the academic sector where we kind of think, “Oh, we're not about the bottom line. We're just about knowledge and discovery.” And it's already meritocracy because we're also objective as scientists and we sort of have the wool pulled over our eyes on that. A lot of this stuff is allowed to persist, unfortunately.

NQ: Absolutely. Diversity of thought, diversity of life experience, all of those things lead to every dimension. All of it leads to diversity of ingenuity, different business practices, the ability to navigate the changing world, and learning to work with different people in different sectors. Absolutely it is there. It does impact the bottom line, but it also makes it a wonderful place to work.

RA: So that for sure, but sometimes when you're trying to bring people along, it's so hard to do. Because the reality is you're not going to convince everybody that this is a moral thing to do. That's the harsh reality of the world. If you're just being entirely pragmatic and want to get things done on the lowest budget possible and the fastest time possible. This is how you do it.

NQ: Yes. You need people who speak different languages. You need all of those different elements of diversity that factor in.

Encouraging Geographical Diversity in Life Sciences

How can scientists address the skew of resources that go to major life science “hubs”, and ensure equal opportunities for scientists from all backgrounds?

AS: We talk about diversity of people, diversity of thought, and this is an inherently diverse field. I think stem cell biology is a pretty diverse field, at least when you think about the people in the field. We're in a relatively new field, a very international field. I've said this before on The Stem Cell Podcast.

One of my favorite things about the modern scientific world, which may or may not have been the case decades ago, is just meeting scientists from anywhere and everywhere at these big scientific conferences like the ISSCR annual meeting, for example. I mean, every time I go to these meetings, I'm just blown away by the conversations I have with these stem cell biologists from around the world, every walk of life, and every background.

But while there are scientists everywhere and super-talented scientists everywhere, they don't always have the same opportunities to shine. This is reflected in a lot of different ways because resources are skewed. That's no doubt in the academic side of things.

Certain geographic hubs have established their reputations decades ago. I used to be in Boston, and it seems like everybody worked in Boston at some point, was affiliated with one of the major academic centers there and spun out of biotech, whatever. The talent tends to be aggregated at these geographic hubs. You see the same institutions, research groups overrepresented in publications and grants that they get because they're ultimately the ones with the influence and the resources to make this cutting-edge science happen a lot of times. And so that in itself can hurt diversity. Even though we have people from everywhere, there's over-representation from certain geographic areas. So how do we actually solve that problem when it comes to diversity?

How do we encourage a more diverse group of people in leadership roles in particular, that are not aggregated in these “hubs”?

RA: There are so many interesting things that you brought up there that we could talk about. I mean, there's the difference between diversity as representation and then the EIB, which is equity, inclusion, and belonging. We can fix the representation problem. We could ram things into quotas and all of that, and then you would not at all fix the overall problem, which is that environment with opportunities to succeed and to thrive.

The “B” has been really important for us because “the belonging” is that sense of feeling that arises when you are really in that inclusive environment. And that's the ultimate goal of our DEI efforts. We want that feeling of belonging to arise in everybody who's part of our institute and part of our community. When people have that feeling, they are really able to be their best selves and to perform at their highest level. If you’re being very pragmatic about it, it lets people advance the field.

Talking specifically about geographical diversity, it is something we think about a lot in our extramural grant making. As you can imagine, when you don't look at this in the first few years of our grant making, you do have a predominance of Boston institutions coming up and getting these awards. That's sort of naturally what happens for all the reasons that you described so well.

Geographical diversity is definitely one of the dimensions we look at very carefully in our grant making, but it's alongside all of these other kinds of dimensions: gender diversity, ancestral diversity, scientific diversity, and just any kind of minoritization that scientists have had to go through that affects their ability to thrive.

Working with this amazing team that we have on extramural grant making and working with Paola Arlotta [Golub Family Professor and Chair of the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University], who's been an advisor for us, we have changed the way that we do our review process in the last few years to elevate minoritized scientists. We don't actually try to slice and dice it, and put a lot of categories that you can check off because we kind of leave it as an open-ended statement in the application where you can self-identify as part of any minoritized group in science and provide what some funders are referring to as a resilience statement. You can talk about your identity to us, and talk about how it's affected your career trajectory. For example, maybe it's led to undue hardships for you.

Our reviewers pair that with the biosketch [a summary of a person’s qualifications and experience, tailored for a specific role] when they're looking at track record, so that when you're comparing one biosketch to the other, you might say, “Well, they have roughly equally impactful publications and science that they've done, but this person has gone through so much more to get where they are.” We had stories in these statements of domestic abuse, fleeing war-torn countries, you name it. If you have a scientist who goes through that and comes out the other side just as successful as someone else, I’m thinking that they're going to be so much more successful in the future because that track record is such a great predictor.

So that's one aspect of what we've done. The geography aspect is wrapped up in there as well.

How can we celebrate those that advance DEIB?

RA: The other aspect is rewarding those who have gone out of their way to advance DEIB in the research community, in their own labs, institutes, or communities, through things like joining their committees, doing non-mandatory self-education, taking on mentorship programs and educational programs, offering access to science education to communities that might not receive it otherwise, or advocating for institutional policies that will change things. The list goes on and on.

Reading some of these statements really was the highlight of my last couple of years. I love just seeing the incredible things that even postdocs are doing or somehow finding the time to do to change the field.

We've implemented these things, along with implicit bias training of our reviewers and all kinds of things to make sure that what we're selecting at the end are those meritorious scientists. We’re also updating our definition of what “meritorious” is. You're not meritorious because you've come from the pedigree of such and such. We don't talk about pedigrees anymore. During review meetings, we ask, “What is the science that this person has done? What is the impact that this person has had both as a scientist and as a community builder? What has this scientist had to undergo to get where they are?” Let's stitch all of that into a picture of what merit and likelihood of future success looks like.

The greatest thing has been seeing how well our reviewers have jumped on board. I was bracing myself for some pushback because this is a different definition of what we traditionally view as success in science. Everyone actually thought this change was great. That's been a success that I wanted to highlight. We've been talking to other funders regularly who are implementing pieces of this [process]. I mean, certainly we weren't the first. A lot of these things have come from inspiration with other funders.

So that's a long answer to sort of your question about geography. It is part of a multifaceted way that we look at trying to level that playing field and recognize talent from places that we're not looking at with our traditional metrics in science.

Advocating for Science Globally

How can scientific institutions, organizations, or societies provide more global access to information on science?

NQ: It's incredible. It's so inspiring to know that you're making little differences that are going to add up to huge differences in terms of how funding, grants, recognition, and reward happens within science. I want to go back a little bit to what Arun was talking about with geography. In 2024, I had the privilege of attending an immunology meeting, the International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS) meeting, in Cape Town, South Africa, with one of our other podcasts, the Immunology Podcast. I can't even describe the rewarding and humbling experience it was to attend a scientific meeting in Africa. It opened my eyes to how there are real logistical and economical barriers to providing accessibility and inclusivity for global scientists, as intentional as we are to try to be inclusive and create a global scientific community.

There were scientists from countries all over the world, but many lower economic countries who were so happy to attend a meeting and so thankful that we'd come, because they couldn't access the visas, nevermind the funds to come to conferences and meetings in Europe and North America.

It really just opened my eyes. There were many, many people there who were avid listeners of our podcast because they said it makes them feel included. It makes them feel like they know a little bit more about what's going on in the world. They can't even always access journals, so I don't know if NYSCF is doing anything here. It sounds like with some of the grant funding and evaluations, you are making sure that you're including stuff like that.

RA: That's such a great point, Nicole. And Cape Town, which I happened to actually visit recently as well. What a humbling place to learn about DEIB and kind of the sort of progress that we still have yet to make. It's certainly been a center of those lessons and that reckoning we're going through. It was horrifying to me to see some of the things that were in place within our lifetimes so recently in the nineties that this stuff was happening.

Do we have to do better as a scientific community to make our global scientists feel included and have access to these conversations and to how we share science?

RA: Through our community, we are trying to fund globally, of course, but I can't say that we've done a great job of fully global geographical diversification as much as we'd want to have. We certainly increased our outreach to underrepresented regions of the world in our in award portfolios. We've tried, but I can't say that it's translated into new awards in Africa, as much as I would love to be able to see that happen sometime.

This is where us, as a small organization, becomes a limiting and frustrating thing for us. We wish we could have the voice and the arm to reach that far, to get people to know us, to apply, and to impact them. But other organizations like ISSCR are doing a really great job in this and amping up their events and their outreach in those parts of the world. We're happy to partner and provide whatever additional knowledge or support that we possibly can for those. That's where partnerships really come in, because we've got to work together on these kinds of things.

NQ: Agreed. Partnerships, collaboration, awareness, and then some of the things you mentioned before, like setting examples and providing frameworks and toolkits, are needed to make these changes.

Promoting DEIB in Academia

How can we increase partnerships, collaboration, and awareness with scientists globally?

AS: That's one of the themes of this show, is that we've come a long way, but we still have a long way to go. Changes are tough to make a lot of times, especially in academia. There's a lot of inertia in academia. Everybody knows that. Indeed, grand cultural changes that you want to make, right? Even at industrial institutions, the bigger the institution, the more inertia there is.

Maybe it's bureaucracy, maybe it's inertia, whatever. But we've all seen this play out, right? Within any number of the academic institutions that I've been at with multiple departments, you have certainly still smaller subgroups in which change is more feasible. Individual research groups, which can be maybe a little bit more nimble when it comes to changing culture. For example, as a brand new PI, I think about culture a lot because especially for a new lab, any small cultural change that you make from the top, it can have just a dramatic impact immediately.

What are some tangible action items that PIs or group leaders can do to promote better DEIB practices?

RA: There are a few things that come to mind. One is starting out by saying that this is an important value in the lab, and a lot of people will point to that as virtue signaling. But I think there is a certain amount of signaling that is actually valuable for advancing the culture. Coming out and putting a statement on your lab website can help to at least set the tone as folks are coming in.

I think when you talk about that sort of inertia and the way that academic culture is stuck, one of the ways that I found that it's stuck and really not conducive to DEIB is this concept of PI as God. There's the God that comes down from on high and tells you what to do, and that's sort of that. You've just got to do it, and you'll never know why. You'll never know. You don't get to discuss it or understand where the rationale is coming from.

So I think one of the best things that a new PI could do would be to try to break down those barriers and just be as transparent as possible. PIs can tell the lab about the struggles that they have. They can explain why they need you to spend more time writing this grant than they need you to spend on going to this conference right now. Maybe it’s because they're actually in a funding crunch, and they’re getting some pressure from the department head on that.

I think a lot of PIs are just so afraid to be vulnerable, open, and honest with their students and postdocs. It really goes a long way for a lot of the culture and that feeling of belonging to a lab when you give them insight into why you're doing things the way that they are and even apologizing if you make a mistake. I actually didn't see a ton of that in academia. And so the first time I saw somebody who was in a position of authority apologize to me for something, I was kind of blown away.

I thought you weren't even supposed to do that. Never admit a fault or a weakness. I think that's the part of the culture that we just need to do away with. And there's tons of literature out there showing that vulnerability and transparency are positive leadership qualities that will lead to better results from your team, and also engender those feelings of inclusion and belonging that you want your lab to be.

What are some things that new PIs can do to promote DEIB as they start and grow their new lab?

RA: I know some great PIs in the field who have done lab surveys. Leslie Vosshall, who's a fantastic scientist at The Rockefeller University and now is at Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), as well as in leadership there. She put out a template lab survey that you can find via Google, which has a lot of questions where people can give feedback to the PI. Some of the good initiatives I've seen and which we highlighted actually at our community retreat in 2023 were around, "Okay, how can you implement this kind of a climate survey? Can you actually be willing to read the results, to acknowledge the results, and to share the results with your lab to whatever you feel comfortable and to come up with some actions that you can work on as a lab?” Even to say, “What are some ways that we can address concern X?”

I suggest this. Really making that bi-directional, open dialog kind of culture, I think can really help. Again, it is something that's really lacking. We do a lot of surveys and those kinds of things in the biotech and nonprofit sectors. But I think that's the kind of thing that was lacking in academia, at least in my experience.

NQ: That's another area. You spoke earlier about how in industry there are more frameworks and more policies and just more structure around, which leads to a different culture, I think, around DEIB, and that is one thing that we do a lot of at �����ƽ�� is internal 360 reviews. There's an engagement survey that's annual that asks a lot of anonymous questions. So there's not a fear of retribution or anything like that. I think it's excellent because then you can start to have those conversations. We talked earlier about building frameworks, giving people tools, and perpetuating certain practices. If you start at the lab level, like Arun said, and build a culture in your lab, you can spread it to the department and ultimately to the institution and maybe really start to make some changes to that. The inertia.

RA: Absolutely. And I think there's a reticence to take on some of those things in academia because it's like, “Oh, but the freedom of academia, we don't need to do these structured bureaucratic performance reviews and those kinds of things, and we want it to be free and knowledge,” and all of that. But a teeny little bit of structure and a teeny bit of these sorts of things can go a long way in a place like academia. The other thing I'll say is that I think the traditional kind of culture is that, you know, PIs often are just sort of focused on the results. Like, what's the data? Show me the data. Show me the data. Okay. If you haven't done the data, then do more of the data and we'll talk about how your presence in this lab is solely linked to your data. But I think the culture is starting to shift a little bit. Certainly a lot of PIs are starting to change. Show they are interested in the wel-lbeing of the human beings who work in their labs, acknowledging that they are human beings who are going through their own things, checking in on how they are. Feeling like your PI cares about those things can go a really long way to making you feel okay every day and that you can show up as your true self.

What’s your perspective on representation in cell lines and patient samples?

RA: It was just a really engaging discussion for me as well. Even knowing the people going into it, I think it just came together in such an inspiring way. We also had a patient advocate on the panel who really reminded us of what we need to be reminded of; that behind all of these cell lines and this data that we generate, there are human beings. Just like in the workforce, but in our data, there are people behind these samples. They have their own journeys and it is our responsibility to be aware of that as scientists. But more generally, what I'll just say is that all of us are working toward medical breakthroughs, and the mortality rate has changed and improved for so many of these major diseases. But the disparity in racial health, like the racial disparities in health outcomes, has widened and increased over time for so many of these diseases. So we're only doing better at saving the lives of a subset of people. That, obviously, does not fulfill any of the missions that we're on.

This is why NYSCF has taken this really seriously. It's mission aligned. We're talking about accelerating treatments and cures for the major diseases of our time, for everybody who has those diseases, not just the people who happen to have been overrepresented in our research to date. So the technology that we've talked about—the NYSCF Global Stem Cell Array, which is this robotic system that can generate induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines at scale—is part of the vision that Susan Solomon had. When building it and calling it the Global Stem Cell Array, the vision was that it would represent the global diversity of the human population in stem cell lines and that we'd be able to do disease research with an inclusive lens, so that even from the very get-go, when you're trying to understand, “What does a neuron do?”, that you have an inclusive definition of that. The understanding that we have of what a neuron does, or any of those fundamental biology questions, all the way to a question like, “What is Alzheimer's?” to, “What is the best treatment for diabetes?” Those are all incredibly biased in the answers that we have to them in that they have only really applied to white Europeans, who have been the majority of research participants for a wide variety of reasons that we need to understand if we're going to rectify that problem.

Have you encountered any problems in building the Global Stem Cell Array?

RA: NYSCF built the technology. The technology is there and ready to go. We can do hundreds of lines at a time. What's lacking is the funding. Everybody agrees it's a problem, but nobody wants to fund it. So that's one thing we're working on. Another thing that we're working on is those partnerships and awareness-building engagement campaigns, because we have a lot of competencies that we need to build in the scientific community. We have a lot of trust that we need to rebuild with these minoritized communities, because the reality is that they are very justifiably hesitant to participate in research. Krystal highlighted this so beautifully on behalf of the Indigenous community: Why would they want to give up their data to a project where somebody else is going to benefit before they will? Why should they? They want data sovereignty, because obviously they haven't had land sovereignty. We took that from them. So these are the kinds of things that we need to be mindful of. So although a technical problem has been solved, the infrastructure problem is still there. As for the “hearts and minds problem”, which is a term Susan would use a lot, this involves getting everybody's awareness, both with the scientific community, and in responsible engagement with the communities that have been marginalized and minoritized from research that we need to responsibly reengage. We need to do this if we're going to be able to rectify this and make discoveries that are going to benefit everyone who needs them.

Do you think stem cell biology is poised to tackle questions of biodiversity and specimen biodiversity compared to other fields such as genome sequencing?

RA: AS: You alluded to this; that you have your in-house Biobank that you're making from induced pluripotent stem cell populations, ideally from diverse populations. And you said that medical research at its best is conducted for the benefit of all. That's how it should be. But traditionally, that hasn't always been the case. You have a genomics background, so you know that, for example, in genome sequencing, the vast majority of genomes that have been sequenced out there, as you alluded to, are from European ancestry; 90% plus last time I checked.

RA: Yeah. The genome project started by sequencing five white guys, and we've pretty much continued in that vein since then.

AS: Exactly, and that influences the drug discovery process. The whole subsequent downstream is influenced by those upstream key data points. Stem cell biology is perhaps a more modern field. We have stem cell biologists everywhere.

RA: I mean, genomics at the time was also kind of a new field. But that's a really nice, optimistic take on it. I think there are people with newer ideas in the field and that we're a bit more agile as a field than some of the more traditional fields, perhaps. I don't know if I'd necessarily call genomics traditional, but maybe I'm biased as a genomics person. Certainly I think we have that agility, and we do see a lot of uptake and support in the stem cell community especially. Part of that is also because we realize the incredible opportunity we have here. Among all fields, we are so well poised to take this on because we can build these models and do so at population scale. It's a lot harder to do that in some of the other disciplines or even at the clinical trial level. But like you say, everything you do upstream with these discoveries, it radiates through and then biases the entire infrastructure that follows.