Few 20th century achievements portend more promise than the digitalization of biology, made possible by the Human Genome Project and a whirlwind of subsequent advances. The omics revolution continues to develop and mature rapidly as sequencing becomes cheaper and easier for individual scientists…
Read moreBlog
2017
Credit: Ernesto del Aguila III, NHGRI
Dr. Hannah Valantine at the NIH Future Research Leaders Conference
Diversity for the Future: Accelerating Change and Sustainability
May 05, 2017
As I’ve noted in previous blogs and elsewhere, I see enhancing workforce diversity as an opportunity and an imperative for maintaining our nation’s biomedical research preeminence in an increasingly competitive global environment. But to grasp this opportunity, we as a biomedical community face…
Read more
Re-Thinking First Impressions
April 19, 2017
In my role as NIH Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity, every week I encounter hundreds of individuals and groups in the massive enterprise that is biomedical research. These include students, postdocs, and faculty; top leadership at NIH and at universities; NIH staff at all levels,…
Read more
Gabriel Cartagena in the lab with mentor Lisa Smith.
Tomorrow’s Scientists, Today
April 06, 2017
Chances are, if you aren’t related to a scientist, or have never known one personally, you probably wouldn’t imagine yourself as one. Psychologists call this a lack of science identity. But other factors beyond who you know, such as who you are and what people think you can do, often shapes…
Read more2016
It’s 1906 at the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition. People are lined up to guess the weight of a steer on display. It turns out that the added and averaged guess of all guessers was within one pound of the actual weight of the cow – and closer than any one person’s guess. This finding, repeated in other settings, suggests that the output of a group of different people is more accurate than any one person: amateur or pro.
Cows, Wall Street and Science
April 30, 2016
NIH’s mission is turning discovery into health. That discovery gets done by people—creative scientists of all types all across the nation. As NIH’s Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity, I am keenly interested in what seems a simple question: Who are the best people for this task? How…
Read more