ASA Recognizes Academic Departments for JEDI Efforts
Department of Biostatistics | College of Public Health | University of Iowa
Joseph E. Cavanaugh is a professor of biostatistics and head of the department of biostatistics at the University of Iowa. He has been on the faculty since 2003 and served as department head since 2015.
Jacob J. Oleson is a professor of biostatistics and the director of graduate studies for the department of biostatistics at the University of Iowa. He also serves as the director of the University of Iowa Center for Public Health Statistics. He has been on the faculty since 2004.
Gideon K.D. Zamba is a professor of biostatistics at the University of Iowa. He is the cofounder and director of the Iowa Summer Institute in Biostatistics, which was initiated in 2009. He has been on the faculty since 2003.
Describe your department’s mission in implementing justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. What steps have you taken to achieve this mission?
The college of public health at the University of Iowa was founded in 1999. In 2002, Kathryn Chaloner was hired to serve as the department head of the newly formed department of biostatistics. As one of the few prominent female statisticians of her generation, Kathryn had spent much of her early career striving to improve the representation of women in the discipline.
In 2009, Kathryn cofounded with Gideon Zamba the Iowa Summer Institute in Biostatistics, one of several educational and research programs funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute “to address a growing imbalance between the demand and supply for biostatisticians.” The University of Iowa program was established with a focus on recruiting women and underrepresented minorities.
As of the summer of 2022, nearly 230 students have been trained through the Iowa Summer Institute in Biostatistics. About half of these students have been underrepresented minorities and about two-thirds have been female. More than half of our institute alums have joined a graduate program in biostatistics, statistics, or data science; of these, about two out of five have attended the University of Iowa to pursue a degree in our department.
In general, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s Summer Institutes in Biostatistics have been extremely successful at drawing quantitatively gifted students to the discipline. Our summer institute has also had a profound impact on our own graduate student recruitment efforts and has allowed our department to make substantive strides in its goal of having a more diverse and inclusive graduate student body.
What have been the biggest challenges in implementing justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in your department?
Iowa is a state with a fairly homogeneous population. Many students who have never visited Iowa City have preconceptions of the community, as well as the state of Iowa and the Midwest. Through the summer institute, we have the opportunity to bring students to Iowa City for a seven-week, immersive educational and research experience. These students hopefully see that some of their preconceptions are wrong and that, as a department, we’ve endeavored to build an extended academic family in which all students feel welcome and valued.
What can other departments learn from your JEDI work?
Other departments can hopefully learn that it is entirely possible to develop a more diverse and inclusive student body, one that is capable of achieving the highest levels of excellence, provided the faculty and staff are fully committed to this objective. An important aspect of this commitment involves the development of teaching and mentoring strategies that will facilitate the success of students from a variety of educational and cultural backgrounds.
What have been the benefits and results of your JEDI undertakings?
As a department, we firmly believe a diversity of backgrounds and experiences enhances the overall academic environment by cultivating a wide variety of perspectives and viewpoints and facilitating the type of nonconventional thinking that leads to scientific advancement. As statisticians, biostatisticians, and data scientists, we should all strive to fulfill a vision for the discipline that embraces diversity and all it entails: fair and equitable treatment; mutual respect and trust; equal access to opportunity; and the pervasive understanding that inclusion fosters innovation.
Is there anything you would do differently if you could go back to the formation of your department?
Our department was fortunate to have hired a visionary leader, the late Kathryn Chaloner, when it was still in the formative stage. We have Kathryn and Gideon to thank for recognizing the importance of promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in the profession and for striving to embed these values in our departmental culture.
Throughout this journey, there have understandably been occasional missteps and subsequent course corrections. In pursuing JEDI initiatives, good intentions are necessary but not sufficient to achieve success. Creating a more positive, supportive, inclusive culture is an ongoing process that necessitates continual attention, refinement, and engagement.
If time and resources were not an issue, what one thing would you immediately do to bolster your JEDI efforts?
More lucrative fellowship and scholarship programs would facilitate our recruitment efforts. Developing a summer ‘boot camp’ for incoming students to better prepare them for their first year of graduate school would also be beneficial, since the students who join our department come from a variety of educational backgrounds.
How does your university support your efforts?
The University of Iowa College of Public Health has been extremely supportive in facilitating, promoting, and publicizing our summer institute and, more broadly, our JEDI initiatives. Our dean, Edith Parker, is one of our most ardent and vocal advocates. Despite her many other obligations, Edith spends time with the students who attend our institute and even hosts a picnic for them at her home. With those students who eventually join our department, she remains engaged and involved. We are fortunate to be in a college that shares our values and is so supportive of our efforts.
Department of Biostatistics | New York University
Rebecca Betensky is professor and chair of biostatistics at the NYU School of Global Public Health. She is passionate about diversity in biostatistics and has directed summer pipeline programs for undergraduates for more than 20 years at both Harvard and NYU.
Rumi Chunara is an associate professor of biostatistics and computer science and director of the Center for Health Data Science. Her research promotes the value of pluralism of people and types of knowledge in advancing biostatistics.
Stephanie H. Cook is an assistant professor. Her work is in the development and application of longitudinal study designs for determining the ways in which dynamic changes in features of minority stress are associated with changes in risk behaviors and physical health.
Melody S. Goodman is a professor of biostatistics; associate dean for research; and director of the Center for Anti-Racism, Social Justice, and Public Health at the NYU School of Global Public Health. She has published on diversity in academic public health.
Describe your department’s mission in implementing justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. What steps have you taken to achieve this mission?
We are a young department (approximately five years old), which gives us the opportunity to build JEDI principles into every program and policy of our department and to embed it in our culture. The initial diverse composition of our small faculty helped infuse the department with JEDI aspirations and commitment from the start. We realize these principles need to be in our lines of sight at every moment, as they require active and proactive effort always.
We include a page on JEDI-related activities on our websites, and we include a full description of our JEDI activities in our annual reports. We also highlight our publications and programs on the landing page of our website and often through Twitter postings. These avenues allow us to showcase our values and efforts and keep us accountable. Examples of what we have done fall into the following categories:
- Who we are. We are a diverse faculty of eight permanent faculty and three visiting faculty, and we work hard to maintain our diversity in faculty searches through targeted outreach.
- Scholarly, educational, and policy writings. We address issues related to JEDI in our research, educational writings, and commentary: health disparities research topics; curricula of public health schools; data literacy as a tool for social justice; examination of diversity in our field
Visit the NYU website and read about how our programs and recruitment, education, and training of students reflect JEDI values and support NYU educational and research missions in biostatistics.
What have been the biggest challenges in implementing justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in your department?
The two biggest challenges we face in implementing JEDI in our department are limited funds and a limited student and faculty applicant pool. NYU’s tuition is high, which is prohibitive for some students from underrepresented backgrounds. While we do provide some tuition funding for most MS and MPH students, it is insufficient for many. If we had more scholarship funds available, we could increase the diversity of our master’s students.
Faculty searches are challenging due to the limited number of candidates from underrepresented backgrounds applying for academic positions and the competition we face from comparable departments in getting them to apply to our positions and in hiring them. This problem requires concerted and personalized efforts to identify candidates, convince them to apply to our positions, and then recruit them.
What can other departments learn from your JEDI work? Do you have a toolkit or resources you can share?
Our approach is multi-pronged and can be categorized as the following:
- We participate and are present: We think it is crucial to make our efforts known in our department and in the larger communities. We do this by being present at conferences; publicizing our research and educational efforts through our websites and emails; and communicating with our ever-growing network of faculty, former students, and colleagues.
- We are constantly learning and teaching: We have met with other departments in our school to let them know about what we have done. We always ask many questions of visitors to learn about what they do at their institutions. We collaborate actively and rely on advisory boards to guide us in our formal programs and centers.
- We are vigilant: We understand achieving JEDI is difficult and requires constant work and self-reflection. We are undertaking a review of our curriculum, and we will certainly be taking a fresh look at how JEDI principles can be better incorporated into our courses.
What have been the benefits and results of your JEDI undertakings?
We have already seen the following tangible results from our JEDI efforts:
- We have an NIH-funded summer program and training program.
- We have published on related topics.
- We are building new pathways: students from our quantitative public health data literacy program have entered our master’s and summer programs.
- We have supported training in and have faculty visiting from Kenya through an NIH-funded data science training program with a focus on data science for social determinants.
Is there anything you would do differently if you could go back to the formation of your department?
We have a limited number of domestic students in our program, very few from NYC and very few underrepresented minority students. When the department was formed, there was little focus on recruiting biostatistics students; recruitment was for public health in general. If we could go back to the formation of our department, we would form partnerships with the City University of New York, State University of New York, historically Black colleges and universities, and MSI that would help us recruit these students. We are still lacking in this area.
If time and resources were not an issue, what one thing would you immediately do to bolster your JEDI efforts?
We have a long list of items! Some of these are the following:
- Establish named, need-based scholarships for master’s students
- Increase the size of our PhD cohort, which is currently limited because we fully fund the students.
- Fund the development of strong JEDI components in biostatistics curricula.
- Establish meaningful bidirectional relationships with minority-serving institutions by co-teaching courses and having shared training programs at both sites.
- Convene a working group to think about concrete efforts that would make biostatistics a more welcoming place for underrepresented minority students and faculty and implement them.
How does your university support your efforts?
NYU and the School of Global Public Health have been very supportive of our efforts. They supported the establishment of a new center for anti-racism and social justice, including three faculty hires and postdoctoral fellows, as well as the Center for Health Data Science, with a holistic view of health and well-being.
NYU supports a six-year College & Career Lab Program for underrepresented and disadvantaged students from NYC, which now has a public health component. They provide support every year for our Pipelines summer program for costs that are not covered by our National Institutes of Health grant. Given the cosmopolitan nature of the city, they host and support numerous summer programs for high-school students and undergraduates from New York City, which we also participate in. These include the Applied Research Innovations in Science and Engineering program that targets 10th- and 11th-grade students with little or no access to high-quality STEM education experiences: women, students of color, and those from low-income backgrounds.
The school has instituted numerous policies to highlight the importance of diversity, including reporting requirements and procedures for job searches, and is currently searching for an associate dean for diversity, equality, and inclusion.
Indiana University | School of Public Health
David B. Allison earned his PhD from Hofstra University in 1990. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a second postdoctoral fellowship at the New York Obesity Research Center at St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Hospital Center. He became dean and provost professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington in 2017.
Describe your mission in implementing justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. What steps have you taken to achieve this mission?
As dean of the IU School of Public Health, my mission is to advance knowledge about health in a way that helps our fellow citizens. Yet we also have the mission of creating equity in science careers and education, which is the opportunity to discover things and experience the wonder and joy of science. These are things everybody should have a right to partake of, so we are trying to open the door wider than it’s been opened in the past.
We want to do the best science, and it has been shown empirically that the best science is done by diverse groups. Such scholars tend to ask different questions and, in doing so, open up new vistas of thinking.
Last, we want to do things in ways that are fun and joyous, and I personally find working and interacting with a diverse community of people to be enriching and rewarding.
What have been the biggest challenges in implementing justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in the IU School of Public Health?
I think most organizations resist change. Sometimes it’s just inertia—people are busy and tired, they have other things to do, and it’s hard to get them motivated and on board. That’s the biggest challenge, but we’ve met it. Indiana University’s leadership has given us the backing both financially and administratively to help move forward, and our faculty and staff have embraced this and worked their tails off to implement JEDI initiatives in our school. The result is an extraordinary pool of diverse and stellar scholars and faculty who are notable for their academic excellence in addition to their diversity.
What can other schools or departments learn from your JEDI work? Do you have resources you can share?
The most important resources are the ones that virtually every academic leader has but does not always bring to bear—the resources we have at hand. Too often in academia, people check the box on diversity recruiting. They sincerely want to promote diversity, but they haven’t put their full effort into it in the same way they would their own scientific research. When we do our scientific research, we plan, hire consultants, study, and study again. And when things don’t work, we go back to the drawing board and try another way to get at the problem.
Whereas my experience with many administrative tasks is that administrators check the box and say, “I put a JEDI statement at the bottom of the advertisement, we’re an equal opportunity employer, and persons of all backgrounds are welcome and encouraged to apply. Yet we didn’t get a lot of diversity, so what can I do? I did the best practices and that’s it.” But if it was your research study, you wouldn’t just give up—you’d go back, hire a consultant, do something different, and keep trying.
If you decide something is so important that the only option is success, then you find a way to get it done. It’s the decision to say, “I will accept nothing but success.”
What have been the benefits and results of your JEDI undertakings?
The results have been extraordinary. While we are not absolutely certain, we may have the most diverse tenure-track faculty of any school of public health in the country. Our numbers (34 percent) are based on the 2022–2023 academic year in terms of the percentage of our tenure-track faculty who are from traditionally underrepresented minority groups in science (as defined by the National Science Foundation). Having 34 percent of total tenure-track faculty be from minority groups exceeds any other school of public health in the US, according to the 2021 data from the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health. We haven’t seen the 2022 data yet, but we think we could arguably be number one in the nation, and the enthusiasm within our school is incredible. People are talking with each other and learning about each other’s culture and research. It’s very exciting.
Is there anything you would do differently if you could go back to the formation of your school?
It’s hard to know, but sometimes I think I would have spent a little more money on staff support earlier on and seen it as a business investment. We’re always trying to be careful and frugal, and that creates a strain when doing an enormous recruitment initiative. So, the recruiting might have been less effortful and a little faster if we had more staff devoted to it.
If time and resources were not an issue, what one thing would you immediately do to bolster your JEDI efforts?
I think that with respect to recruitment, I would spend enormous resources bringing potential doctoral students, in particular, and more people—potential staff, faculty, postdocs, and undergraduate students—to our campus and school to see what a wonderful place it is. We are actually going to start doing some of that, but I would do it on a mega scale if money were infinite.
This coming year, for example, we want to focus on more PhD student recruitment and keep pulling from that pipeline. We hope and believe that with a diverse faculty and PhD student population, others will look at our school and say, “That’s where I want to be, that’s a place that respects diversity, that’s a place where there are people who look like me where I can see it and I can be it. There are role models and diversity is valued.”
We have hired a new associate dean for organizational climate, inclusion, and belonging, and I would put more resources under her disposal for more assessment to figure out what really works, to help create those greatest benefits for all of us involved, regardless of race, age, ability, status, gender, sexual orientation, sexual identity, etc.
How does your university support your efforts?
Our university leadership has for years been enormously supportive, which is very much why our school has been so successful. Indeed, we have had tremendous financial backing from the provost and president. Both the current and prior provosts and presidents were all committed and strongly supportive. But at least equally important is the moral, social, administrative, and political support. It is the encouragement to move forward, understanding that when I prioritize this, I may not prioritize something else.
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