Commitment to Diversity

Underrepresented minorities (URMs) often have to confront unique challenges that can hinder their success at academic medical institutions. First, given URMs are less likely to have participated in research-related activities during their graduate medical education, they often have more difficulty acquiring full-time faculty appointments in academic medicine than Whites (Jeffe, 2012). Second, URMs are less likely to be awarded prestigious NIH R01 funding than Whites (Ginther, 2011), which can be extremely detrimental to their academic productivity. Moreover, URM faculty with assistant and associate professorial ranks are 32% and 19% less likely to be promoted than similarly ranked White faculty at US medical centers (Fang, 2000). Although there is relative variation in the promotion rates of faculty by race/ethnicity, given various characteristics of medical centers, like institutional size, it has been argued that the lack of equitable promotion of URM faculty can have devastating consequences for healthcare delivery to vulnerable populations and for medical school trainees given the lack of diverse educators and mentors in leadership positions (Nunez-Smith, 2012).

Although the challenges to increasing both the recruitment and retention of diverse leaders and investigators in academic medicine require rigorous, multilevel solutions, we posit that one mechanism by which academic medical institutions can better ensure the success of both URM trainees and faculty members is by providing them with frequent opportunities to increase their methodological research capacity. Thus, in order to make a valuable contribution to increasing the methodological expertise of URMs at academic medical centers nationwide, we established the Diversity Recruitment Advisory Board (DRAB) to ensure that the most effective strategies are employed to recruit URM residents, fellows, postdocs, and junior clinical investigators from academic medical institutions into the ASIBS Short Course.

Fang D, Moy E, Colburn L, Hurley J (2000) Racial and ethnic disparities in faculty promotion in academic medicine. JAMA 284(9):1085-1092.
Ginther D, Schaffer W, Schnell J, Masimore B, Liu F, et al. (2011) Race, ethnicity, and NIH research awards. Science 333:1015-1019.
Jeffe DB, Yan Y, Andriole DA (2012) Do research activities during college, medical school, and residency mediate racial/ethnic disparities in full-time faculty appointments at U.S. medical schools? Acad Med 87(11):1-12.
Nunez-Smith M, Ciarleglio MM, Sandoval-Schaefer T, Elumn J, Castillo-Page L, et al. (2012) Institutional variation in the promotion of racial/ethnic minority faculty at US medical schools. AJPH 102(5):852-858.

Members of the Diversity Recruitment Advisory Board