The Department of Medicine Minority Recruitment and Retention Committee and Program for Women in Internal Medicine have announced that Hannah A. Valantine, MD, MRCP, the first NIH Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity, will give the Martin Luther King Jr. Medicine Grand Rounds presentation on Jan. 18, 2019 in the Searle Center Lecture Hall.
Dr. Valantine will present "NIH Addresses the Science of Diversity: Looking Through a Genomic Lens."
Valantine will describe NIH’s current approach and activities related to promoting inclusive excellence through fostering workforce diversity. She will also discuss her clinical research at the intersection of genomics and transplantation, in which she is currently validating use of cell-free donor DNA for early prediction of heart- and lung-transplant rejection. This work is shedding new light on the role of genomic markers in health disparities.
Valantine will highlight four main diversity challenges facing biomedicine: Advancing scholarship of the science of diversity; Using a data-driven scientific approach to understand diversity drivers and outcomes; Studying and mitigating the role of sociocultural factors in recruitment, retention, and career advancement; and Sustaining future workforce diversity.
She will describe development and use of the NIH Scientific Workforce Diversity Toolkit, a free, downloadable interactive resource institutions can use to help advance their own faculty diversity. The toolkit guides users through evidence-based interrelated activities that her office is currently using to enhance diversity in the NIH intramural research program. A key focus will be the need to advance institutional accountability for lasting change. Please visit the NIH Scientific Workforce Diversity website and Valantine’s blog for more information.
Valantine is nationally recognized for her transformative approaches to diversity and leads NIH efforts to promote diversity through innovation and data-driven approaches. Her clinical research employs novel genomic tools to monitor heart- and lung-transplant rejection.