Educators at the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth know interest in STEM should start early. For Jamboor Vishwanatha, vice president for minority health and health disparities at the Health Science Center, that means creating mentorship opportunities with school districts, including Fort Worth ISD, Arlington ISD and Crowley ISD.
“We want middle school and high school students to see themselves be a doctor, be a researcher. We give programs called coaching up, and we give after-school programs,” said Vishwanatha. “We bring them on campus, give them exposure to some of the science that is going on, some of the facilities that we have.”
Vishwanatha helped organize a national conference at the Health Science Center on mentorship and broadening the pipeline of people who pursue biomedical research.
The January conference took place before President Donald Trump took office and issued a sweeping set of directives for federal health agencies, including executive orders banning funding related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, and “gender ideology,” according to the leading research journal Science.
A spokesperson for the Health Science Center said that they are working with their federal partners to best understand any potential implications of recent federal directives, but they did not comment on whether any Health Science Center programs have or will be affected.
Lawrence Tabak, the principal deputy director of the National Institutes of Health, was the keynote speaker at the conference. Because he was preparing for a new presidential administration at his office in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside of the nation’s capital, he joined the conference virtually.
He outlined what the NIH supports, from basic research, translating research into discoveries and clinical research to evaluate the effectiveness of their discoveries. But its biggest asset, Tabak said, are the 350,000 people who the group funds.
“People are the most important resource we have and all the while, you know, we are obligated for those of us who lead the effort at NIH to have a balanced research portfolio to ensure the highest return on investment for the U.S. taxpayer,” said Tabak, who has worked at the NIH for more than two decades.
Tabak discussed his personal journey, from attending college when tuition was free at City College of New York, then going to Columbia University to study dentistry, attaining his doctorate in oral biology at the University at Buffalo, and rising through the faculty ranks at the University of Rochester.
“There’s this fantasy that you get a mentor, and that’s your lifelong mentor — and now you’re done. And, point of fact is that most people need more than one mentor,” said Tabak.
Mentorship isn’t about being prescriptive and clinical, Tabak said, but about coaching and teaching people to assess the terrain they’re on at different levels in their career.
That’s one broad way that Vishwanatha is viewing mentorship. It’s not just about igniting an interest in STEM. It’s about building a pipeline from school to college, and creating the infrastructure in the professional world so students don’t just pursue STEM but advance in their careers with the right guidance, coaching and support.
“One of the goals of our conference is also how institutions can adopt programs that can help both the students and faculty receive mentorship, quality mentorship, so that way, in addition to their education, they also receive a proper mentorship for their own future,” said Vishwanatha, who obtained his doctorate in biology from the University of South Carolina and studied genetics in Bangalore, India.
For Tabak, his work is about broadening the impact of the NIH so that they can continue to help develop research and create an impact. When he talked about diversity, he meant in the broadest sense, from a person’s background and economic status to where they went to school. Building geographic diversity, he said, is important, too. It needs to be beyond the usual centers of research in California, New York, Massachusetts and even Texas.
“I don’t know where the next great idea is going to come from. And unless we have broad engagement with all the different parameters that I just sort of picked off, we may miss the next great opportunity,” Tabak said.
With scientists hailing from Puerto Rico to Pennsylvania, the conference set its aim to broaden mentorship, with the hopes of identifying the next big ideas.