November 2006

Anne Harding - Guest Editor Some Real Action After Decades of Talk About Diversity In 1989, the number of PhDs in science and engineering awarded to blacks in the United States was 222, just 1.8% of the total - and a drop from 288 in 1977. More recently the numbers are better. According to the National Science Foundation, 661 blacks received a PhD in science or engineering in 2003

Myth: Diversity is good for business. Reality: It's a bit more complicated than that. Research from MIT's Thomas Kochan showed-controversially-that ethnic and gender diversity can harm team and company performance if they're not managed effectively. (see "Diversity: The New Business Case") Myth: Blacks and Latinos don't consider careers in researc

FROM THE FIELD There are no easy answers when it comes to building a truly diverse workforce in the life science arena. Many feel we've made little progress toward that goal during the last few decades, rightfully pointing to the continued disparity in representation, inc

By Clifton A. Poodry It's time to apply our scientific thinking to designing diversity programs. Here's how. Despite our scientific training, when we think about ways to build a more diverse biomedical research workforce, we may base our ideas on sentiments and preconceptions rather than the best evidence. One way to avoid this is to approa

Determining Program Efficacy © PETER M. FISHER / CORBIS In 2004, NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) launched a research initiative to understand the efficacy of interventions intended to increase the number of minorities in bio

By Damaris Christensen Losing Ground? Educators fear small gains of affirmative action are under threat from reverse-discrimination lawsuits. In 2003, in its first ruling on affirmative action since 1978, the Supreme Court affirmed in its University of Michigan Law School decision that diversity in the classroom, in and of itself, is a compelling state inter

The Government's Assessment In the current mixed legal climate, where diversity programs have been ruled constitutional and litigation continues over their appropriate boundaries, federal agencies are by and large continuing to fund programs aimed at increasing participation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) by underrepresented minorit

The Government's Assessment In the current mixed legal climate, where diversity programs have been ruled constitutional and litigation continues over their appropriate boundaries, federal agencies are by and large continuing to fund programs aimed at increasing participation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) by underrepresented minorit

By Anthony H. Williams and Carole Williams-Green Environmental education center gets city kids started down the path to science. Just a stone's throw from streets sprinkled with shattered glass, in a largely African-American west Philadelphia neighborhood, exists a convergence of labs, volunteers, educators, and most importantly, eager students. We established the Cobbs Creek Environment

By Anne Harding Diversity efforts are unexplored territory for many European nations. The November 2005 riots across France made it clear why efforts to diversify Europe's workforce are important, and why these efforts may pose a particular challenge here. Frustrated at being shut out of the nation's economic and educational

By Ed Silverman Small World Globalization means broader definition of diversity, and broader opportunities. Weiyi Zheng says he loves his career in the New Jersey suburbs, but he wouldn't turn down an opportunity to return to his native China. And thanks to the increasing globalization of the pharma industry workforce, his employer just might give him the ch

By Karen Pallarito The Feminine Touch Women are joining forces to invest in life science ventures, and getting results. "We feel there's a huge opportunity to be able to support the initiatives that these women are going to want to take in terms of entrepreneurship and growing businesses." — Donna

By Kirsten Weir Erich Jarvis Associate Professor of Neurobiology, Duke University © LES TODD As the stage lights went down on his graduation dance performance at New York's High School of the Performing Arts, Erich Jarvis decided on his future. He'd been

By Damaris Christensen Donna J. Nelson Associate Professor of Chemistry, University of Oklahoma COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA, DEPT OF CHEMISTRY & BIOCHEMISTRY Perhaps it was her training as a chemist that led Donna Nelson to insist on filling out eve

A Revolutionary Approach to Biomarker Discovery Immunoassays coupled with mass spectrometrycould reveal new dimensions in the blood  By Emanuel F. Petricoin and Lance A. Liotta ARTICLE EXTRAS Proteomics: Promise and ProblemsSuch early disease detection doesn't always mean longer life, write JENNIFER MILLER and BARNETT KRAMER. INFOGRAPHIC: The Peptidome Hypothesis:What does a disease signature look like in the blood? Serum Proteomics ScrutinizedSELDI-TOF st

By Kirsten Weir Lyndon Mitnaul Research Fellow, Division of Cardiovascular Diseases, Merck Research Laboratories COURTESY OF LYNDON MITNAUL Lyndon Mitnaul remembers falling in love. "Around tenth grade I took my first chemistry class," he says, "and I fell in love with science."

By Karen Pallarito Sonya Summerour Clemmons Director of Business Development, MediVas, LLCBusiness Founder and Owner, SSC Enterprises © BLACK ENTERPRISE MAGAZINE Growing up in Gainesville, Ga., Sonya Summerour Clemmons could have easily made excuses not t

By Juhi Yajnik Andrea Stith, 33 Program Officer for educational grant programs, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) COURTESY OF COLELLA PHOTOGRAPHY EDUCATION: PhD in biophysics, University of Virginia HOMETOWN: West Point, NY WORK/RESEARC

Proteomics: Promise and Problems By Jennifer H. Miller and Barnett S. Kramer FEATURE ARTICLE A Revolutionary Approach to Biomarker DiscoveryEMANUEL PETRICOIN and LANCE LIOTTA describe how their methods for discovery could solve the seeming end to the pipeline of disease detection biomarkers ARTICLE EXTRAS INFOGRAPHIC: The Peptidome Hypothesis:What does a disease signature look like in the blood? Serum Proteomics ScrutinizedSELDI-TOF still struggles to prove its worth as a clinic

By Kirsten Weir Gwen D. Fewell, 40 Open Biosystems, Huntsville, Alabama; RNAi Product Manager COURTESY OF OPEN BIOSYSTEMS EDUCATION: PhD in neuroscience from Florida State University HOMETOWN: Bombay, India WORK/RESEARCH: Fewell is in charge of developin

By Juhi Yajnik Maria Thelma Ocampo, 29 Postdoc, London Research Institute COURTESY OF MARIA OCAMPO HOMETOWN: Manila, Philippines, until she was 8 years old, then Arleta, Calif. WORK/RESEARCH: Ocampo works on DNA packaging and the cohesion complex that holds sis

By Chandra Shekhar Sebastián Vélez, 33 Third-year graduate student at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University COURTESY OF SEBASTIÁN VÉLEZ HOMETOWN: Bayamon, Puerto Rico WORK/RESEARCH: Vélez's research is centered o

CASE STUDY: BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLANNING By Fred Klapetzky FEATURE ARTICLE Confronting RiskChallenges to your business - both daily and long-term competitiveness - lurk in surprising places. BRUCE BELZAK explains how to protect your company. ARTICLE EXTRAS Case study:A medical device component manufacturer faces nervous senior executives Four ways to save money - and your business Five Things Not to Forget When ForecastingForecast models can become complex, but the princi

Four Ways to Save Money - and Your Business An underwriter reveals the must-do items he looks for when evaluating a company for coverage. By Philip W. Fiscus FEATURE ARTICLE Confronting RiskChallenges to your business – both daily and long-term competitiveness – lurk in surprising places. BRUCE BELZAK explains how to protect your company. ARTICLE EXTRAS Case study:A medical device component manufacturer faces nervous senior executives Case s

By Charles Q. Choi Getting Results You've started a diversity program. But how do you know if it's having any effect? Harvard Medical School has offered a voluntary diversity-training program every year since 2000. Immediately after each session, organizers asked how much volunteers liked learning about the importance of diversity for organizations. People

By Charles Q. Choi Getting Results You've started a diversity program. But how do you know if it's having any effect? Harvard Medical School has offered a voluntary diversity-training program every year since 2000. Immediately after each session, organizers asked how much volunteers liked learning about the importance of diversity for organizations. People

By Charles Q. Choi Who's in Charge? What it takes to manage diversity. © JENNIFER TRENCHARD Ten years ago, a chief diversity officer or vice president of diversity was almost unheard of, but today about one in five Fortune 1000 companies have diversity ma

Resources More Information The Athena Project www.athenaproject.org.uk Joint government/university effort to promote women's participation in science, engineering and technology in the UK. European Commission Science and Society

The Life Sciences Salary Survey Compensation soars as demand for highly-skilled professionals heats up. By Karen PallaritoRelated Articles: Salary by Highest Degree Earned Salary by Area of Specialization Salary by Gender Salary by Ethnicity Salary Map: salaries and costs of living in 19 US metropolitan areas Salary Charts Salary by Job Activity, type of research, age, and job title 2006 Salary Survey Methodology Salary Survey ArchiveThe que

The Life Sciences Salary Survey: Methodology By Karen PallaritoRelated Articles: Salary by Highest Degree Earned Salary by Area of Specialization Salary by Gender Salary by Ethnicity Salary Map: salaries and costs of living in 19 US metropolitan areas Salary Charts Salary by Job Activity, type of research, age, and job title 2006 Salary Survey Salary Survey ArchiveThe survey, ?Compensation of Life Scientists in the USA,? was conducted by Abbot

Shivani Sud (right) with Jan Davidson of the Davidson Institute. Credit: http://www.LEPOLDPHOTOGRAPHY.COM LEPOLDPHOTOGRAPHY.COM _blank" />Shivani Sud (right) with Jan Davidson of the Davidson Institute. Credit: http://www.LEPOLDPHOTOGRAPHY.COM LEPOLDPHOTOGRAPHY.COM _blank When Shivani Sud was six years old, a member of her immediate family had surgery to remove a brain tumor. Desperate to help, Sud dragged a stepstool to the kitchen sink, sprinkled soap on a sponge and began w

Caroline Snyder Credit: COURTESY OF CAROLINE SNYDER" />Caroline Snyder Credit: COURTESY OF CAROLINE SNYDER It was sometime in the late 1990s that Caroline Snyder first read news reports about a couple in Greenland, NH, who were blaming recycled sewage sludge - also known as biosolids - for the death of their son. Although she was an environmental scientist, Snyder didn't really know anything about sludge, but the story piqued her interest because she had recently retired to New Hampshi

On a brisk August morning in southern Australia, 16 recent PhD graduates and postdocs from around the country are sitting in a windowless room, fretting about the way science is portrayed in the media. They're attending a weeklong media-training boot camp, and the fraying of their nerves is palpable as they talk about what worries them most: the superficial way their research might be handled, overhyping, and how to handle difficult questions. "What's the point of science communicati

When the space shuttles Discovery and Atlantis blasted off in the direction of the International Space Station (ISS) this year, passengers of a more botanical variety vastly outnumbered the seven astronauts on board. Secured in small seed cassettes, some 1600 seeds of the cress species, Arabidopsis thaliana, took the flight for a research project designed to help tease out the tropic influences of gravity and light on plant growth, while perhaps helping to find a way to grow crops for lo

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Russian scientists are testing a proposed system to bring a more merit-based approach to the doling out of funds supplementing basic salaries. The effort by the Russian Ministry of Science is meant to address criticism of the current system, "a crazy combination of uniformly low pay with distribution of extras by the will of the management," says Mikhail Gelfand, a scientist at the Institute for Information Transmission Problems in Moscow. Paychecks for Russian post-docs are about 5,000-

Graduating from a mid-ranked university may put you at even more of a disadvantage than finishing a life sciences doctorate at a lower-ranked school, according to research by Laurel Smith-Doerr, an assistant professor of sociology at Boston University. Smith Doerr sampled 2,062 life scientists who were on average 5 years out of grad school. As she reports in the June issue of the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, those who had completed their PhDs at elite universities were mu

Credit: © JAMES PAULS" /> Credit: © JAMES PAULS Ellen McMahon was a rising star as leader of the cardiovascular research group at Pharmacia before its merger with Pfizer. But she started to get grumbling from her team, and talks about management style from her bosses. McMahon says her staff "was struggling with my leadership, they didn?t feel involved in making decisions. I was more in the mode of driving towards goals rather than considering team dynamics." McMahon, an acknowledg