Speaker Profile
M.D., MRCP, FACC, Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity, NIH
Biography
Hannah Valantine is the first NIH Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity, and a Senior Investigator in the Intramural Research Program at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Prior to starting this position in April 2014, Dr. Valantine was Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and the Senior Associate Dean for Diversity and Leadership at Stanford, a leadership position she held since November 2004. She is nationally recognized for her transformative approaches to diversity and is a recipient of the NIH Director’s Pathfinder Award for Diversity in the Scientific Workforce. She is currently leading NIH efforts to promote diversity through innovation across the NIH-funded biomedical workforce through a range of evidence-based approaches. Dr. Valantine maintains an active clinical research program that continues to have high impact on patient care. Current research extends her previous finding that an organ transplant is essentially a genome transplant, and that monitoring the level of donor DNA in a recipient’s blood as a marker of organ damage will detect early stages of rejection. She is currently overseeing a mul-ti-site consortium of mid-Atlantic transplant centers to validate these findings clinically toward the development of a non-invasive tool for detecting early signs of organ rejection.
Talk
Scientific Workforce Diversity: A Cornerstone for Precision Health
NIH’s first NIH Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity Dr. Hannah Valantine will describe NIH’s current approach and activities related to promoting inclusive excellence through fostering workforce diversity. Dr. 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 also 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. These include expanding diversity of the candidate pool, proactive outreach to diverse talent, mitigating bias in search processes, and developing/sustaining mentoring relationships. A key focus will be the need to advance institutional accountability for lasting change. Please visit the NIH Scientific Workforce Diversity website and Dr. Valantine’s blog for more information.
