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  • CAREER Q&A

‘There’s a lot of privilege masquerading as merit’: why inclusion matters in academia

Frankie Heyward explains why he founded the National Black Postdoctoral Association, and why researchers must honestly evaluate their privilege.
By
  1. Esme Hedley

    1. Esme Hedley is a careers and supplements team intern for Nature in London.

Frankie Heyward, surrounded by a purple outline, presents during a symposium.

Frankie Heyward founded the National Black Postdoctoral Association to create community, to fight isolation and as part of the antidote to institutionalized racism in academia. Credit: Kenny Elas

Early in his postdoctoral programme at Harvard Medical School (HMS) in Boston, Massachusetts, Frankie Heyward realized how isolated he felt as the only PhD holder in the department who identified as Black. In 2020, after a chance meeting with another Black postdoc in a lift, Heyward decided to build a community for people like them, and set up the Harvard Black Postdoc Association (HBPA). Later that year, after the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer, Heyward penned an open letter to an HMS dean on the need to address institutionalized racism in academia, which the dean then shared with the HMS community. Subsequently, Heyward and a group of seven other Black postdocs at Harvard submitted a proposal for Black postdoctoral support to the HMS deans. The HBPA, at the time a small mailing list, soon attracted many new members. HMS committed US$5,000 in funding to the organization, and Harvard Affiliate Hospitals promised future financial support. Wanting a community that transcended institutional boundaries, Heyward founded the National Black Postdoctoral Association (NBPA), a non-profit organization, in 2021.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02698-7

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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