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Designing a biomedical coding program focused on inclusivity and agency

Nature Computational Science volume 1, pages 242–243 (2021)Cite this article

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To the Editor — Last year, scientists across the world participated in the 10 June protests and used hashtags such as #ShutDownAcademia, #ShutDownSTEM and #Strike4BlackLife, which called for non-Black academics to take action towards eradicating anti-Black racism in academia, including the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). This resulted in an outpouring of stories by Black academics detailing the racist experiences that they have endured. Their stories underlie an urgent need for transforming academic structures to be more equitable.

To make a positive change towards this goal, last year we created the Virtual BUILD Research Collaboratory (VBRC), an online summer program focused on diversity and inclusion. Summer programs are crucial for students as they are a critical step towards building scientific careers. The VBRC was developed out of the SF BUILD (Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity), a six-year-old program for undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds in biomedical research, typically held in person. Given the disruptions caused by the pandemic, our team had to transform the regular in-person offering into an eight-week online summer coding program, which took place from 22 June–13 August 2020. As we were able to pivot rapidly to a new solution, we offered it to nine sister National Institutes of Health (NIH) BUILD sites across the country. The objective of the virtual eight-week summer coding program was to teach students to use the statistical programming language and software R/RStudio to perform research related to health disparities due to COVID-19.

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References

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank SF BUILD staff members D. Espinosa, M. Guadalupe De Paz Fernandez, and SF BUILD student assistants K. Leong and B. Garibay for their work on VBRC. We would like to acknowledge all members of the NIH BUILD Research Collaboratory team (faculty, students and staff) for their collaboration. We greatly appreciate the support of A. Gammie and E. Falcón-Morales the project officers of the NIH BUILD program. We also would like to acknowledge site-level collaboration at each of the NIH BUILD sites: San Francisco State University, California State Long Beach, California State Northridge, Morgan State University Baltimore, Portland State University, Mercy Detroit and University of Texas at El Paso. Lastly, we wish to thank the Big Data Summer Program (Pennings, Rohlfs). This work was funded by a grant from the NIH Common Fund through linked awards: GM118984, 11895 and 11896.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Kala M. Mehta, Sonthonax Vernard, Yazmin P. Carrasco & Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo

  2. Department of Biology, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Niquo Ceberio, Peter Lê, Audrey Parangan-Smith, Kelechi Uwaezuoke, Kenjus Watson & Leticia Márquez-Magaña

  3. Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo & Tung T. Nguyen

  4. Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Jasmón Bailey

  5. Office of Minority Health Research Coordination, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Robert C. Rivers

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  1. Kala M. Mehta
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  2. Niquo Ceberio
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Contributions

K.M.M., N.C., S.V., Y.P.C., K.B.D., J.B., A.P.S., K.U., K.W. and L.M.M. designed the work. K.M.M., N.C., P.L. and K.U. drafted the article. K.M.M., N.C., K.B.D., T.T.N., P.L., J.B., A.P.S., K.U., R.C.R., K.W. and L.M.M. revised the article. All authors approved the final article.

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Correspondence to Kala M. Mehta.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Mehta, K.M., Ceberio, N., Vernard, S. et al. Designing a biomedical coding program focused on inclusivity and agency. Nat Comput Sci 1, 242–243 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-021-00063-6

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