EDI News

The Duke University School of Medicine has announced the recipients of the 2021 Michelle P. Winn Awards, which recognize exceptional achievement within the field of diversity and inclusion. This year’s recipients are Maureen Cullins, Jacqueline Barnett, DHSc, MSHS, PA-C, Marcus Taylor, and the team of Gabriela Maradiaga Panayotti, MD, and Viviana Martinez-Bianchi, MD.

Only around 6% of practicing ophthalmologists are minorities, and only 3% of ophthalmologists are Black. As part of Duke Health’s broader Moments to Movement anti-racism initiative, leaders at Duke Eye Center like Herndon are working to continually improve these statistics through initiatives to recruit and mentor medical students and residents from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds and fight against racism and discrimination in their everyday work. 

Read in Vision magazine

Medical Student Jasmine Chigbu, MS3, the founder and CEO of MTM, won not only the grand prize, but also the Fidelity Community Catalyst Innovation Award.

Commentary by Dr. Kafui Dzirasa and colleagues, published in Science Magazine.

As the COVID-19 pandemic and racial reckoning unfolded side-by-side during the summer of 2020, a common thread emerged that prompted an intentional shift at the Duke Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA).

“Although equity is something that Duke CTSA has always been interested in, during the summer of 2020, a more organized initiative to integrate equity throughout CTSI and CTSA was deemed necessary,” said Keisha Bentley-Edwards, PhD, a Duke developmental psychologist and member of CTSI.

Duke Clinical and Translational Science Institute is launching the Center for Equity in Research to promote equity, anti-racism, and anti-bias in clinical and translational research. The new center is led by Nadine Barrett, PhD, Associate Director of Equity and Community and Stakeholder Strategy for CTSI.

Learn more about the Center for Equity in Research

 

With COVID-19 being a fixture of our lives for nearly a year now, science has been a staple in the news. Along with science, though, a long-overdue conversation about the state of race relations in America has taken center stage, which makes diversity in science a critical topic to delve into. COVID-19 has highlighted not only a national crisis in healthcare response, but also longstanding health disparities across racial and socioeconomic groups that have only been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Duke University has been awarded a Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Award to study the health concerns most important to the local Black community, particularly as they relate to COVID-19.

As the COVID-19 pandemic shines a light on health disparities, efforts to find new ways to reduce them get a boost.

Lung cancer is responsible for the greatest number of cancer deaths each year in the United States and in North Carolina, and African Americans carry a disproportionate share of this burden. African Americans are more likely to be diagnosed with lung cancer and more likely to die from it, compared to White people.

Dr. Bryan Batch, a Duke endocrinologist and researcher, studies treating metabolic disorders (like diabetes) with non-pharmacological approaches. But, she says, her parents’ medical professions, and the hard work that went into them, resulted in her not wanting to pursue science at all as a child.

When she took biology in middle school however, it clicked. It didn’t feel like “the slog of math,” she says, because she enjoyed studying life in its different forms. This infatuation with science combined with a love for other people pushed her to pursue medicine.