Eric J. Nestler, MD, PhD
Creating a level playing field, increasing mentorship opportunities, and making inclusion a priority, are among the steps needed to attract more underrepresented minorities and increase the number of women in senior faculty positions in the neurosciences. Those steps were outlined on Friday, September 25, at a Town Hall Meeting on “Diversity in Neuroscience,” attended by an overflow crowd of students and faculty in Hatch Auditorium on the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai campus. Eric J. Nestler, MD, PhD, Nash Family Professor and Chair, Fishberg Department of Neuroscience, and Director, The Friedman Brain Institute, presented statistics that illustrate the underrepresentation of women at senior faculty ranks in neuroscience departments throughout the country, and how minorities continue to lack equal representation in the sciences. At the Icahn School of Medicine, for example, there are 52 women and 39 male instructors and 386 women and 436 male assistant professors; but at the professor level, there are 79 women and 240 men. And of the 261 faculty members within the Mount Sinai Health System’s eight basic science departments, only 13 are from underrepresented minority groups. These data are equivalent at other leading medical centers around the country.
The meeting included a panel discussion with Icahn School of Medicine faculty members, Alison M. Goate, DPhil, Professor of Neuroscience, Genetics and Genomic Sciences, and Neurology, and Director of the Ronald M. Loeb Center for Alzheimer’s Disease; Kristen J. Brennand, PhD, Assistant Professor, Psychiatry, and Neuroscience; and George W. Huntley, PhD, Professor, Neuroscience. For more information, go to: neuroscience.mssm.edu/diversityinneuroscience/.