The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), one of the country’s biggest and wealthiest private funders of biomedical research, has announced the details of one key element of the $2 billion initiative it launched last year to build a more diverse workforce in academic science research. Over the next 20 years, the philanthropy’s new $1.5 billion Freeman Hrabowski Scholars Program will support biomedical researchers from diverse backgrounds during the make-or-break early years of their academic careers.
The announcement is welcome news, given the inertia that has long kept basic science departments predominantly white and male — despite many promises by university leaders to make progress on diversity. For a couple of reasons, this new HHMI program could have the kind of positive, long-term impact that’s needed to make real change in a segment of academia that’s long been resistant to it.
The Freeman Hrabowski Scholars Program will support early-career scientists with diverse racial backgrounds by paying their salaries, providing their research budgets and furnishing them with other financial support for 10 years while they remain in their university positions. That means up to $8.6 million for each scientist over the full decade, supporting up to 150 scientists and physician-scientists. This strategy is in keeping with common HHMI practice: the philanthropy often supports researchers by essentially hiring them, assuming their salaries and providing other funding and support while they remain at their home institutions.
The goal of HHMI’s new program is to ensure that these researchers have the time and resources they need to build labs and advance their ideas through early-stage research. Typically, this early phase generates the preliminary data that’s needed to earn them the big, multiyear, multimillion-dollar public and private research grants that their universities — that is, their employers — are looking for down the line.
The initiative is named in honor of Freeman Hrabowski, the outgoing president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has been lauded for his successful efforts over many years to diversify the field of scientists, engineers and physicians.
HHMI announced its larger $2 billion strategy to increase diversity in science in October of last year. Meanwhile, another HHMI program, the $30 million Hanna H. Gray Fellows program, dates back to 2017 and also supports scientists from diverse gender, racial and ethnic backgrounds and other underrepresented groups. The fellows receive support for their postdoctoral training and may continue to receive funding during their early years as faculty members.
Lots of philanthropic dollars have been flowing in recent years to address the STEM gap — the worrisome shortage of high school and college students majoring in science, tech, engineering and math. Most of that giving has focused on attracting and retaining young people in STEM fields. Some funding has been geared specifically toward boosting the involvement of historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, as well as women. For example, Bloomberg Philanthropies launched a $150 million program with Johns Hopkins University last year to boost the representation of Black Americans in STEM. More recently, we wrote about a $55 million gift to Barnard College from Diana T. Vagelos and her husband P. Roy Vagelos, a former pharmaceutical executive, to increase the number of women of all backgrounds in STEM studies and professions.
These efforts are valuable, considering that they operate on the front end to encourage young students of all backgrounds to get into STEM. But HHMI’s focus on early-career scientists is doubly important. When people from historically underrepresented groups become senior scientists in their departments, they’re in a position to serve as vital role models and as mentors to others who may also have been less likely to find the professional and personal support they need to advance in academia. In other words, a single scientist in a university department can make a difference in dozens of hopeful careers.
Support for early-career researchers is an important area for philanthropies — particularly deep-pocketed funders on the scale of a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative or a Gates Foundation — to commit significant funds, as HHMI has done. That’ll go a long way toward creating the kind of generational paying-it-forward that will go far to reduce systemic racism and sexism in science and academia.