INTRODUCTION

LED-BIO is a collaborative effort in response to the LEAPS NSF solicitation. It engages the Alliance to Catalyze Change for Equity in STEM Success (ACCESS, NSF1744098) and its member societies in the life sciences (the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology--ASBMB, the American Society for Cell Biology--ASCB, the American Society for Pharmaceutical and Experimental Therapeutics--ASPET, the Endocrine Society--ES, and the Biophysical Society--BPS), the Quality Education for Minorities (QEM) Network (NSF 1649095, 2032781,1818635, 2035321, 1842726), the Marine Biological Laboratories at Woods Hole 

(MBL), and the Aspire Alliance (NSF 1834518, 1834522, 1834510, 1834513, 1834526, 1834521). 

Scientific societies have sought to foster workforce diversity by supporting professional development (PD) programming for graduate, postdoctoral, and junior faculty trainees in academia (Segarra et al., 2017; Segarra et al., 2020a). These programs have encountered several persistent challenges that contribute to systemic inequities in scientific environments and undermine inclusivity efforts. Despite these setbacks, scientific societies remain perfectly positioned to act as nuclei for the dissemination of solutions for scientific communities to meet these challenges successfully. For example, scientific societies regularly organize national and international meetings that gather individuals with synergistic scholarly interests, creating unique and powerful opportunities for the advancement of a particular discipline of knowledge. In this way, societies serve as communities of practice (CoPs; Wenger et al., 2002) that transcend geographical barriers to facilitate information exchange, networking, and collaboration among more localized academic or industry-based scientific communities. Moreover, these organizations often set the standards for their discipline, establishing the requirements for best practices in data collection, certification, publishing, and culture. 

The LED-BIO RCN aims to create systemic change by implementing and evaluating new ways to address persistent challenges that affect scientific disciplinary CoPs, and other scientific environments such as academia. LED-BIO will develop and design solution strategies for three persistent challenges scientific societies face, as determined by work by ACCESS 

(Segarra et al., 2020b, Segarra et al, 2020c, Etson et al., 2021). The three persistent challenges are: (1) Lack of data needed to fully understand how the demographics of scientific society membership are impacted by their efforts to create an inclusive CoP, (2) Lack of integration of scientists in transitional stages of their careers into disciplinary CoPs, and (3) Lack of diversity among highly visible thought leaders, including speakers in scientific programs. The planned LED-BIO activities represent a Think Tank-driven approach to developing a set of community standards for data collection and training activities to empower scientific societies to meet the challenges outlined above.  

These challenges are interconnected in that they are impediments to change within the cultural environments of scientific societies, and designing sustainable solutions to address each of them will enhance the impact of inclusivity efforts across scientific disciplines. Our “Think Tank'' strategy has proven successful when used by QEM to bring stakeholders together to address issues like using technology to mitigate the effects of systemic inequities in STEM education, setting research agendas at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and broadening participation in STEM at HBCUs and tribal colleges (Toldson et al., 2021). We describe LED-BIO’s Think Tank model in the paragraphs that follow.

The LED-BIO Town Hall/Think Tank strategy models what QEM has developed as a networking meeting model. In this model, a Town Hall event that frames the challenge(s) of interest precedes a Think Tank--a group aiming to tackle the issues being considered. Leading up to the event, the Town Hall is widely advertised in the stakeholder community, and attendees from a wide range of perspectives are recruited to attend. Panelists and moderators are selected to structure the discussion and ensure that different voices have an opportunity to be represented. Think Tanks are open to a smaller group of experts to facilitate a deeper-dive into the key issues articulated during the Town Hall. After the networking meeting concludes, a report is prepared that highlights the discussions and recommendations and is then shared with key stakeholders. LED-BIO will adapt QEM’s Town Hall/Think Tank model as detailed below.  

LED-BIO will host two four-day Town Hall/Think Tank events over three years; an initial event at the end of 2022–the first year of the grant, and a follow up-meeting at the end of 2023–the second year of the grant to address any unresolved issues from the initial event and finalize recommendations and working materials for piloting during the third year of the grant, 2024. The MBL will be the central location for LED-BIO networking activities, as it has historically been a premier biological sciences research and education center that can function as a neutral location for identified stakeholders to come together to discuss identified challenges. 

The goal of this thought-leadership paper is to introduce LED-BIO participants to the Research Coordination Network and the challenges it aims to tackle. Throughout the document, we discuss and cite relevant scholarly and peer-reviewed literature as well as editorial articles and essays that highlight the considerations associated with each challenge. Both scholarly and anecdotal sources of information are cited in this document. The views peer-reviewed and anecdotal sources of information provide are complementary. For example,studies that center belonging, diversity, and inclusion in STEM fields do not always represent the lived experience of HE individuals (Hemming et al., 2021; Carmona and Ezzamel, 2016; Gafni 2021). In recognition of this, we wish to include both in our work.

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