CSR ’s Commitment to Advancing Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Peer Review

Guest post by Noni Byrnes, Director of the NIH Center for Scientific Review (CSR), originally released on the Review Matters blog Noni Byrnes, Ph.D., Director of NIH Center for Scientific Review On March 1, NIH Director Francis Collins announced NIH’s broad-based initiative, UNITE, to end structural racism and racial inequities in biomedical science. This is a recognition of the need for urgent, sustained effort on many fronts across the research enterprise, including in all parts of the NIH’s extramural processes, to change culture. While the NIH Institutes and Centers will examine their programmatic priorities and discretionary funding practices, here at CSR, we are committed to pushing ahead with efforts to protect the peer review process from the systemic biases that exist in all areas of the scientific community. In the June 2020 Review Matters blog, I wrote about some of the steps that CSR is taking to address individual and systemic biases in peer review. Following that, in July 2020, we held three community listening sessions, in which we heard the rightful anger and the call for urgent and specific action around the persistent funding disparity for Black investigators. I shared the report and recommendations from those forums with NIH leadership, with the UNITE E group that is focused on extramural changes, as well as with our own CSR Advisory Council. Since then, I have held a number of individual and small group conversations with investigators, who sha...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: blog Open Mike Diversity Peer review Source Type: funding