Frank Wong
Florida State University, FL·Education Research
Faculty in the biomedical sciences remain far less diverse than the populations they study and serve, and the usual response, adding faculty development programs, has not reliably changed who gets recruited, retained or promoted. That suggests the obstacles are organizational rather than individual.
- Fields
Education Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
Social Science
- Topics
faculty diversity
cohort hiring
NIH FIRST program
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Feb 2027
What they work on
- Achieve sustainable cultural change at Florida State University toward inclusive excellence at three levels simultaneously: macro (institutional policy), meso (hiring unit, center or department), and micro (individual faculty).
- Recruit, hire and retain six new early-career faculty as The FIRST Cohort within research clusters in chronic disease prevention and management or mental health, testing cohort hiring as a replicable model.
- Develop and implement individual research plans, career development plans and mentorship plans for each FIRST Cohort member using the same macro-meso-micro systems approach, and generate evidence of their effectiveness.
- Institute a nimble administrative core that centralizes fiscal, communications and organizational management for the Brigade and harmonizes it with existing university practice.
- Restructure faculty recruitment procedures with adequate marketing resources and bias-reducing practices, and site new hires within a center in the Equity Research Corner so mentoring, sponsorship and promotion follow unified practices.
More about the research
Two administrative barriers have been identified in particular: the absence of coordinated programs that handle recruitment, retention and promotion together, and the absence of a senior leader to champion the effort. This project treats institutional practice itself as the thing to be redesigned and evaluated.
Why it matters
Biomedical research draws on a narrower slice of talent than it could, partly because institutional hiring and promotion practices work against faculty from underrepresented groups. By recruiting a cohort of six early-career researchers in chronic disease prevention and mental health, rebuilding search and promotion procedures, and evaluating the result at institutional, departmental and individual levels, this project could produce a model other universities adopt, and strengthen research on health conditions affecting rural and diverse Florida communities.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Laura James
University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, AR·Medicine & Clinical Research
Develop, demonstrate and share translational science innovations that make it easier to move research through several stages of the clinical and translational research spectrum.
Timothy Murphy
University at Buffalo, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Recruit, mentor and train early-career investigators from many fields in minority health and health disparities research, offering pilot study awards on health inequities and social determinants of health in Buffalo.
Frederick Moeller
Virginia Commonwealth University, VA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Strengthen translational research workforce training across the partner institutions so that researchers can recruit a broad range of patient populations into clinical studies.
The school
Florida State University: 15 labs on PI Pages, $461M a year on research, 481 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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