Thanks to a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Cornell University is able to support several professors in fields including genetics, computational biology and neurobiology. In its funding proposal, the university emphasizes a strange metric for evaluating hard scientists: Each applicant’s “statement on contribution to diversity” was to “receive significant weight in the evaluation.”
It might seem counterintuitive to prioritize “diversity statements” while hiring neurobiologists—but not at the NIH. The agency for several years has pushed this practice across the country through its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program—First for short—which funds diversity-focused faculty hiring in the biomedical sciences.
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