Sometimes in life you meet someone and know instantly that you will be friends forever. It isn’t easily explained, but I assume it has something to do with your resonant frequencies being so in phase with one another that they amplify when combined to create something even more magical than the sum of its parts. Just ask Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, or Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman – they get it.
Or ask me – because this is what happened when I had the pleasure of meeting my friend and eternal tribe member Dr Danielle Twum – a cancer immunologist, contributor to the If/Then initiative, and contributor to this week’s TL;DR Shorts episode which we filmed about year ago, on the very day we met. In this episode, Danielle talks about why representation in research matters.
Danielle discusses role models, and how all people in science can be role models for other people. As the old saying goes, “you can’t be what you can’t see”, and the research community is still far from representative of society, whether in gender balance, ethnic make-up, socio-economic background, and so many more characteristics. Many of these underrepresentations stem from systemic barriers to inclusion of a range of different people, with the socio-economic barrier often being the hardest to overcome and create equity around. However, by inspiring future generations of researchers by not only being visible but also by being able to tell our stories, our motivations, and our reasons for wanting to become researchers in the first place, we can continue to make research more relatable, encourage more people to be recruited to and retained within the profession – whether in academia, or in industry like me and Danielle – and continue to make changes to ensure research is more equitable from within.
If you’d like to suggest future contributors for our series, suggest some topics you’d like us to cover, or can engineer a way in which Danielle and Suze can be on the same land mass together sooner rather than later (conferences are always a good shout), drop Suze a message on one of our social media channels and use the hashtag #TLDRShorts. Subscribe now to be notified of each weekly release of the latest TL;DR Short, and catch up with the entire series here.
