Black in Neuro Week puts spotlight on Black scientists studying the brain
Earlier this summer, Black professors, students, and their allies took a day to consider how racism impacts academia and science. Now, Black early-career researchers are leading efforts to highlight Black contributions to various scientific fields.
Cases of police brutality have driven many of the anti-racist protests this summer, but the story of Christian Cooper also struck a chord with many Black scientists and nature lovers. Cooper, a Black man and birdwatcher, had the police falsely called on him by Amy Cooper (no relation) when he asked Ms. Cooper to follow park rules and put her dog on a leash in New York City’s Central Park.
In solidarity with Mr. Cooper, a group of Black scientists in fields like ecology and biology launched Black Birders Week on social media. The goal was to challenge stereotypes of Black people being uninterested in nature and to educate the broader birding and wildlife communities on the racism that Black professionals and hobbyists encounter in the field.
The success of Black Birders Week encouraged multiple spin-offs celebrating Black achievement and highlighting the effects of racism in other fields of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). The most recent of these was Black in Neuro Week, focusing on neuroscience and related work in biology, medicine, and engineering.
Gwenaëlle Thomas, a PhD candidate in neurobiology at Duke University, was one of the organizers of Black in Neuro Week. She wanted to get involved both because of the broader movement for racial justice this summer and a feeling that universities can exploit Black students and researchers by highlighting them to tout a school’s diversity without implementing policies that would actually support diversity.
Black in Neuro started with a tweet by Angeline Dukes, a PhD student in neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine, and attracted organizers from around the world. Social media has been a critical force in bringing together Black scientists, who can be isolated in their departments and schools due to underrepresentation in most STEM fields. The National Science Foundation reports that just 4.8% of people employed as scientists or engineers in the United States are Black.
“One of the biggest goals of Black in Neuro was to show Black scholars holistically,” Thomas said. “It was so important to show all the different intersections we live at.” Events included focuses on art, women, LGBTQ people, and disabled people within the Black neuroscience community.
The organizers wanted to combat stereotypes that “serious scientists” can only look and act certain ways. “We wanted to show in Black in Neuro that you are talented and you can still be everything else,” Thomas said.
Paige Greenwood, another organizer and a PhD candidate in neuroscience at the University of Cincinnati, felt Black in Neuro Week was important for representation and the potential for building new support systems.
“As a young girl, I never saw myself in STEM and was often discouraged from pursuing those opportunities. Being a co-organizer for Black In Neuro was transformative for me because as Black Neuroscientists, we were able to be the change we always wanted to see. To be able to provide a community and support system for those who are often overlooked in academia due to the inherent biases was essential and a key component for why Black in Neuro week was necessary,” Greenwood said in an email.
Another key theme of the week was understanding how racism has affected neuroscience and health care. For instance, over half of medical students and residents surveyed in one study believed that Black people feel less pain than white people.
Black patients systematically receive less pain medication in treatment and are underprescribed opioids. “Physicians either believed that Black people were exaggerating about our pain or we were lying as part of drug-seeking behavior,” Thomas said.
Even more modern tools and treatments have been designed in a way to exclude Black communities. EEGs are commonly used in clinical and laboratory settings to measure a person’s brain activity with electrodes placed on the scalp. Many of these electrodes don’t work as well with natural hairstyles like afros or dreadlocks, limiting Black participation in EEG-based research and potentially affecting treatment options.
Thomas described herself as “one of the people who is in neuro because of life experiences.” One of her close childhood friends, who is Black and Latinx, was diagnosed with schizophrenia in high school. Between cultural stigmas around mental illness, distrust of the health care system in marginalized communities, and a poor response to his antipsychotic medication, he felt a need to self-medicate with illegal drugs, she said, and is now incarcerated.
“That’s a story that is very common for a lot of Black people, a lot of Latinx people, and for a lot of poor people,” Thomas said.
Thomas’ own research focuses on how different drugs to treat psychosis, depression and anxiety interact in the brain by measuring changes in electrical activity. “PCP is a psychotic drug,” she said. “If I give a mouse PCP, and the antipsychotic I’m testing is a good antipsychotic, then I should see the electrical signature in the brain reverse when I give this new drug.”
Black in Neuro Week is over, but the organizers are working to ensure the Black in Neuro community continues. The website will update with funding and professional development resources to support neuroscientists at all stages of training. They are also collecting profiles of Black researchers in the field who can be mentors or topic experts, and hopefully highlighting potential candidates to job recruiters.