MAVEN: Developing Diverse Senior Scientists Leaders

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Increasing the diversity of the scientific workforce at the senior level is essential to facilitating the nation's research agenda,1 to training future generations of scientists,2 to advising public health policy makers, to enriching scientific approaches, and to reducing national health disparities.1 Requisite to this goal of diversity at the senior scientist level is providing a greater number of underrepresented scientists with key skills to navigate to a productive, engaging, and rewarding senior faculty position and science portfolio. The long-term objective of the MAVEN program is to expand the national pool of qualified women and minority candidates for senior scientist positions across all NIGMS areas of science. We intend to create a self- sustaining community committed to inclusive excellence in science. We will do so by adapting best education practices from other industries in executive leadership, strategic career planning, and institution culture change, to create a sustainable, but intensive program with objective evaluation metrics. Our innovations include proactive invitations to apply and randomization of those applicants to a control group or to program attendance. Four cohorts of scientists will be invited to attend MAVEN, two 5-day institutes focused on senior scientist career planning, respect-based leadership, evidence-based mentoring, organizational culture problem solving, transparency and Open Science, interdisciplinary team collaboration and inclusivity, effective science thought leadership and public engagement with science. These residential summer institutes will be comprised of didactics, discussions, and interactive individual and team-based activities. Between the institutes there will be 10 months of mentorship, networking, and conduct of institutional responsible conduct of research projects. Target program participants are scientists 10-15 years from their final training, who identify as belonging to an ethnicity, race or gender under-represented at the senior levels of faculty, and who currently hold one or more NIGMS-funded R01 or equivalent grants. To achieve the MAVEN long-term objective, MAVEN scientists will be provided the skills to attain: 1) increased career satisfaction (primary outcome); 2) peak academic productivity; 3) expanded scientific networks; and 4) leadership ascension. Program success will be evaluated by comparison of the control group to MAVEN scientists for change in career satisfaction scores and a blended Major Educational Score Index comprised of h-index, relative citation ratio, number of publications in journals with an impact factor > 5, and annual federal grant dollar amounts. We will also explore changes to professional scientific network size and the leadership ascension between the two groups, tested quantitatively. If our scientific leaders and role models are diverse, we stand to benefit from enrichment of the pool of future investigators, the broader perspective in research agenda prioritization, the greater success in recruiting diverse research participants, and the enhanced ability to reduce health disparities.