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Racial equity and inclusion still lacking in neuroscience meetings

Nature Neuroscience volume 24, pages 1645–1647 (2021)Cite this article

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The death of George Floyd in 2020 sparked intense emotion, and increased recognition of the need to take active measures in matters of race within science and academia. This piece considers the field’s immediate actions with regard to Black representation at neuroscience conferences, and whether we are rising to the occasion in an area under our control.

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Fig. 1: Percentage of Black speakers at all identified conferences.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Change history

  • 10 December 2021

    In the version of this Comment initially published, an unfortunate composition error in the sentence now reading “It is worth noting that several (but not all) of these conferences were diverse in other ways” was present (“noting” appeared as “nothing”) and has been corrected in this file as of 10 December 2021.

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Acknowledgements

I thank my colleagues on the ASNR Executive Board and the ASNR Program Committee, and the many colleagues who have reached out and asked me questions about what they can do.

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  1. School of Biological Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Lewis A. Wheaton

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  1. Lewis A. Wheaton
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Correspondence to Lewis A. Wheaton.

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Neuroscience thanks Sheena Josselyn, Bianca Marlin, Lucina Uddin, and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Wheaton, L.A. Racial equity and inclusion still lacking in neuroscience meetings. Nat Neurosci 24, 1645–1647 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-021-00964-9

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