Leveraging, Enhancing, and Developing Biology (LED-BIO): Scientific Societies Shedding Light on Persistent Cultural Challenges is a three year (2022-2025) project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) BIO-LEAPS Research Coordination Network (RCN) grant mechanism.
The goal of LED-BIO is to create a network of scholars that will crowdsource solutions to three persistent challenges that scientific societies face as they strive to build inclusive and equitable communities.
The three challenges are:
(1) lack of data to track scientific society membership demographic composition,
(2) lack of integration of scientists in transitional stages of their careers into disciplinary CoPs, and
(3) lack of diversity among highly visible thought leaders, including speakers in scientific programs
As a tool to develop the LED-BIO RCN, the project will host an in-person meeting at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in years 1 (2022) and 2 (2023) of the grant.
This document is our Pre-meeting Thought-leadership Paper for 2022. It is meant to give our participants an overview of the project, an introduction to the challenges that we are trying to tackle, and what we are hoping to accomplish together.
