By John Yuen, Andrea Arreguin, Luke Torre-Healy, Dillon Voss, and Isabel Sakarin

We first have to touch upon what it means to be a physician-scientist. Many people familiar with physician-scientist training will portray a story of self-sacrifice – forgoing your 20’s and 30’s to reach some sort of enlightenment as a medical professional who is trained to think critically like a scientist. As with most stories, the path is hardly linear as trainees try to balance aspects of clinical and research careers. Continuing to parse through what that may look like as graduates, we will typically undergo more training, perpetual grant writing, and a litany of administrative tasks, as we continue to juggle a wide range of responsibilities throughout our careers.

As banal and grueling as we make the training seem, why then, did we choose the path of becoming a physician-scientist? Although all MD/PhD students have their own unique reasons for choosing this career path, a unifying theme is that with this path we have the privilege of choosing a profession where we can not only think critically about problems, but also be empathetic to the challenges that people face daily. Simply, we get to have a job where we can choose to do things that can directly improve people’s lives and wellbeing. While this should no longer necessitate writing or saying: race impacts people’s lives and wellbeing.

We, as members of the Stony Brook Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP), will no longer remain silent in combating injustice in our society. We mourn and condemn the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, and the innumerous Black and Brown lives lost to racial injustice every day.

As MD/PhD students we remain at an institution for around eight years, which affords us the opportunity to enact and see change at our institution. This national movement, brought up by the nation becoming acutely aware of racial injustice in the form of police brutality and systemic racism, grants us the opportunity to fight for change. We are frustrated by small, performative fixes that often serve to placate those of us with privilege instead of creating meaningful change.The time for incremental change is behind us.

As MD/PhD students and as a program that trains future medical professionals, we have a responsibility to look at the data and face the challenge of combating injustice and inequality every day. Looking inward at our MSTP cohort, we currently have very few students from communities underrepresented-in-medicine. We must do better.

Inequity and inequality is something that our program is focused on addressing. Students in our program have been advocating for the enactment of some short-term and long-term changes to our program, including the formation of an MSTP Diversity and Inclusion Committee. The committee is working towards the following goals:

• Building a more anti-racist environment that values the contributions and well-being of students from underrepresented groups in medicine.
• Advocating for the hiring of faculty from underrepresented groups in medicine.
• Inviting the Center for Inclusive Education on interview days.
• Pushing for additional implicit bias training for MSTP leadership, interviewers, and students.
• Adding a statement on our commitment to anti-racism to the MSTP website
• Updating our website to more prominently feature current students
• Providing a statement of anti-discrimination to invited candidates for interviews that states our full support of individual expression.
• Advocating for additional financial support to underrepresented students.
• Discussing health disparities and systemic racism in our MSTP journal club and clinician scientist dinners.

Similar to what the coronavirus epidemic is revealing every single day, our lives are inextricably intertwined. Poignantly, there are many social determinants of health that contribute to the disproportionate deaths of people of color, especially those who are Black. As Nelson Mandela put it, “to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” We, especially those who choose to become physician-scientists, have a responsibility to continue to use data to be anti-racist and address other inequities in society, as healthcare is inextricably intertwined with the status of the people that it serves.

We the MSTP Diversity and Inclusion Committee take these issues seriously and will continue to work with our program directors to ensure that they are addressed. Creating lasting change requires engagement from the entire community. Please reach out to us if you would like to get involved in these efforts.

The SBU Diversity and Inclusion Committee can be reached at MSTP_diversityandinclusion@stonybrook.edu.

(Written by John Yuen, edited and signed by Andrea Arreguin, Luke Torre-Healy, Dillon Voss, and Isabel Sakarin)

John Yuen (GS2) is studying micro-RNA based interventions in oncology in Jingfang Ju’s lab.