Overview of New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF)

Arun Sharma (AS): Great to chat with you again, Raeka. We got to know you and the NYSCF team last summer at the in-person event in New York City. I was blown away by what I saw at NYSCF—all that automated cell culture and the amazing science you and the team are doing.

NYSCF, in part through your leadership, is leading the charge in not just the science side of things, but also outside of science. This includes building this really strong culture of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, or DEIB, at this cutting-edge stem cell institute that you have in New York City.

Could you just give an overview of what NYSCF is all about?

Raeka Aiyar (RA): We're a bit of a unique kind of organization, and that's what kind of makes it really fun to work here. We're the New York Stem Cell Foundation. We're both a foundation and a research institute, which means the fun sort of never stops. Our mission as a nonprofit and independent research institute is to accelerate treatments and cures for the major diseases of our time using the power of stem cell research.

We accomplish that mission in three major ways. One, which is the central piece, is the research institute. The research institute centers around technology development and enabling technologies for the entire stem cell community. All of those fun robots that you mentioned are a big part of that, and just being able to do stem cell research at scale with the reproducibility that we know is lacking so much when we go from lab to lab. We want to be able to look at the differences between patients with a certain disease, look at inter-individual differences, and make sure those are accounted for in our research, as we're trying to both understand and develop better treatments for these diseases.

Alongside that technology, we have a lot of dedicated research teams who are working on areas like Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, Parkinson's, and ovarian cancer. They're much more integrated and collaborative than what you'd see in a typical academic environment, which makes it really cool. Everybody's working together, with the biologists next to the engineers, next to the software developers, next to the data scientists, and just trying to come together to really accelerate and do things that you can't necessarily do in a typical sort of academic or even biotech environment. The goal of all of that is to serve as that bridge between academia and biotech, to bridge the knowledge, to translate, and to see what we can do to address those gaps as a nimble nonprofit.

Another major area that we work in is community building. We have a global innovator community of over 200 scientists that we've built up through our grant-making programs for early career scientists, stem cell research, and neuroscience.These are really incredible scientists at the edge of the field. You guys have had tons of them on your [Stem Cell and Immunology] podcasts. Folks like Paola Arlotta, Feng Zhang, Ed Boyden, and so many more who have really transformed the way that we do our research.

And the third piece of it is education and outreach. Within that, we have our annual conference that we host on translational stem cell research. We also do a lot of student and teacher education programming for the lay public, really just trying to get the excitement of science to all audiences that we possibly can. I would say our DEIB work bridges across all of these activities.

When it comes to your specific role as Vice President of Scientific Outreach and DEIB, what do you do on a daily basis? What's your life like on a daily basis?

RA: This is a really broad and multifaceted role, but it’s such a blast. It entails maybe four major areas.

One is science communications, which is about getting our message out there to all of the audiences that matter. That means our fellow scientists, the general public, students, teachers, funders, and all of the above. It’s about translating our science into language that's both appealing and accessible to all of these audiences on our print and digital platforms.

Another piece of it is event programming. I work with a really great team here to figure out the topics we want to focus our events on, the speakers we want to highlight, and the questions we can ask. We want to be tailored to these different audiences, which includes hosting the conference that we get so many great people from this community at every year.

And then another area is in grant funding. We raise grant funding for our intramural research institute where we have traditional PIs. We’re running research teams, and much like any other academic lab, we're applying for NIH grants, for other foundation grants, and all kinds of things. We collaborate with people all over the world to facilitate those projects and those funding chances. On the flip side of the grants is that I also work on our extramural grant making, which is through our fellowship and investigator programs for early career scientists. I provide scientific guidance and DEIB-related guidance to make sure that we're doing the best that we can in selecting the rising stars who we want to support in the field and think are really going to make a difference. Adding a DEIB lens has been a really fun and rewarding part of that.

The fourth major aspect is, of course, the DEIB work. We’re figuring out how we can embed that across the entire organization. That's the high-level view when it comes to the day to day. I can be spending my entire day on one of these [four] things. Most often I'm bouncing back and forth. With grant deadlines, things will change dramatically. With events around the corner, things will change dramatically. It requires a real diversity of tasks, no pun intended, but it's something I really enjoy. The core of all of it, to me, that brings it together, is communicating about our science and connecting with our community. That's what inspires me about this work, both at NYSCF and more broadly.

From Research to Science Communications

How did you make the pivot from a career in research to one in science communication, and why?

RA: I trained in genomics, which was another very technology-driven field. I started getting into research at the time of the human genome project being published. That was such an exciting time to get into research. I was always drawn to research for the impact that it could have on really understanding why certain people get diseases while other people don't, and how we can treat them better.

And in my mind, when I got into it, genetics was the answer to that. It's like those individual variations are what's responsible. As I went through my career scientifically, I gravitated towards stem cells because the more time you spend in genetics and genomics, the more you realize that's not the whole story, actually. You don't necessarily know how they're impacting the cell and the biology of an individual just because you know what those variants are. Stem cells are kind of that scaffold that you're sort of needing to interpret the genetic data.

In terms of the communications aspect of things, I did my PhD in Germany and ended up getting recruited into editing tasks for my lab because I was the only native English speaker. People would be like, “Can you fix my English in this manuscript, in this grant? And what have you…” In the process of doing that, I realized I really enjoyed that aspect of just telling a story, interpreting data, and building a narrative of what this means for our field and for the studies that can come next. I ended up just building a career around that, because I think we can all appreciate that science needs good communication and that we encounter disastrous effects when there isn't that good communication. I think the pandemic has laid that bare for all of us. It showed the consequences of when it's not done correctly. I felt that was a calling. There needs to be more scientists who understand the science, are getting the word out there, and can do so in a responsible way, in an accurate way, and hopefully in an engaging way, too. We need to spread that excitement and get everyone on board who needs to be on board.

What led you to NYSCF?

RA: I spent my whole life in academia and academic research, and I absolutely loved it. It's really great to be at that edge of discovery and everything.

I started to feel like in my science communication career path, there isn't a whole lot of navigation you can do. There's specific kinds of roles you can fill that people will kind of make exceptions and fill for you. I feel like that's maybe changing a little bit since I was in academia, but by and large, it was pretty hard to figure out what I can do and how I can grow. I was always a team of one and there's only so many hours in the day, even as an academic. So I was looking further afield to see how I can do something that's going to be even more impactful. And again, further along that pipeline of translation, because that was something that I was passionate about.

In just looking around, I encountered NYSCF. I had a former classmate of mine from my PhD who was working here, so he told me all about it. It sounded really great. I came here, got to visit, loved the nonprofit environment, especially how passionate everyone was. I liked that sort of hybrid identity that we have as both a grant maker and a grant receiver.

I loved the research aspect, where you can be really close to cutting-edge research and the technology. With my background being in genomics and seeing what the genome project did for that field, I felt like the same kind of thing was starting to happen in stem cell research. It’s a little bit later than genomics, but we're very much in that same trajectory now where you're seeing it just transform everything. And that's because of the Yamanaka factors and then everybody building on that to be able to look at all these different cell types. And, gosh, it was just so exciting to learn about that. So it was like, “Okay, I could see myself here.”

Working in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging

Could you talk more about DEIB, where the New York Stem Cell Foundation fits, and also about your own path towards working in this space?

RA: The DEIB work was not something I necessarily envisioned myself doing when I was in academia, and I didn’t even know what it was to be frank. I think in 2020, we, like so many other organizations, were going through sort of a reckoning of like, “Okay, well, what are we going to do about this? There's certainly more that we could be doing.”

Not to say that NYSCF had been totally out of the game, but prior to my joining, Susan L. Solomon, our founding CEO, had started the NYSCF initiative on women in science and engineering. That was really around how we can advance gender equity in the field and make sure that women are getting access to opportunities the same way that men are. It was in 2020 that I got pulled into it. I think it was sort of a byproduct of all the communications work that I do. Both internally and externally, we were trying to understand what to do as an organization and where we could have the biggest impact.

One of the hardest things with DEIB work is that there's so much that needs to be done. We have so far to go in so many ways. You obviously can't boil the ocean. So, especially as a small organization of only 120 people, it's really about figuring out what we can do that has the most impact and is aligned with our mission.

In conversations with Susan, she just suggested that I take this on as a part of my role. She believed I would be really great about it, be really thoughtful about it, and hopefully have good judgment about it, which I hope I still do. We were really asking ourselves about how we can use what we call that convening authority that we have at NYSCF to spotlight some of these issues, draw attention to them, and try to come up with things that we can do together. Again, we’re not able to boil the ocean alone, but what can we do with this amazing community to start to right some of these wrongs and level the playing field?

The way that Susan put it, which really resonated with me and still does, is that if we're going to achieve our mission and if we're going to deliver on our mission of accelerating treatments and cures, we need all of the brightest minds in the field to have the opportunity to contribute and the opportunity to succeed. That's simply not going to be possible unless we actually are able to level the playing field and integrate that equity of access. We like to say science is a meritocracy, but that's not the case. And we have a ways to go before we make it so.

The Impact of Efforts to Address DEIB

What are some major successes that you'd like to point to when it comes to DEIB that you think NYSCF has really pioneered and really pushed forward?

RA: Great question. I want to preface that by saying that you kind of always wish [scientists] could be doing more in this work. So that's kind of a hard question to answer because I focus so much on what we could be doing, but there are some things I can say for that. I mentioned the initiative on women in science and engineering that Susan launched around 2011 or 2012, which was way before my time. She convened some of the leaders in the field to think about what we can do to make institutions advance gender equity to level the playing field for women. They came up with seven actionable strategies, which were published in a Cell Stem Cell paper in 2014 or 2015. These are low cost or no cost strategies that institutions can adopt and they're really something actionable.

Some examples are Extra-Hands Awards for people who are having changes in their life—families, or that sort of thing—to be able to hire additional help when they become a primary caregiver for someone. There are recommendations and ways to get around that. There are also things around psychological and cultural change, such as making sure that you're recruiting gender-balanced review committees and speaker selection committees. That all sounds a little bit obvious now, but it was not at all the case at the time that this was put out. People were not doing this.

One of the biggest things that came out of that, which we still continue today, is an institutional report card for gender equality. We used our “carrot” as a grant maker to gather this kind of data as benchmarking data for the entire field to understand what is the state of gender equity across the pipeline. We can understand when certain interventions are made, what kind of impact they're having, and again, really go toward those most impactful interventions possible.

This institutional report card is something that we implemented right away in our extramural grant-making programs. We require every applicant to fill this out. Their department has to submit information about the breakdown of gender balance throughout the academic pipeline, from students all the way to the tenured professors on decision-making committees and so on.

We've been collecting a lot of that data. A few years ago, we published our first data set from over 500 institutions in nearly 40 countries and found that there was no real improvement over a four-year span. There's this leaky pipeline. From the data, it's very much a thing. We have solid, beautifully, horribly linear data that shows the drop off of women at every stage in the academic pipeline as you advance. We saw the total lack of women in decision-making roles. So, of course, one kind of leads to another. We also survey for policies that institutions have in place to be able to combat these disparities and so on. We did see at the end of that period that some institutions started to take on some policies, including some of the ones that we had advocated for in those seven actionable strategies.

What makes you excited about the DEIB initiatives the NYSCF has accomplished over the last couple of years?

RA: One success that came out of that, aside from the really cool data slash really terrible data that we can show as a demonstration of the state of things, is that at the very beginning, when this was happening, the departments didn't even know where to find this data and they didn't want to provide it. We kind of said, “Well, you can't apply. You’re just not going to be eligible for the grant if you don't submit this data.” Of course, we don't judge anybody based on the data because nobody would get the grant because all of the data is pretty terrible, but we just say, “You have to have it for your application to be complete.”

We got a lot of pushback at the beginning because people just didn't want to bother getting the data or didn't want to share the data with us. Now, it is something that's become pretty standard because we've had it around for so long. I just got an email from one of our investigators the other day saying that because of this, they actually have started tracking this data more regularly themselves and are using it to kind of benchmark where they are as a department.

We hear a lot of stories like that, so I would consider that to be a pretty great achievement in what the Initiative on Women in Science and Engineering (IWISE) has done for the field. And we're continuing to analyze that data. Hopefully, we'll see an improvement over the past few years, although we had a pandemic that was obviously not great for women in science, but let's see.

Is there some inaccessibility within the academic world causing an exodus of scientists?

Nicole Quinn (NQ): So I think I might know where some of these women are going. At STEMCELL, we have a 56% female population, which is super awesome, and we're very proud of it. We provide a great place to work for people of all different backgrounds because there are benefits, work-life balance, and some of the things that are not offered in academia. But I think on the flip side, the reason we have so many women coming to STEMCELL is because of some of the inaccessibility within the academic world. There's a lot of opportunity to do great work without some of those barriers in place that are there in academia.

RA: I think that's something that we're seeing a lot, of course, beyond women as well. I think a lot of what we're seeing with the postdoc crisis, this sort of exodus of postdocs from academia, is because of these environments that are being unsustainable for people. People are rightfully fed up with this position where you're exploited, you're paid the worst possible salary that you can pay a PhD-educated person, and you're in this horribly toxic environment where you're just expected to shut up and take it because that's what you need to get to the next step in your career. No wonder that a lot of these postdocs are going to biotech and to all kinds of other areas.

One other aspect of industry that I think is so interesting, that I've learned as we've gone through this work, is that industry has been so much better at addressing DEIB in a systematic way than academia has. From what I understand, it goes more toward the bottom line that there's so much literature out there now showing. We need more of this literature in academia. At least in the corporate world, there's a lot of literature showing that diversity leads to innovation and that equitable environments lead to innovation. So if you want innovation, your bottom line, and your profit, it's just not going to happen unless you really address this.

The bar has moved a lot higher in industry and we have some catching up to do in the academic sector where we kind of think, “Oh, we're not about the bottom line. We're just about knowledge and discovery.” And it's already meritocracy because we're also objective as scientists and we sort of have the wool pulled over our eyes on that. A lot of this stuff is allowed to persist, unfortunately.

NQ: Absolutely. Diversity of thought, diversity of life experience, all of those things lead to every dimension. All of it leads to diversity of ingenuity, different business practices, the ability to navigate the changing world, and learning to work with different people in different sectors. Absolutely it is there. It does impact the bottom line, but it also makes it a wonderful place to work.

RA: So that for sure, but sometimes when you're trying to bring people along, it's so hard to do. Because the reality is you're not going to convince everybody that this is a moral thing to do. That's the harsh reality of the world. If you're just being entirely pragmatic and want to get things done on the lowest budget possible and the fastest time possible. This is how you do it.

NQ: Yes. You need people who speak different languages. You need all of those different elements of diversity that factor in.

Encouraging Geographical Diversity in Life Sciences

How can scientists address the skew of resources that go to major life science “hubs”, and ensure equal opportunities for scientists from all backgrounds?

AS: We talk about diversity of people, diversity of thought, and this is an inherently diverse field. I think stem cell biology is a pretty diverse field, at least when you think about the people in the field. We're in a relatively new field, a very international field. I've said this before on The Stem Cell Podcast.

One of my favorite things about the modern scientific world, which may or may not have been the case decades ago, is just meeting scientists from anywhere and everywhere at these big scientific conferences like the ISSCR annual meeting, for example. I mean, every time I go to these meetings, I'm just blown away by the conversations I have with these stem cell biologists from around the world, every walk of life, and every background.

But while there are scientists everywhere and super-talented scientists everywhere, they don't always have the same opportunities to shine. This is reflected in a lot of different ways because resources are skewed. That's no doubt in the academic side of things.

Certain geographic hubs have established their reputations decades ago. I used to be in Boston, and it seems like everybody worked in Boston at some point, was affiliated with one of the major academic centers there and spun out of biotech, whatever. The talent tends to be aggregated at these geographic hubs. You see the same institutions, research groups overrepresented in publications and grants that they get because they're ultimately the ones with the influence and the resources to make this cutting-edge science happen a lot of times. And so that in itself can hurt diversity. Even though we have people from everywhere, there's over-representation from certain geographic areas. So how do we actually solve that problem when it comes to diversity?

How do we encourage a more diverse group of people in leadership roles in particular, that are not aggregated in these “hubs”?

RA: There are so many interesting things that you brought up there that we could talk about. I mean, there's the difference between diversity as representation and then the EIB, which is equity, inclusion, and belonging. We can fix the representation problem. We could ram things into quotas and all of that, and then you would not at all fix the overall problem, which is that environment with opportunities to succeed and to thrive.

The “B” has been really important for us because “the belonging” is that sense of feeling that arises when you are really in that inclusive environment. And that's the ultimate goal of our DEI efforts. We want that feeling of belonging to arise in everybody who's part of our institute and pa