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and now it is my great pleasure to introduce the winner of this year's be mes diversity award my new plot the B mes diversity award honors an individual project organization or institution for outstanding contributions to improving gender and racial diversity in biomedical engineering the award seeks to recognize lifetime achievements as well as innovative and/or high impact activities where they are warranted as I'm sure many of you know dr. plot has been a fierce advocate and innovator regarding diversity at our universities and beyond dr. Platt earned his bachelor's in biology from Morehouse College in 2001 and then his PhD from Georgia Tech Emory the joint program in biomedical engineering in 2006 he went for postdoctoral training at MIT and then returned to Georgia Tech Emery in January 2009 to start his independent tenure-track career dr. Platts research focuses on proteolytic mechanisms of tissue remodeling using experimental and computational approaches dr. plot with Bob Niram co-founded and co-directs project engages engaging the next generation at Georgia Tech in engineering and science a program for african-american high school students in the Atlanta public school system that are trained and paid well above minimum wage to be researchers in Georgia Tech Labs dr. Platt was named an emerging scholar by diverse issues in higher education magazine in 2015 and chosen for Atlanta 40 under 40 he's still under 40 by the Atlantic Business Chronicle in 2016 for his activities at Georgia Tech in his outreach activities in the broader Atlanta community please welcome Manu Platt [Applause] [Laughter] for those but no of you I laugh a lot it takes you a while to just calibrate I am deeply honored I'm humbled I'm really appreciative of being here and being selected for this award this year I've been a part of being me as clearly since the beginning of my graduate work at Georgia Tech Emory with Hunter and Joe and I do want to make sure I thank gr Moe and Debra who are the co-chairs of the committee for selecting me and also to Bob nietzermann Monty Reichert who are the ones who nominated me for the award so I appreciate that I also have to thank all of the students that have worked with me over the years they have helped me get all of this work done they are the reasons that we do the work and they're the ones that kind of make it all worthwhile so I want to thank them many of them are in the audience and here we go so again I see you all in Atlanta next year hopefully all of you plus three of your friends each of you bring three friends I bring you greetings from the Georgia Tech Emory joint department of biomedical engineer I was in the second class of that program and what made it so phenomenal I think it actually was founded with diversity in mind it was at a time when they wanted to bring life scientists people with life science degrees like biology and have them work with people who had mechanical engineering electrical and chemical engineering and throw us all together and see what kind of work could we accomplish and we actually had an anthropologist on the faculty who was evaluating us and watching us like Jane Goodall in all those moments so I think it was a successful model so I want to talk about this outline the title is the danger of acting now I mean I talked with some of my friends about how to title it and something why don't you put the importance of it but I like the whole idea about the danger because there are things that we do that we should do because they're right and people may tell us not to do them and there may be consequences but we should still do them in full awareness of that so I thought danger was the the more appropriate title and so just a quick outline I'll talk first about now a few different ways of thinking about now so starting with the state of things today but I'm gonna talk to you about it according to my lived experience it may not be your lived experience you may not have you may have different takes on it all I can talk about is my lived experience okay then there's the now with a question mark which now and I'm really excited to be chosen because I young people shouldn't wait until later right why wait until everything is safe I've got my house my car you know I'm well established and IH calls me to give me money why wait until that point to start having impact right so now in this fear of doing it now so I'm talking to the students and the early career professionals in that regard then there's now ellipsis right now there are practical tips that we can do all of us can do to make change so I hope to address some of that because I hope you as scholars and teachers what you ought to learn something and walk away with that and then there's Ben now with the exclamation point to talk about power so the people and positions of power there are things that you all can do to this afternoon that can make things better alright and so I'll be talking to some of those allied power players so you might be wondering whether they choose him and probably somebody's thinking cuz he's black right that's okay I know I'm black I do right if you feel comfortable calling me african-american you can that's a little bit too many syllables for me so I don't do that but I know that I'm black and it's okay if you know that I'm black right the colorblind I don't see color I'm proud to be black you can you can do that and that's important because I am NOT different from other black people I have a black family I have a black father I have a black mother I have a black stepmother I have black brothers my grandparents are black hypertension high cholesterol diabetes fibroid tumors colon cancer these are all health concerns of my family but we also I have family members that are HIV positive I have family members that have been arrested I have family members that are incarcerated right now that are victims of child abuse and molestation that are addicted to drugs and I have many family members with bad credit okay but in my family we also have union leaders civil rights activists veterans professors network security expert waiters psychological counsellors and I have a ton of teachers in my family that's me and they are all black also but yes I am black but at the same time I've been harassed by the police I've had the Georgia Tech police pulled me over 11:30 at night and have two or three squad cars come up to talk to me why fumbled quickly to try to turn the video on my phone on just in case I didn't make it but there would be a story to continue and I live a black life and I live in this black body and I'm aware of that and I move in spaces where black bodies are not common so we know the statistics or if you don't I'll give you a quick primer about two percent of professors in stem are African Americans and that's me reaching to say that I said on a study section for NIH there's about 20 to 25 people that show up when we do our reviews I'm the one black person in that room with these 20 25 other people and we're making decisions that are million-dollar decisions that will affect careers labs local economies I'm one black person in that room every third cycle there's another one so princess was just there so I was glad to have someone else in the room for that cycle I rotate off in about three months or not Philemon said about six months so we'll see what happens that committee after that my department very diverse department revival of Engineers right we we pride ourselves on that but there's two and a quarter of the faculty in my department are black I say a quarter because one person is 25% assigned to be me seventy-five percent in me it's a whole person but just split up differently and I cannot tell you how many weddings I go to where I am the only black person there and that's of course especially if the plus-one that I bring is not black okay and because these are good friends of anti then go up to them and say so am I your only black friend to which some ask that question but I wanted to say my black life matters I feel my black body matters but it's interesting as a nerd and a scientist I'm told my black body as a weapon and I'm told by people that they feel threatened by me but this big black body and and I think that surprises that surprises me I got this big smile right big smile but even with me and I think with this height and with his hair those things don't help because black bodies are threatening and they should be controlled to keep everyone safe and so here I am I agree we've been fighting health disparities in science since 2009 I think there's another reason I've been here and there's a whole number of other host reasons why I think BM es we had me up here as doctor set and presented in the introduction so I appreciate that I do a number of things with the society I love the society I love what we mean I love that we are the diverse science society because we bring in all of these different fields together and I think that makes us powerful but when I think about what's happening now right and I get back to this control of black bodies and I think that's relevant for biomedical engineers because we think about we work with health professions we are trying to fix bodies we work with bodies non-stop so we should talk about these things but in this control of black bodies Colin Kaepernick comes to mind football as we know great traumatic brain injury specialists here know the damage that happens with football right we have contributed to lots of that field of knowledge but they want these black bodies still to go out there crash throw themselves into each other and to do all these things for our enjoyment which they also they make choices they're adults yes but now the different level control comes why are you kneeling stand your black body up when we tell you to but we forget the original reason why he's doing this it was about police brutality despite whatever you may hear now it was about police brutality this statistics tells us that black people unarmed black people are killed by the police at five times the rate of unarmed white people five times right and we make up 13% of the population if we were five times the population maybe we could normalize the numbers and have it equal per capita right because engineers play with numbers this was his issue right and this was on top of all of the other unarmed black children men and women that were killed by police now to be true a Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis the first two there were not killed by police one was killed by someone who wanted to be a police officer and the other was just killed by a citizen but instead of thinking about these as unarmed black children men and women how about we think about them as unarmed black sons daughters father's cousins killed by police I would know people like this right but I don't live in Florida or just unarmed Americans killed by police and these numbers that I have on here these are the ages of these people when they were struck down right and the one that really gets me still to this day when I think about is Tamir rice it was 12 years old I'll show you later picture my brother's my youngest brother was 12 years old at the time that Tamir was shot down right these are people that we know and these are things that we wear and take with us when we walk and navigate the world but now look at this if we look at that out of out of that select group the unarmed Americans killed by the LEAs this is the number whose killers were convicted out of all of those so the other people they died and no one was at fault and for Jordan Davis's killer Michael Dunn he was only convicted of killing Jordan Davis at the second trial it was a hung jury the first trial he was convicted of reckless endangerment because his two friends who lived had had bullets shot at them that's what they convicted him of but Jordan Davis his murder was not a conviction until the second trial to be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage James Baldwin said this in the 50s and I came across this over the last two years and it's an interesting very powerful quote but you look at this picture and he's smiling so how was he totally raged and he looks happy well look it's let's look at some pictures of me through my life in times this is me finishing grad school with a wonderful and great backdoor hunching John board of directors BM yes I'm smiling they're smiling there is one of us some friends of mine from my postdoc experience more friends at the end of my postdoc and you also see other patterns I think in these pictures as well but I'm still smiling some sense of shadows that let you see anything but my smile and this is one of my first lab group meetings and several other pictures you see me with wonderful people and I'm smiling I am happy to be here I'm happy to be in biomedical engineering I'm happy to be professor at Georgia Tech and I'm extremely happy to be speaking in front of you but I cannot forget what else is happening when I walk off this stage or when I walk home to the hotel when I go back to Atlanta because I live in this black body and these things were always happening for me by Rustin says there so when people get upset about colin kaepernick i think about by addressed him right by Rustin was not dr. Martin Luther King Jr's right-hand man he was an out black gay man back in the 60s and civil rights movement and some of the king's enemies did try to use that against him but Baier did not care it's you should read his biography it's amazing but look at this if you think about this in Colin Kaepernick's place when an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being his very act of protest confers dignity on him and that's what Colin he's not playing so when I talk about the danger of acting now it's dangerous he lost his job he took a stand he's not playing right but he is still holding his dignity and still maintaining his conversation so where does that come to play with me my name is Manu Platt my name is actually Ghanaian it means second born son I am the second son of six boys so when I talk about black men I'm not talking about me I'm talking about these other five people that are really close to me that I grew up with and you can see a picture there sadly in this picture we had got together North Carolina because one of my cousin's had been violently killed in the nightclub and he was 26 years old and another one of my cousin's had been shot earlier that year we went up to New Jersey for that free roll I am black I love a black life in America right my dad was in the Air Force too moved around quite a bit I was born in New Jersey then we went to Arkansas Little Rock Arkansas is telling the you of Arkansas people last night leaving the reception then they did Oklahoma for thirty fifth grade and we retired my dad retired in Dover Delaware so I know Air Force my dad is a veteran he gets better benefits he did 20 years but then after Delaware I went down to Morehouse College for my undergrad and here's another little known fact and this is an impact how we think about the numbers of today black boys are not supposed to be nerds okay I wish it changed it still is not quite changed right the educational system says so as do other black boys say why are you studying why are you trying to be nerd and really what you sometimes called is why are you trying to be white my brothers used to say that to me and we were all smart and we would say they would say that today but that's why there are these dismal numbers for african-american men in professional fields in Atlanta 53% of black men are graduating high school 53% and then we talk about we want them to come to college and then grad school 53% right then there's that plus that's unfair sentencing law stop-and-frisk broken window policies and more that add to the systemic problem with this but I was an individual school was my jam right I love school no one's gonna take school away from me I love reading I love everything about it and so I was a valid torn on my high school class second one in my high school's history and never haters and that's fine they can be haters because they your motivators as the old school there goes but I wen
out to visit Morehouse College last school I visited I had gotten at Johns Hopkins RPI because I was gonna do biomedical engineering and I walked on Morehouse's campus and to see all of those black men dressed up talking to each other being respectful going to school it was something I had never seen before but those are no no more houses all black and it's all male ok only school in the country like that and I said I had got to be here cuz in my AP class at my high school was the black guy in the black girl there are other black people to school but in my class the black guy the black girl right but here all these brothers are smart and it also became quite humbling because I was not the smartest person in my classes black men out there smarter than me way smarter than me now I was killing it in calculus and that's why I'm here doing engineering to this day but I learned a whole lot about Morehouse College because it's an all-black all-male College and what I learned there is that black men come in all shapes sizes intelligences experiences sexual orientations gender identities economic status and family backgrounds we are all of those things despite what may be portrayed right but that was so freeing right so I get to walk around and not have to think about being a black man I get to think about how I want to do this science oh I like that music oh that person from what part of the country let's talk Oh and it wasn't about being a black man that's really how you can identify all the other parts of yourselves and that's what I think how it becomes quite powerful so that was all black and on mail and then I did a study abroad there because Morehouse as old as you can go and do anything and be anything and go anywhere so I did a study abroad at King's College London my scholarship paid for it thankfully cuz I wouldn't be able to do that and being outside of the United States for the first time with fall of 99 first time ever and I went to study abroad you really start to get a different impression of how we are inside of here so I think my old suit of Philips over yesterday Travel is the enemy of which is I think it's interesting thing but then I started grad school at Georgia Tech second class of the BME class and I still remember the demography of that class there were two black students one black man one black female five white men one white woman when Indian man one Chinese man when Chinese Chinese American woman one Mexican woman and one Korean woman why do I know that because race matters if you every black person walks into a room shout out to my friend and knows how many other black people are in the room I'd imagine women do that when they are few women in the space one probably also for safety even to right so the person who is the minority or the marginalized person knows it so it's cute to say I don't see color but unless you're colorblind you do right I'm sorry going through the slides Morehouse College and I went by myself Mac Blackman come in all different shapes and sizes these are black men these are black men that's actually me and my crew from freshman year see Miss Kitty back these are black men these are black men these are Morehouse all these are Morehouse men these are black men these are black men these are all my Morehouse men on my friend French funeral I've wedding sorry a couple years ago but this is me when I entered school and I like showing this picture because it was summer 97 20 years ago this is my 20th year for my high school reunion and out of the four that went to Morehouse after their pre freshman program there's four master degrees and two doctorates and in the picture that I show you down to the bottom two of the other people are medical doctors when as a brain micro neurosurgeon all of us are more huh Salaam this is the face of what I think of and I think of black men but the rest of my story has twists and turns because it's someone who my parents might act my dad and my stepmom they didn't finish college until they were in their 40s right my mother graduate she was 30 so there's no guidance about how do you navigate college and success and how does it all work which I think can be freeing but it also means you're gonna hit some brick walls so I went down to Morehouse that's the chair my department JK Haynes he told me to go see Bob near when I was graduating and I was like okay I don't know him but he looks great that was when the way I was getting started so I looked at his web page she was doing tissue-engineered blood-vessel I thought it was amazing right went over to talk to him well he planned the meeting for a month in advance and I was like what I can walk into my Morehouse professors office that just talked to them month in advance he kind of was busy but anyway after that first meeting he offered me to work in his lab I was happy to do that and I thought I was not going to be paid then he gave me a check at the end of the month it was amazing I graduated from Morehouse and of course I went to the Georgia Tech Emory program that was the faculty were phenomenal the facilities and I work with that guy right there hunching Joe and I needed to do that you have to think about who you are at the time my family wanted me to graduate as quickly as possible to get a job because if you're a minority your family and you're the smart one the family is waiting on you to start making money so you can start lifting everybody up right rising tide lifts all boats so there was this thing of graduate school I had to kind of I had to understand it for myself first and then explain it to my family that it was like work although it's called school so they wouldn't ask me to come home every summer for three months or to give me all this grief when I couldn't make it home right but I chose huntin Jo because Bob Mirim he's had this saying and I wish she was here but he's coming in late evening which was never let money be the reason you don't do an experiment okay yeah right I'm a big nerd I'm a big nerd and dr. Jo well-funded even more well-funded these days and back then but he always like wow that's great ideas sorry I do his voice and I talk about it let's narrow it down and if you could do just one experiment what would it be doctors money we don't explore but it was a great focus lesson and I graduated in five years so that was the goal and Randi angley's one of my first undergrads and again I was a NASA fellow but at the end I had to make a decision I chose to stay in this field great field nurture community and I did a postdoc at MIT with Doug Laufenberg and Linda Griffith where I learned a whole new set of things right but I have several mentors along the way some that looked like me some that don't and all that played different parts and different roles in my own development which Georgia Tech plug on the charge of graduate recruiting in admissions we have a very diverse department that has always been a mission of Georgia Tech since I've been there and I think it holds true and they spread it across all the departments so we have diverse faculty we are happy to have our new chair dr. Susan margulies I'm really excited about her and the things that she's already put into place plus we have a diversity of research interest so everyone should apply to Georgia Tech and come next fall and I do mean that but then I got back there and opened up my lab the plat layer repair regeneration of remodeling and really focusing on the paralytic mechanisms dr. Stetten mentioned but my disease that I focus on are actually mostly health disparities so sickle cell disease I do HIV and cardiovascular disease I'm happy to be part of this in a system to called a BICS and then we do some predictive medicine for breast cancer but I just want to do some quick plus on research I am okay it was a quick plug for research because I'm spending too much time here I want people to ID sickle cell disease it's not cure there's lots of things for bioengineers I get involved when it's not cure life expectancy is 36 right but there's 300,000 babies born each year with sickle cell disease around the globe but up to 90 percent will die in their first five years of life as a person as a human being that de-stresses me and that is why we work on this problem and what I've also learned is how to be a scientist activist what does that mean it means think globally act locally then act globally so in the spirit of that global health concerns are health disparities for under represented minorities United States sickle cell disease is a health disparity for black folks in the United States but it's a global health problem HIV similar thing so when you understand this importance of becoming a scientist activist and you can actually communicate that to other people and to my family who is exposed to all of these diseases that they need an interpreter for their doctor and so we also interface with the community so that brings in great way to bring in undergraduates grad students to understand that what they do in they're working in the lab actually is applicable and real - a real population we also participate at the capital when they lobby States Congress people we go when we participate and there's a gravitas that being a Georgia Tech professor adds to them speaking to the Congress people and then we talk about HIV right HIV you can see this statistic here it's an old one but the numbers are still they're still true that um it disproportionately affects African Americans in the United States so you can see number two for new infections are black men want sex with men number one or white men are sex I mean look at that number 13040 no sex - 10,000 black men in a sector that are 6 percent of the United States or black men period are 6 percent of the United States population but the numbers are almost equal as far as new infectious look at that percentage and then you can see where black women heterosexual women are the next highest risk group and that's the leading killer of black women age 25 to 34 is HIV we have to actively activist and educate our communities and then you look at where it's blooming in the United States down there in the south where Atlanta is where Georgia is these are things that we should address because there are problems in our community affecting the people that I work with and it was amazing that that actually took me to South Africa which is a hotbed for HIV and again I'm a regular person so when I go to a place and visit I want to eat the food and I want to see the sights and I get to do that and science has taken me in all these amazing places that little mano when you started in Morehouse had no idea was a possibility I gotta get my fly let me get to the rest okay I'm gonna keep on Finn sorry and Ethiopia now let's do this NASA now I should start doing things now I love this RuPaul quote okay what other people think about me is none of my business okay as professors we got our own path right but there are people who are whispering in our ears what we should or should not do what do you think my business and that's where I guess would be a bit confusing for us because I'd love to think that way but peer review but 10-year review uh people want to be happy okay so how do we change that so let's talk about this tenure situation right when you get started it's this amorphous crazy oh my god they're gonna kill me kind of thing right but it's interesting I think for someone who's traditionally great or who was raised by academics or who knew their whole life I want to be professor and have this long targeted goal who read all the literature know what it takes I think it becomes a more different thing for them that they constantly focus on it think about it but I believe in Murphy's Law something can go wrong it will go wrong I don't have expectation like I'm gonna get it right but at the same time I am a person of faith so I do believe it's wrong not to count your blessings and to thank God for them so I the way I sum it all together is I think I'm blessed but I need that special right and so when I think about tenure when I started my postdoc at MIT not to bring a bad business but I started and a month later the James Shirley hunger-strike tenure situation kicked off sometimes you know the situation because he did not get tenure I was one month in when that email to all MIT hit my inbox I'm this young black postdoc at MIT like what is going on but I also knew that MIT had a tenure rate of 50 percent at the time right so why would anybody think they were getting tenure there anyway okay sorry for anybody why would you think you're getting it anyway Georgia Tech has an 80% tenure rate but dr. Murphy right and I'm black so I really didn't think it was gonna be any extra given any fair and might but here's the other kicker my family has been through worse so not getting tenure okay I get to make all this money for five years and then go find another job right so it allowed a certain bit of a freedom right but in that and then also this happens two years after I get started it is out this amazing statistic [Laughter] the percent of average if you're African Americans everything equal publications training universities institutions you're still 50% as likely to get at NIH one so I was like okay well this did your thing okay fine we're just gonna have fun while we're here and that's what we begin to do and I think about this Maya Angelou quote if you're always trying to be normal you will never know how amazing you can be and I had to quickly come to grips with the way that dr. Niram got tenure an eighty plus year old white man I'm not gonna get tenure that way now he can guide me and mentor me and hope that works but it's not gonna work that way for me I can't get the same tenure the same way that a Korean immigrant came in and got tenure right that's not gonna be what works for me so I've got to figure out what's gonna work for me and do it and again for me with the freedom I don't get it another job somewhere else and so we just started running like crazy and I'm really thankful that emails were supportive in 2012 in Atlanta we brought those hundred 20 high school students here I'm glad there's more high school students here again we'll do it again next year Georgia Tech Emory helped me get an op-ed in the Atlanta journal-constitution we had a whole day it was this an amazing time and we had on NPR come and interviewed students I'm not gonna play that audio right now let me skip that in the back but in doing all of that look at this and what it also wasn't just me Georgia Tech undergrads put together science to him that was Georgia Tech grad students and we had students from other universities come that they wanted to participate in do the hands-on demos so it does take a village and I'm glad the village came out and the question is are we growing new future scientists and biomedical engineers and again I love this man clearly you could imagine but change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time we are the ones we've been waiting for we are the change that we seek do it now and start making that impact now and that leads to us starting project engages this has been such an amazing experience to do and a time commitment to run and I'm thankful for Miss lakita Cervantes of the audience the program manager who I started this botany room but these young kids are working 40 hours a week in labs during the summer and then they're paid to do 12 to 16 hours a week during the school year during the academic year so we had to make arranges with the universities for them to actually get out of school for half days because the idea was instead of them working fast with a retail they could come to work at Georgia Tech and get paid a salary because of you have people who are low economic socio-economic value the kids 16 a kid needs to work and bring in money so we didn't want to select for students that were wealthy because of course they're gonna be not gonna be fine but I'll just say that right and this has been a lot of fun things there's an actual oral presentation that we're giving Friday so please come and check it out I'll talk more about the details there because now we're finally doing the scholarship to get it out so other
can emulate the practice but this is the team myself Bob there than this lakita servants in the middle keeping it cooking what we started we had teachers from the schools come and work in Georgia Tech labs so again not just me my Georgia Tech professor colleagues are hosting these teachers and these and his high school students and they helped us establish a curriculum for the boot camp then we started the training days the next year we interview students we brought them in we had lab speed-dating for the graduate student and postdoc mentor so everyone felt ownership and helping decide what student that they wanted and then they worked in labs and we got them presenting and talking their science in front of groups as quickly as we could because science is nothing if it's not about communication and these are words that these students may not have even seen or done before and then what gets me is end with these final summer presentations and what has always been impact us you bring the family the parents the community everyone involved and the Georgia Tech professors and so if you could click on the speaker for me in the back Trina Latham is Jade's BA and she's proud because I knew that it was in her but now she knows that as we wrap up I asked the question every reporter saves until last is there anything you wanted to say I didn't ask you know I just want to make Jade's answers to my questions often surprise me her mom's answer leaves me speechless hey thank you for the opportunity and thank you for saying and my daughter what I've always seen in her a great opportunity for her and now people hit the scene but I've always known about my child and I'm great okay so the others not so good I'll tell you what she said they interviewed the mother of one of the students and she said I'm just so touched that my daughter that people finally that my daughter sees what I've always seen in her and that other people get to see it in her as well and then the mom starts the crying at doors like Oh mom don't cry it's on npr's you can check it out it's actually such a beautiful thing but this is the successful even getting many of these students our students are first-generation college students and look at the schools that were getting these kids into and what we had to quickly realize is not about just getting him into these schools we now have to train them so they can graduate so that's the next level but we're impact beyond just the students the Georgia Tech community is changing and I tell you for me diversity work is not charity so I think we have to get that out of our mind I'm actually very selfish and running project engages I do it because I want to see more of these brown faces around Georgia Tech's campus and even in the first year before they really felt comfortable they would sit together in a pack in like a chair in the lobby right because they were kind of nervous about integrating with everybody else now the kids are all over the place so a stranger can walk in and be like oh there's just lots of just black researchers the thing that they do here which it is a thing that we do here and the thing you can do at your school's this young student here but the audience gonna play this is kyndra solid he's actually in the audience we're in the Platte lab okay the cadets in lab I research HIV and with HIV we deal with conceptions the cadets can contribute to the negative effects that HIV have on people the Warka Delta there are the words to diseases when I were young I like to go outside a lot I also had the thing for school I like school too I like to be interactive when I get bored but when everybody get bored they get sleepy so what science science kept me up we had to construct like a rock book of different types of rock and sixth grade so we got a chance to go outside even get to go outside a lot that's cool but we got to go outside and then we had collect different rocks around the community and once we got done we came back to class and like glued all the rocks onto a paper it showed the different types of rocks that we collected council runs in my family so that kind of like push me towards science because my grandma she died from cancer also my cousin died for counselor and my sister she currently has cancer so that plays a big role in and why I want to do research so first you come you come into the lab you come up to it's a big one for lab if you're blind you can tell you in the lab because of the smell and what I were to say about kids kinder this amazing kid and you could tell his genuine his genuine he is how hard working is and he could tell you about when he came in for that first interview he was a Mac he knows he was a wreck and we love to tell that story but what was their diamond in the rough this kid was hungry this kid was ready he was willing to do whatever he could take he saw this opportunity this is an amazing opportunity and that's the kind of kid that we all should be looking for we look at these other metrics of GPAs in academic but what about resilience perseverance creativity how does that then help you advance your research program and so when I think about his little a kyndra's I think about this again I love pop culture a lot as well I think about when Viola Davis first black woman to win the Grammy for Best Actor Actress in a Drama Series in 2016 was it or 15 first ever she gave this speech the only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity how many other students are out there that the reason they're not in this room right now is the opportunity to be in this room right and other things we should not think about and we think about Viola she's famous now by always been acting for a good 25 30 years right viola she used to be on special date Law & Order Special Victims Unit she was always the defense attorney I was gonna beat the public defender and terrible wigs then she was the mother in doubt nominated for an Academy Award for 12 minutes of being on screen 12 minutes nominated for an Academy Award then of course we all remember the help she's in another bad wig now ask a nominated and she of course has her own show how to get away with murder and this is when she actually won the Emmy for it but then of course she played this role in fences and I always not afraid to down-and-dirty we need to get down and dirty if we want to make a change this is real intense is that finally she was a winner for her academy award and the beauty and the glow of Viola Davis we all can appreciate and that's what you want to see in some of these young students that we work with so everyone reach back full farther back up in a puddle y'all talk about this pipeline go back farther go to middle school go to nursery schools whatever you need to do to start chugging that pipeline don't scare them away from science we get excitable about things and I'm still a giant and then again I love our engaged students from engages we got a student got to go to the white house I got to get a tour of the West Wing because of what on the high school students right that's amazing and that's her mother and her postdoc mentor and I always say reach back and pull someone else up but what's important I think to keep minority students engage is you have to celebrate them being themselves if they feel they have to change to fit in or be something else you lose creativity you lose what they can offer you and you make them wonder if they belong in this environment so I love this quote diversity is being invited to the party inclusion is being asked to dance and transformation is being allowed to dance to your own beat and we let people dance because that also means you should bring your whole self as well and so my lab we do events of all kinds and what I love about my lab group we're all different kinds of people in there and we actually celebrate all the different kinds of things that people do and I learn a lot they learn a lot and it makes us ask a number of different questions that I wouldn't get in a homogeneous situation and I say I do that no matter where you go you all recognize I'm a good buddy at Boatwright the wall of china the great wall and everybody kept stopping us to ask for pictures because I thought we were basketball players but we provided them a new perspective and said no no we're scientists and it's always interesting to me whenever you know we fly around a lot I get upgraded sometimes on flights I always get asked not always I get asked quite a bit know I design it actually do that so Cheney was prospective and so I like this awesome Maya Angelou quote success is liking yourself liking what you do and liking how you do it and again this professor thing wasn't well laid out for me it was the thing that kind of opened up and I love this was as when the doctor said mentioned this award what kind of hit me greatly about this was what they put on the the cover the professor's of purpose I had never thought about myself that way but it actually is just so appropriate and so I love that title all right I'm still not done and now then now what to do I want this one to work okay can you play this video what can we do everyone soaked in their urine soaked in their C soaked in her blood left to die can you see I want you to picture a little barrel now how imagine she's white so from time to kill that's the John Grisham novel turned into the movie starring Matthew McConaughey and Samuel Jackson where the young black girl was raped and beat gang-raped by this group of truckers I've been assaulted her and threw her body out and she survived and that McConaughey's in mississippi talking about I thought I could try to get a fair court case here in Mississippi and they was not winning the case and so in that last moment he has everybody even reimagine the crime and then yet the energy here he said imagine she's white and it changes everybody's perspective and this is a trick that I started to use and it actually got to me when I'm talking with Ted Conway former NSF program director now down at Florida Institute of Technology as part of our innocence center he started to push us to that we needed to start recruiting students with disabilities into an REU program and I said to say there's like well what if they can't do the projects what if they don't get along with the other students should we give them an easier project what if no professor wants those students and and I couldn't a 5th question I was asking I was like this is what they used to say about black people this is what they used to say about women I have to stop asking these questions and we have to start recruiting these students and what Ted said is that student will find what they need to be successful in that lab give them the opportunity and so now when I hear people talking and they say things I'm like so they say all these crazy I'm like so imagine if you plays black with woman how does that sound to you say that out loud to someone in a meeting and if that sounds incorrect then the thinking has to change right and I think that's an easy tip than most of us can use so let's do this as an example my department has been thinking about GREs and if we're gonna continue taking this test because Emory has a new policy there so the data shows that significantly disadvantaged women minority students from low socioeconomic backgrounds so women score 80% lower on average in the physical sciences the do men let's flip it would you want to still accept this test if men scored 80% lower on average than women african-american score 200 points below white people white people score 200 points below African Americans we still gonna keep this test only 20% 26 percent of women compared with 70% of men score about 700 only 26% of men compared with seventy-three percent of women score about 700 in the GRE is everyone still for this exam you could do that math and if you see the numbers the numbers are even crazier okay take your time I'll keep going and then I just want to make sure I touched on microaggressions these are what we all do I do them you do them none of us are immune from this we do these things but if we are aware that we do then we can think about them before they start happening again or we can understand why people may respond in a different way and their big trick about microaggressions they're small things people say that the person walking away can be like I don't that happened but something didn't feel right and then when it keeps happening you're like yeah this is a thing I've got no evidence but I know this is a thing until finally then it boils over and there's a discussion we'll say but here are some realities and racial microaggressions people of color experience in the workplace and I and again as a man I know I do this with women as a person is a domestic English speaker I'd probably do it with people who are foreign language speakers like we all have our privilege and they only Kesler did a great talk about this a couple years ago when she was at this podium but here the things that we happen to us you're expected to speak for it on behalf of people of color everywhere I cannot I don't know them all and I'm not related to all of them either right you're supposed to be the barometer of racism imagine what that is asked is one person like this community that group hey did what we all said was that racist what if the answer is yes so that Marissa yes and then what happens in that person in this group right and I want to just give a give her time to the last one you wonder how you can feel invisible and hyper visible at the same time nobody's talking me nobody's paying attention to me but as soon as I move they're like wait what are you doing what do you want what if I'm not at the party or the function hey Bono we missed you the other day I know it's sort of shut up but I couldn't because I didn't want to be there and and there's a danger about how we each appreciate the microaggressions so for the the perpetrator the one doing it they might think that that Margiela's person is overreacting right and that's all you're just so touchy I didn't even say anything bad like it ineffective emotion or anything and they wouldn't blow it off and that's why people decide not to bring up the micro aggression right but what I will tell you is anybody if you're ever the only person in a group while my lived experience may be up for discussion it is not up for debate you cannot tell me what I was feeling or what I was experience you cannot change that for me you cannot convince me that I felt something different and I cannot convince you and I should not try right so every person has a bill of rights and I think this time that we can all take into consideration I do this my lab I do assertiveness training with my lab because they were just let anyone run over them at one point but this my psychology sister-in-law she helped me with this everyone has the right to be treated with respect and respect is a universal thing you know what it means everyone has the right to have and express your own feelings and opinions you have that right for people the right to be listened to and taken seriously the right to set your own priorities and I tell us my grass is if I ask you to do something you cannot do it for whatever thing you got going on tell me and we will have to adjust it cuz I respect you and your rights to have these priorities now at the same time yet accept the consequences of your priorities being greater than mine right but you have that right I can't be mad with you and that's the right to say no without feeling guilty you have the right to get what you pay for you have the right to make mistakes and I think underrepresented communities always feel like if I make a mistake it's over I cannot tell people making mistakes I don't want to ask for help because I'll know that I don't know what's happening and this is detrimental we all have the right to make mistakes and you have the right to choose not to assert yourself if you don't feel safe in a situation but if we all kind of go around as I think about other people have these rights then it's something that I think we can all get better with and so just something now be an ally use your power for good I think these two at
he beginning but I also want be able to think about imagine if Bob Niram started project engages 20 years ago when he was Bob Wright where would this room be today if he started it 20 years ago right I'm glad he started now and he needed a partner right and everyone knows this quote that they came for the Jews I did not speak out but when they came for me there was no one left to speak for me this is my ally ship is so important well just Whittle away we're gonna get around to everyone ultimately so I want to show this I think this is a fairly agreeable statement in the room right Porto Rican lies matter this is happening right now this is terrible Puerto Ricans are Americans I love Puerto Rico and a lot of other Regas are not here because of this things happening their houses right and we all know Puerto Ricans Korean lies matter this is the thing that's happening in the world right now right about the risk of all these lives happening over Korea they matter black lives matter the other two matter these can matter the other two are not inflammatory this should not be inflammatory these lives matter gay lives they matter right black gay lives they matter trans lives matter black trans lives matter this is the group that's the most killed right all of these things matter and we're engineers we all set set theory or discrete math whatever they called it back in your day so if you did a set theory if you want to say all lives matter for all lives matter to be true each of those individual subgroups must also be true so if you want to say all had a black lives matter Korean elastomers matter Puerto Rican lies must matter gay lines must matter so as engineers spread that word is a mathematical proof right so we don't have to fight about it and we are the society that can make these changes that's why I'm happy to be a part of this look at us at BM yes we are 50% women at the undergrad and graduate level in engineering where you have departments that are eight or ten percent we are that department that is diversified at the at the gender level now I say undergrad and grad because there's plenty of spaces that we still have work to do right we have a whim are two societies that let's have a women's luncheon at our annual meeting right so they could get together and have some professional development and things that help them we haven't started a celebration minorities luncheon I was thankful to Sangeeta Bochy and Gilda Bertino asked me to be the lead on that for the first five years and then lack or two years ago we started the LGBT desert social and I was glad to be able to talk at that one last year we are the society making those changes so we are the ones should be the leaders and look at what we've done already I have been just blown away this year all the numbers of new women department chairs now I don't something happen four seasons pictures bigger than I don't know I think it's um I think they must have done that in the bag I don't know how that worked out and there's more with the department chairs than this I am empowered by this I think this is amazing we are the society that can do all these changes I think it's on all of us to go out and do that and so that's the charge 50th year Atlanta what are we gonna do let's do it racial ethnic ability diversity and let's set the standard for other sessions and disciplines to follow we can do that and please we can't forget about intersectionality because there's a black woman as a black gay woman with a disability who there's all of that as well okay and they don't just count once so thank you for listening I want to think of course my lab group they've been fantastic funding that helped me do all the other things and again the professional society and I'm probably one over time but thank you for allowing me that space [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] all right well what we'll do now is show her thanks to dr. plot for being so sharing his experience and really energizing and empowering us to make change in this coming year and what we can do now we have the celebration of minorities luncheon next we'd be happy to entertain a few questions for dr. plot or a few comments oh hello dr. Platt I actually saw you last year at the LGBT social I want to say thank you to get the conversation going the context of your speeches they really inspire me and thanks thank you thank you I appreciate that [Applause] I thought that was a phenomenal presentation I wonder if you could speak to some of the social groups that an organization is that you partner with in order to help engage be so successful I know there's a lot of different groups out there and maybe people who are interested in doing these type of programs in their own City can link up with the local chapters of those groups oh yeah that's a good question yeah so of course Nesby is a great organization I think dr. set-in mention that in the opening I've done some partnered with Nesby and SP has the pre-k so our pre highschool chapter plus the undergrad chapter in the Graduate chapters it's mostly a professional organization but they are now embracing graduate life then of course they're shep societies Hispanic Professional Engineers that are also looking at ways that they can include the academic side into their community but some of the other things to think about really are just groundswell calling people and going over to a high school and saying hey I want to come and do this thing with your students are you okay with us doing that and so I do want to mention in the beginning of the getting engaged off the ground which we'll talk about again in my talk tomorrow is it was establishing relations with a high school by just us giving our time and going over there and me taking my grad student particularly my black team in a little black male grad students over there and kind of just engaging with them to show that we were willing to sacrifice time to be with them that then they could sacrifice administrative time to help us get things off the ground so a lot of grassroots just going over there being that one person yeah thank you dr. Platt yes over here oh yeah phenomenal talk one of the things that stood out to me is just how much of a free spirit you are and you're certainly dancing to your own beat as you indicated there was there a click moment in your development that allowed you to sort of do that was it your undergraduate experience and were you able to dance to your own beat right away as a graduate sooner is that something you had to relearn good one I have always been me even when I have tried to not be be in certain spaces because I feel like it might be too much and I think that's been the part so I love the Tim Cook quote about bring your whole self to work the more you try to repress parts of yourself and who you are like it just doesn't work out right and so for me it probably again and morehouse it clicked I didn't have to always have this first black man thing it was what are the other parts of me that are now able to shine that I can really think about so I don't have to impress these black men because there's so many types of us versus in the rest of the world they think I'm supposed to be like this so let me maybe try to be like this or fight stereotypes and then once I didn't have to fight stereotypes I could just find out what was underneath all this right and so that's why I try to encourage that with my lab students especially because they're young and early right so what can they do now that makes things more exciting for them and bring others in because again if you have to conform then you feel like that space is not for you so and that's why I began going about the Georgia Tech was amazing for me they value diversity like that's a thing so I didn't have to play a different game to be there and so I think it's also finding a space that fits yeah we could talk more about that because I have to think a little bit more about the epiphanic moment - yeah I I'm very proud of you for bringing up those topics in this audience I think that was very inspiring and powerful one of the issues that I'm interested in finding out and since you've you know develop a lot of these programs to help minorities you know especially in engineering is you know there is this big increase in these types of programs which is wonderful especially at the earlier stages but unfortunately once you reach that stage you know everybody eventually it's a PhD or what-have-you and they have to transition into these professional positions you know according to NSF that you know reports they always have this diversity reports you know black women for example represent only 0.1 percent of Engineers in universities and also in industry so there's this big dam there you know that's preventing the water from flowing once though all of those girls from high school college you know reach that point where they have to transition into you know the professorial or you know scientists in industry so where are the programs that are you know supporting those minorities once that reach they know this is a very important questions only because if you look at the numbers even black women are outnumbering black men at the Graduate or the undergraduate graduate every like all of the educational levels and I'm by like four to one almost right and did we lose them at the professor level right and so it's interesting as I was going through those time periods myself I was talking to my friend my black woman friends who were in the space different things happen right so there's family things that happen but there's also well I've heard these my women specifically say this is they were just retired of fighting right and they were fighting a fight that I didn't understand because I'm not a black woman right and I just had to believe them when they were telling what their fights were so I love when people now are having different conversations and you know Rashi Bashir is one of them which I think he's great is think about how does it we have to change the system so that women are supported at all of these levels so that's the first part about life choices and I know that women of color family is critically important for a number of reasons right then I think the other side is there are professional development programs at the early faculty and mid faculty levels I mean dr. Berube know has been phenomenal in keeping her minority faculty development workshop going and I learned a lot when I was going to there because it opens your eyes to things you don't know are coming right but also American Heart Association has a minority mentoring network princess and I were and part of that and so I think we're biomedical engineering it becomes interesting and different I think the society doesn't have something but we then are part of all of these other professional societies and maybe it should be a thought that the society thinks about how they could actually nurture their own talent instead of us going out with the others if they're things that have become unique to be in me so that's a longer discussion and recently I've been having that fight because I've graduate now to black women I got two more in my lab and I don't want them to leave the Academy but role models they need to be there but there's two down front for those that are looking you can start it you can start let's chat at the lunch then we can talk about ideas what I think we'll do because we really don't want to cut off the dialogue but we also don't want to cut into the next event which is 11:45 the minorities luncheon yeah if I could ask the people who are now patiently waiting at the microphone to come up to the front we can continue the dialogue up here and as long as dr. Platt has energy which I think he does [Applause] okay [Applause]
