One university is putting diversity front and center and helping to ensure that the next generation of bioethicists is more culturally and ethnically diverse than ones gone by. The students at the University of Maryland Baltimore County recently started a Bioethics Student Association.

This year, the UMBC Bioethics Student Association (BSA) will be sending seven students to the 12th Annual National Undergraduate Bioethics Conference at Harvard University. BSA now boasts 70+ members and had only 2 members attend attended NUBC last year, but this year has a proud troop of 7 marching their way to Boston.
Why is THIS undergraduate bioethics group, in particular, an important harbinger for the future of diversity of bioethics writ large?

The Princeton Review ranked UMBC one of the 20 most diverse universities in the nation, and the membership of the BSA reflects this diversity. BSA Vice President Batsheva Melissa Chapman comments, “Although we all come from different races and religions, we have one goal in mind: to bring about the awareness of the different ethical issues that society faces in the world of science.”

Students with majors as diverse as philosophy, bioinformatics and computational biology, biochemistry, molecular biology, public health, and statistics will attend NUBC from UMBC this year. One student, Richard Blissett said, “Once I got to college, I suddenly started wondering about many of the ethical issues in my field.” He will present on the ethics of marketing preimplantion genetic screening to infertile couples.

Pictured: 2009 NUBC attendees (left to right) Richard Blissett, Mary Rhee, Sid Agarwal, Batsheva Melissa Chapman, and Michael Young (not pictured: Justin Donlan, Jacqui Wanjohi)

Finding the resources to get seven students to Cambridge has not been easy. Harvard generously waived the registration fee for students who are presenting. Additionally, the UMBC Deans of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics both made generous contributions for the students whose abstracts were accepted.

UMBC also has a new travel fund through the Office of Undergraduate Education to which the students will apply. For the remainder of the travel expenses, the BSA has scheduled a bake sale fundraiser.

If we want a diverse field and, thus, diverse dialogue, we need to start recruiting at the undergraduate level. ASBH should also up the ante and make it possible for more students like these who want to begin their academic careers earlier, to enhance the diversity of the dialogue in bioethics and make it possible for them to attend this conference and so many others. Diversity grants for undergraduate students just like these should be made available NOW.

We applaud these students for their tremendous contribution to this conference and to their field and for the contributions they are certain to make in the years and decades to come.

To learn more, go to UMBC.edu

Andrea Kalfoglou, PhD and Summer Johnson, PhD