“Data shows that women and minorities are selectively sorted out of engineering, math and science careers.”
Dr. Anjelica Gonzalez, biomedical engineer, scientist, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University. “Her Scientific Discovery: Support”, New York Times Feb 25 2017
Some of the most talented scientists we know are also the least visible. Not because their work isn’t strong, but because the system wasn’t built for everyone.
Amplifying Underrepresented Voices
The Life Science Editors Foundation (LSEF) is producing a short podcast series to amplify underrepresented voices in science, featuring JEDI Awardees and LSEF leaders sharing the moments that shaped their paths: how they built resilience, navigated key transitions, and turned science into impact. Hosted by Oliver Bogler, PhD, broadcast on the Out of Patients channel (The Standard Deviation, Season 2).
In this episode, we expose the hidden side of scientific publishing, revealing that the best data doesn’t always win. Former scientific journal editors, Dr. Angela Andersen and Dr. Brandi Mattson, share their insider knowledge on the multi-billion-dollar industry that shapes scientific visibility, credibility, and careers.
They discuss the “hidden curriculum” and unwritten rules dictated by a few massive publishing houses, and how this creates barriers and inequities for scientists who lack the right mentorship and networks. You’ll hear why the public should care, from taxpayer dollars funding research to the delay of scientific breakthroughs.
To address this uneven playing field, Angela and Brandi co-direct the Life Science Editors Foundation and the JEDI Program (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion). This program offers free editorial feedback and scientific consulting, providing disadvantaged scientists with the “code” and moral support needed to navigate the system, secure funding (like the NSF Career award), and get their work seen. They are crossing the aisle to ensure every scientist’s hard-won research is given its best shot.
Many of us come to science believing the lab is a sanctuary — a place where only the work matters. Dr. Chrystal Starbird, a structural biologist at UNC and 2020 winner of the inaugural Rising Black Scientist Award from Cell, came to science from a childhood marked by poverty and a parent struggling with addiction. Science was her refuge. But when she got inside the world she had dreamed of, she found it was far less welcoming than advertised.
This episode is about what Chrystal calls the advocacy tax: the invisible, uncompensated labor carried disproportionately by scientists from underrepresented groups who, after fighting their way in, turn around and hold the door open for others. We talk about the origins of her advocacy, the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) program at the Life Science Editors Foundation, why diverse scientific teams ask better questions, and why this work is harder — and more necessary — in the current political moment.
Dr. Chrystal Starbird is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, where she studies the structure and function of proteins implicated in cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. She is the Chair of the Board of the Life Science Editors Foundation and a nationally recognized advocate for equity in science. In 2020 she received the first Rising Black Scientist Award from the journal Cell.
In this episode of Standard Deviation, host Dr. Oliver Bogler explores the perilous career transition from promising student to independent Principal Investigator, a stage where scientific talent alone isn’t enough to secure the high-stakes grant funding needed to survive in academia. We hear from Dr. Crystal Rogers, a developmental biologist at UC Davis, and Dr. Michelle Mendoza, a cancer biologist at the Huntsman Cancer Institute, who both faced immense personal and professional hurdles while trying to land career-defining grants. Both scientists collided with academia’s “Hidden Curriculum”—the unwritten, highly specific rhetorical rules of grant writing that often act as a gatekeeper to tenure. The episode highlights how the Life Science Editors Foundation’s JEDI program pairs underrepresented scientists with elite former journal editors to decode this language of confidence. By acting as a “dress rehearsal” for harsh reviews and strengthening their scientific logic, JEDI volunteers helped both researchers win crucial funding, secure their positions, and ultimately “edit the system itself” as they now hold the door open for the next generation.
Academic science runs on unwritten rules. If you know them, they’re invisible. If you don’t, they can end your career before it begins. In this episode, host Oliver Bogler talks with Dr. Benjamin Suarez-Jimenez about the hidden barriers that shape who gets to stay in science — and the people working to dismantle them.
Guest: Dr. Benjamin Suarez-Jimenez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Rochester, where he uses virtual reality and video games to study how people with PTSD and anxiety construct mental maps of their environment. His research sits at the intersection of neuroscience, trauma, and spatial cognition.
What We Cover
How Benjamin’s mother’s cancer diagnosis shaped his drive and resilience from an early age
The plagiarism accusation that nearly ended his career — and why it had nothing to do with dishonesty
Why grant writing is a distinct skill that even talented scientists often lack
The JEDI Program (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) at the Life Science Editors Foundation, which pairs scientists from underrepresented groups with former top-tier journal editors
How working with editor Angela Anderson helped Benjamin sharpen a two-page letter of intent that unlocked a pilot award — and ultimately an NIH R01 application
The “multiplier effect”: how Benjamin paid his experience forward to a mentee whose dissertation was being blocked by bureaucratic gatekeeping
The compounded “invisible load” carried by scientists who are also navigating identity, culture, and bias in the academy every day
There’s a concept in physics called a “field” — an invisible area of influence you can’t see but can feel. Dr. Nirosha Murugan has built her career connecting these invisible fields to real-world biomedical challenges, like regrowing a lost limb. But when it came time to publish her team’s groundbreaking work, she discovered a different kind of invisible field: the unwritten rules of academic publishing. In this episode, Nirosha shares how a mentorship program taught her the “hidden curriculum” of scientific communication — and how she’s now passing that map on to her own trainees. Dr. Nirosha Murugan is a biophysicist and the current Tier II Canada Research Chair in Tissue Biophysics at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her work sits at the intersection of biology and physics, using bioelectricity to advance regenerative medicine — including a wearable bioreactor that successfully triggered limb regeneration in frogs.
A man is hit by a car in Los Angeles. In the emergency room, the scan looking for internal bleeding finds something else — a mass in his colon. He calls it a blessing in disguise. When Dr. Belinda Waltman meets him a few days later, what he wants to talk about is not the cancer. It is whether he can afford to miss another day of work. Waltman runs expedited cancer workups in the Los Angeles County safety net, where the diagnosis is rarely the hardest thing in the room. For years she carried her patients’ stories with no way to put them on the record: she is a clinician, not a researcher, with no lab, no grant staff and no pipeline into the journals. In our season finale, she describes how working with a former journal editor turned those stories into a JAMA essay — and what happened when she printed it out and handed it to a patient on his way out of clinic.
About the Guest: Dr. Belinda Waltman is a primary care physician and sees patients in a clinic built for expedited malignancy workups, caring for people who are uninsured or underinsured and newly facing a possible cancer diagnosis. She trained at Harvard Medical School and worked in San Francisco’s safety net clinic system before joining LA County. Her narrative medicine essay “The Margins Matter” was published in JAMA in December 2023, and she is now building Essential Voices, a storytelling collective focused on essential workers who cannot get essential care.
