Diversify Your Faculty: A Roadmap for Equitable Hiring Strategies

Abstract Hiring practices in academia have critically limited the entry of individuals from historically excluded groups (e.g., people who identify as Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, American Indian/Alaskan Native, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities) into our biomedical engineering faculty. Excluding such individuals has hindered our profession’s research impact and ability to equitably educate our students. With many departments committed to “do better,” we now need to embrace a new mindset and gain the skills necessary to rectify injustices in our faculty hiring processes. Here, we offer a faculty hiring roadmap that departments can leverage to eliminate many barriers of entry to members of historically excluded groups as faculty in biomedical engineering. We call on our colleagues to recognize the failings of our current hiring practices and adopt the guidelines provided here to diversify biomedical engineering departments so that we might collectively accelerate the impact, innovation, and power of our profession.