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The American Physiological Society (APS) celebrates the contributions of Native Americans in research and medicine year-round and during Native American Heritage Month in November. This month, we will introduce the idea of cultural competency—the ability to understand, appreciate and interact with people from cultures or belief systems different from one's own.

This webinar will discuss:

  • cultural competency in the lab and workplace;
  • mechanisms to promote cultural humility to acknowledge and appreciate cultural differences;
  • effective skills that are appropriate to communicate with individuals from a variety of cultures in the laboratory, workplace and society; and
  • “code switching” or leaving cultural aspects out of the workplace in order to “fit in.”

Moderator

Joshua Sheak 200Joshua Sheak, MD, PhD, is a pediatrics resident physician at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. He completed his MD/PhD at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. As a graduate student, Sheak was the 2016 K-12 Minority Outreach Fellow for the American Physiological Society and is a New Century Scholar with the Academic Pediatric Association (APA). He participates in the APA’s Research in Academic Pediatrics Initiative on Diversity program. As a member of the Diné community, Sheak believes that promoting diversity and inclusion in the health sciences is vital to ongoing growth of science and medicine.

 
Speakers

Claw 200Katrina Claw, PhD, is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in the Division of Biomedical Informatics and Personalized Medicine. Her research program focuses on personalizing medicine, pharmacogenomics and the ethical, legal and social implications of genomic research with American Indian/Alaska Native and other Indigenous communities. Claw’s current research focuses on pharmacogenetic variation, tobacco cessation and nicotine metabolism, and examining the perspectives of genomic research in Native communities. Claw grew up on the Navajo Nation, and obtained her BS in biology and BA in anthropology at Arizona State University. She earned her PhD in genome sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Him 200Deana Around Him, DrPH, is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and senior research scientist at Child Trends, a research organization based in Bethesda, Maryland. Her research aims to improve the well-being of American Indian and Alaska Native children, youth and families through avenues that meet the cultural and contextual needs of their communities. Around Him’s training focuses on the social determinants and life course approaches to health, culturally responsive evaluation, research ethics, and maternal and child health. Her past work has included projects that focus on strengthening tribal research capacity and policies. Around Him strives to conduct research and evaluation that respects tribal sovereignty, builds on cultural strengths and produces outcomes that inform policy and programs.

Poodry 200Clifton “Clif” Poodry, PhD, is a native of the Tonawanda Seneca Indian Reservation in western New York. He earned both a BA and an MA in biology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and received a PhD in biology from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Poodry has served on the advisory boards of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society and the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science. He is a courtesy professor at the University of Oregon. Poodry is a past professor of biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a former program director for Developmental Biology at the National Science Foundation, where he developed the minority supplement initiative that was later followed at National Institutes of Health. He also developed the Native American Research Centers for Health program in collaboration with the Indian Health Service.

 

 

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