Mission

The Project on Race & Gender in Science & Medicine (RGSM) is an intellectual center that promotes scholarship, research, policy and public education for understanding how scientific, medical and technological ideas and practices contribute to and construct notions of human differences in our multi-racial, multiethnic-society.

The mission of RGSM is to (1) bring a sense of urgency and visibility to the critical roles science, technology, and medicine play in African and African American Studies and concurrently examine the critical role that notions of “race” play in the histories of science, technology, and medicine; (2) to generate scholarship on current and historical inequalities in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields that will inform the development of policies at the state, national, and international level to end the persistent underrepresentation of  African Americans, Latin Americans  and Native Americans in these fields; (3) to develop robust public education projects about the role of genetics/genomics in constructions of human differences in the United States, Africa and Latin America; and (4)ultimately, to help achieve the goal of racial and ethnic equality in all areas of American society and internationally.