The 5th AfroBioTech Conference — an event dedicated to exploring the innovative applications of biotechnology developed by Black scientists — was held Feb. 16–18 at the John Lewis Student Center at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, GA. The conference was launched in 2019 as a platform to promote innovation and highlight the contributions of Black scientists, while helping to combat historical bias in the biotechnology and medical sectors. At this year’s conference, nearly 125 attendees from academia, industry, and the public sector gathered to discuss work at the forefront of regenerative engineering, medical biotechnology, genomics and genetics, computational and systems biology, and more. This conference was created by the Society for Biological Engineering (SBE), an AIChE technical community.
In discussing the conference’s origins, Karmella Haynes, AfroBioTech Conference founder and Emory Univ. and Georgia Tech professor, explained, “I had served on several national and international conference organizing committees. Every time the topic of representation came up, organizing committee members who wanted to improve inclusion would often comment that they simply didn’t know any senior scientists from marginalized groups.” Haynes added, “Low numbers are a symptom of historical marginalization, and, on top of that, the few of us that are out here are not always highly visible. So, I set out to build a platform to provide greater visibility to scientists from minoritized groups, specifically African American and African Diasporans.”
Technical programming began Sunday, Feb. 16, with keynote speaker Ted W. Love from the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), in which he discussed the history of biotechnology and the necessity of inclusivity for unlocking its potential. This opened the session “Bioengineering and Our Community,” dubbed “For Us, By Us (FUBU) Sunday,” which is a newer addition to the conference’s programming added at the third conference. This programming featured many speakers, like Joy Jackson of Georgia Tech and Jasmine Kwasa of Carnegie Mellon Univ., who sought to highlight innovative technologies that combat existing racial biases in medicine, from specific innovations like electroencephalogram (EEG) testing technology for people with highly textured hair to broader issues like systemic bias in neuroscience.
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