To our Stanford Community,
In response to the recent racist attacks on Professor Hakeem Jefferson and the open letter published in The Stanford Daily from the Early Career Black Faculty Group, we, the chairs of the Basic Bioscience Departments in the Stanford Schools of Medicine, Humanities and Sciences, and Engineering, the directors of the Biosciences Institutes and the directors of the Interdisciplinary Biosciences Programs, express our support for Professor Jefferson and the requests made in the open letter. We condemn the coordinated, racist attacks against Professor Jefferson and call on ourselves, our community and our University to help protect and defend our Black colleagues in response to these attacks. We commit to developing proactive strategies, in coordination with our Black faculty, to prevent these attacks in the future, and when we cannot prevent them, to respond to them quickly and to mitigate their negative impacts. We hope that we can help Stanford become a community where all of our members feel safe and included as we pursue our scholarly endeavors and career aspirations.
— Chairs of Basic Biomedical Science Departments in the Schools of Medicine, Engineering, and Humanities and Science, directors of the Biosciences Institutes and the directors of the Interdisciplinary Biosciences Programs
Stephen A. Baccus — Chair, Department of Neurobiology
Melissa L. Bondy — Chair, Department of Epidemiology and Population Health
James K. Chen — Chair, Department of Chemical and Systems Biology
Jennifer R. Cochran — Chair, Department of Bioengineering
Martha S. Cyert — Chair, Department of Biology
Miriam B. Goodman — Chair, Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology
Sherril L. Green — Chair, Department of Comparative Medicine
Theodore S. Jardetzky — Chair, Department of Structural Biology
Paul S. Mischel — Vice Chair for Research, Department of Pathology
Thomas Montine — Chair, Department of Pathology
Douglas K. Owens — Chair, Department of Health Policy
Sylvia K. Plevritis — Chair, Department of Biomedical Data Science
David S. Schneider — Chair, Department of Microbiology and Immunology
Michael Snyder — Chair, Department of Genetics
Aaron F. Straight — Chair, Department of Biochemistry
Anne Villeneuve — Chair, Department of Developmental Biology
Steven Artandi — Director, Stanford Cancer Institute
Carolyn Bertozzi — Director, ChEM-H Institute
Mark M. Davis — Director, Institute for Immunity, Transplantation, and Infection
Mary Leonard — Director, Maternal and Child Health Research Institute
Crystal Mackall — Director, Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy
William Newsome — Director, Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute
Carla Shatz — Director, Bio-X Program
Irving Weissman — Director, Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine
Joseph C. Wu — Director, Cardiovascular Institute
Olivia Martinez — Director, Immunology Interdisciplinary Graduate Program
K.C. Huang — Director, Biophysics Interdisciplinary Graduate Program
Tushar Desai — Co-Director, Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine Interdisciplinary Graduate Program
Gerald Spangrude — Co-Director, Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine Interdisciplinary Graduate Program
Julien Sage — Co-Director, Cancer Biology Interdisciplinary Graduate Program
Laura Attardi — Co-Director, Cancer Biology Interdisciplinary Graduate Program
Justin Gardner — Co-Director, Neurobiology Interdisciplinary Graduate Program
Merritt Maduke — Co-Director, Neurobiology Interdisciplinary Graduate Program