Community Board Podcast

A need for diverse thinking drives Mayo Clinic's efforts to attract and develop future scientists from diverse backgrounds, and Mayo Clinic Research is working to make sure underrepresented groups have a voice and support. On a mission to remedy health disparities — comparatively poor outcomes for certain populations with certain health conditions — Margaret Akinhanmi learned a disturbing fact: People of African descent with bipolar disorder often are misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. A predoctoral student in clinical and translational science at Mayo Clinic, Akinhanmi scoured clinical records and research articles. She found a glaring lack of biological and genomic research involving black patients, some of whom struggled with bipolar disorder while taking the wrong medication for 10 years or more. That's unfortunately not an uncommon roadblock for research. And Mayo's Research leaders say that scientists of color, like Akinhanmi, are needed to remedy health disparities and the chronic scarcity of racial an