Meet the 2025 Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Prize winners, the Black Microbiologists Association
28 March 2025
As part of its commitment to nurturing an inclusive and welcoming culture within the microbiology community, the Society launched the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Prize in November 2023 with plans to hold its inaugural award lecture during Annual Conference 2025.
Ahead of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Prize Lecture, Dr. Rebee Penrice-Randal interviewed Dr. I’ah Donovan-Banfield, Dr. Ariangela Kozik, Dr. Nikea Pittman, Dr. Chelsey Spriggs, Dr. Ninecia Scott, and Dr. Kishana Taylor to find out more about how this initiative started and the impact this has had in microbiology and to Black microbiologists.
Can you tell me about the start of the community?
It started in the summer of 2020. The world was facing a global pandemic, global protests and a renewed reckoning with systemic racism. This motivated us to come together, and we created a one-week social media event ‘Black in Micro Week’. After this we formed the Black Microbiologists Association (BMA) which has quickly become an ongoing initiative.
The social media event was designed to amplify the voices of Black scientists in microbiology and the response was overwhelming. We received lots of feedback, including hopes that the initiative was going to run long-term. Black in Micro Week was the first time that many of us had met or seen one another - aspiring microbiologists who had lived experiences that were similar to our own. We found that after finding a community that you didn’t realise you needed it’s hard to suddenly not have that. The response to Black in Micro Week made it clear that this wasn’t just a one-time conversation. We made a clear decision to formalise as a non-profit organisation, allowing us to secure funding and expand our work in community-building, mentorship, and outreach.
Can you talk about the impact of your work?
One notable story is that of a graduate student organiser who, through Black in Microbiology Week, discovered an entirely new career path. In the first Black in Micro Week, we had a session on clinical microbiology which inspired him to reach out to one of the speakers. Through this interaction, he was encouraged to apply for a clinical microbiology fellowship. That application was successful and he is now a faculty member in that field. We recently saw him at a conference and everyone’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, how are you? How’s work? What are you doing now?’, and he was just saying how he would not be in clinical microbiology without BMA because he had no idea that it even existed, even though he had been in a microbiology lab in grad school.
These kinds of stories seem to be common among BMA members. Beyond individual career success, we have pushed scientific institutions to recognise the value of diversity. We are proud that our work played a role in the Microbiology Society establishing its EDI Prize, which we were the first to receive. We hope that the Microbiology Society will continue to push what they are doing to provide an equitable environment and pursue justice in this arena. Having the BMA as an organisation winning the first EDI prize, and the EDI prize coming into existence in the first place, kind of shows that commitment to it. We also want to give kudos to the other prize winners, the group at the University of Glasgow who have created a decolonising the curriculum program.
These two kinds of working groups winning the prize at the same time and at this particular moment is very powerful – it sends a strong message. The Microbiology Society isn’t as large an organisation as something like the American Society of Microbiology, but it does show that you don’t have to be a large organisation to do what is right, and that is super empowering for us as a group of individuals.
What can you see in the shifting landscape of microbiology in regards to EDI?
We do see a change, but we will continue to keep pushing forward. Scientific excellence, society and diversity are intricately linked with each other. We don’t have scientific discovery if all the same people are doing and thinking the same things, and I think it’s important for really every facet of society to recognise the value of having different perspectives and people who have experienced different things to be able to solve any of the world’s major problems. That fits inside microbiology as well.
Whether or not we acknowledge the history of the contributions of Black and other marginalized groups of people to science, especially microbiology, it's there. We wouldn’t be where we are now today without the contributions of those people.
We hope that organisations like the Microbiology Society or American Society of Microbiology or, any equivalent in any country are going to be able to stand in their espoused commitment to honouring and championing diversity, in part because we can go backwards so fast without it.
What are some challenges or lessons you have learnt?
Running a non-profit while being early-career scientists has unsurprisingly come with significant challenges and figuring out how to run a non-profit organisation in general has been a learning curve, because it’s just not something that most scientists are trained in. Of course, running events takes money and we always have live captioners for the events that we have online, and sign-language interpreters to ensure accessibility. We have to be able to pay for stuff like that. All of those things have costs associated with them. As a very small volunteer-led non-profit organisation, being able to find the resources to do that, and maintain infrastructure like a website, has been difficult for sure. And beyond financial challenges, the shift from virtual to in-person engagement has been tricky. And of course, we have also had to figure out how to adapt to the way people are interacting and communicating. We are always considering how to make sure that we are still present and interacting with the scientific community, as many of these interactions have somewhat left the virtual space as people have increasing demands on their time offline.
Despite these challenges. We have been able to drive an increased presence at conferences, online and in many other ways which has allowed us to connect more closely with the community. We always ask ‘How can I help? How can I get involved?’
What’s next for BMA?
Looking to the future, we’re focused on sustaining and expanding our impact. One of the most ambitious goals is to host an in-person Black in Microbiology Week in the future. However, securing funding for an event explicitly focused on Black scientists has been an uphill battle. As you can imagine with the current climate, trying to run an event called ‘Black in anything’ is probably not going to fly with [US] federal funding agencies at the moment. In addition to event planning, the group is expanding our role in science communication, particularly in response to emerging infectious disease threats.
What advice would you give to early-career researchers, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds?
‘Keep going, it might be hard, it might be difficult for a variety of reasons, but you’re important, you might be a missing piece to some big problem that we’re trying to solve. So, keep going.’
— Dr. Kishana Taylor
‘You deserve to be here, and you can achieve your goals and your dreams regardless of if you can see people that look like you doing it in your immediate vicinity or not.’
— Dr. Chelsey Spriggs
‘Find the community where [you] are valued and will be supported, I don’t think it’s ever too early in the career trajectory for that. … Investments in that early on will pay dividends later.’
— Dr. Ariangela Kozik
‘Explore, it’s okay to try something new, you never know what connections you can make across multiple fields, multiple sectors that can make a difference in one-to-many lives.’
— Dr. Ninecia Scott
‘Find a friend, stand together and speak out together, everything is harder when you’re on your own.’
— Dr. I’ah Donovan-Banfield
‘Know and believe [you] bring a unique perspective to science that no one else can.’
— Dr. Nikea Pittman
Interview by: Dr. Rebee Penrice-Randal
Edited by: The Microbiology Society