I hope everyone is spending as nice a summer as you can despite the ongoing health crisis. I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone of the importance of having a diverse organization and to share a few steps that ISTSS has taken toward diversifying our membership in support of
Strategic Goal 2 (“
ISTSS promotes professional, demographic, cultural and geographic diversity and inclusivity among our membership”). As someone born in France from Vietnamese refugee parents, who has lived 10 years in the U.S., and who happens to think (and sometimes dream) in four different languages, I deeply value diversity, not only to promote inclusivity and tolerance, but also as a central tenet of scientific excellence. However, despite all this, I found myself struggling greatly when writing this column on diversity, as this brings up conflicting feelings in me.