A Message From the ENAR Executive Committee

Dear ENAR Member,

The ENAR Executive Committee is extremely troubled by the tragedies that have occurred over the past few weeks along with the many related incidents that have long preceded them. We stand with the Black and African American communities and would like to do our part to help fight systemic racism in the United States and in our field, as well as actively work to implement anti-racist practices among statisticians and promote diversity and equity across the scope of ENAR's activities.

In the short term, we plan to do the following:

• Create opportunities for our membership to learn about how discrimination and racism impact statistics & biostatistics practice and teaching, through Short Courses, Tutorials and/or Roundtables at all future ENAR spring meetings and via WebENARs starting this summer. Possible topics include teaching biostatistics in an anti-racist way, use and misuse of statistics in health disparities research, algorithmic fairness, and statistics in community-based participatory research.
• Strengthen our support of the long-running ENAR Fostering Diversity in Biostatistics workshop by providing free meeting registration to workshop participants who are: students, high school teachers and advisors, and faculty members whose focus is on undergraduate education and can thus help support the development of pipelines into Biostatistics careers.
• Further increase the diversity of ENAR spring meeting attendees by developing a travel scholarship fund for members from underrepresented groups with limited travel funds.
• Promote diversity and inclusion throughout all of ENAR's activities, by appointing a representative from among our membership to work with ENAR committees and vendors.

For the long term, we will explore the following:

• Engage in improving the pipeline of underrepresented minorities (URM) in statistics and biostatistics via formal ENAR participation in URM conferences (e.g., the Math Alliance Field of Dreams Conference and Society for Advancing Chicanos/Hispanics & Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) annual conference), partnering with the ASA committee on minorities in statistics, and further engaging with the local communities that host the annual ENAR spring meeting.
• Create an ENAR distinguished lecture (in addition to the presidential invited lecture) that promotes diversity.
• Work to further increase diversity on many dimensions within the ENAR leadership.
• Work to ensure there is diversity in the vendors ENAR utilizes.

In the interim, we encourage you to propose sessions/panels for the invited program and/or topics for the ENAR 2021 Spring Meeting educational program (Short Courses/Tutorials/Roundtables), which address diversity, inclusion, discrimination, and/or racism, via the link found here.

In addition to what we have proposed above, we would like to hear about ideas and comments from you, our membership. We welcome (anonymous) comments/feedback in this Google form, which will be live by Friday, June 19, 2020.