In this Special Edition of FOCUS In Sound, we meet with the CEO and President of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Dr. Louis Muglia, who will guide us through the Fund’s multi-faceted response to the COVID-19 pandemic and will discuss the Fund’s stance on Social Justice.
Transcription of “Interview with Louis Muglia”
00;00;02;02 – 00;00;32;25
Ernie Hood
Welcome to a special edition of Focus In Sound, the podcast series from the Focus newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this special edition of Focus In Sound, we meet with the CEO and president of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Dr. Louis Muglia, who will guide us through the fund’s multifaceted response to the COVID 19 pandemic and will discuss the fund’s stance on social justice.
00;00;33;23 – 00;00;36;16
Ernie Hood
Lou, thank you for joining us on Focus In Sound.
00;00;36;26 – 00;00;47;16
Louis Muglia
Ernie, thank you for this interview. I look forward to it and conveying some of the enthusiasm I feel about what Burroughs Wellcome Fund can contribute during this extraordinary time.
00;00;48;07 – 00;01;01;19
Ernie Hood
Lou, you were named president and CEO of the fund in January of this year and the ink was hardly dry on your contract when the COVID 19 crisis cropped up. What has that been like for you?
00;01;02;14 – 00;01;24;02
Louis Muglia
Well, I can tell you, when I started at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund as the president and CEO of the organization in January of 2020, I had had a long experience with the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I had been one of their initial awardees in the biomedical sciences in 1995. I’ve been an advisor under review committees for many years, including up until I became the president.
00;01;24;14 – 00;01;47;25
Louis Muglia
And I was so excited about not only what the Burroughs Wellcome Fund had been doing, but also the potential it has for moving forward as a real intellectual innovation catalyst for all kinds of great science moving forward. And we began a strategic planning exercise at that point about what things we want to keep, what things we wanted to modify, which things we wanted to move forward.
00;01;48;07 – 00;02;17;13
Louis Muglia
And I must say, COVID 19 was not one of the considerations in that portfolio at the time. And at this point, I don’t think COVID 19 is changing our long term strategies, trajectories and priorities. But what it has reinforced to me is how important organizations like the Burroughs Wellcome Fund are That can be flexible, adaptable, nimble and prioritize based on acute needs to invest funding in critical situations.
00;02;17;24 – 00;02;44;28
Louis Muglia
And so as challenging, as devastating as the issues around human health and COVID 19 have been around, the continued wounds that racial injustice portend for society, we’ve been allowed to have our organization step up to the challenge and figure out how we can have the most impact in this transformative period of human history.
00;02;45;18 – 00;02;52;10
Ernie Hood
Let’s explore the fund’s response to the pandemic. How has it affected Burroughs Wellcome Fund operations?
00;02;52;24 – 00;03;14;11
Louis Muglia
Well, just in the way we work every day. I mean, we’re a small family of Burroughs Wellcome Fundstaff. We have an extensive extended family of advisors and colleagues that we use our board of trustees to help us shape our mission moving forward. And usually we hosted those events at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund headquarters in Research Triangle Park.
00;03;14;12 – 00;03;42;17
Louis Muglia
It’s an incredible facility that is a real opportunity to generate a hub for engagement across not only Research Park but across the United States and across the United States and Canada, which we look forward to doing when times again allow that to be a safe opportunity for us. But what’s happened is we’ve moved to entirely virtual platforms, entirely video conference engagements with our advisory committees, with our finalists for awards.
00;03;42;24 – 00;04;07;04
Louis Muglia
We’ve run now successfully awards for the career award, the medical sciences career awards at the scientific interfaces, Pathogenesis of infectious diseases and others on virtual platforms. And I don’t think we’ve lost much momentum in doing so. The engagements have been great. We’ve come to a resolution about who our final candidates should be, and we’re entirely invested in those programs as we have been in the past.
00;04;07;17 – 00;04;31;15
Louis Muglia
So that’s all been, I think, very positive. It’s been disappointing not to have the engagement in-person, but for many reasons. Now we’ve rethought our priorities and feel like this has caused us to come to some, I think, needed conclusions. First, I think it’s good to have our advisory panels together to understand and communicate more effectively as a team in making decisions.
00;04;32;00 – 00;04;52;18
Louis Muglia
But probably it makes more financial, environmental and safety sense to not have twice as many finalists as will be. Awardees. Come to Burroughs Wellcome Fund headquarters for 20 minutes. There are 20 minutes in the sun to interview with the panel when they can do it virtually and have the same impact. At least that’s my impression of how it’s done.
00;04;53;03 – 00;05;18;19
Louis Muglia
What we’ve additionally done is, as you might guess, we fund a lot of symposia, workshops, convenings at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund headquarters now that have been either delayed or canceled, which is unfortunate, but what it’s done is allow us to have resources to funds that would not be utilized now that we can use to impact COVID 19 directly.
00;05;18;22 – 00;05;42;18
Louis Muglia
So we’ve reprioritized many of those funds for acute projects, which we didn’t envision six months ago. So we fostered a workshop for our early career investigators to bring them together to help them meet the challenges they’re facing with starting their laboratory amidst this time of real struggle, of transitioning institutions which have been delayed, of even finding a job.
00;05;42;19 – 00;06;15;15
Louis Muglia
Many universities now have hiring freezes for new faculty members, so it’s a challenging time for them. We’re helping them try to get through that. We’ve been very flexible with our funding in terms of no cost extensions, about allowing reprioritization of funds to address COVID 19 issues. And then last, we’ve had a request for proposals amongst our network of awardees to put things forward for short term funding consideration to try to solve this problem of COVID 19 in a basic science way more acutely.
00;06;15;24 – 00;06;35;28
Louis Muglia
So we just awarded two research grants to collaborations amongst our awardees from Burroughs Wellcome Fund in the past and we’re excited about moving goes forward. And we did this within within a two month period of time, which is extraordinary turnaround for Grant. So we want to get these things started implemented in having impact as soon as we can.
00;06;36;11 – 00;06;57;18
Louis Muglia
And last, I think we’ve been working very closely with the North Carolina schools and the North Carolina museums to help them get through this period as well. As you might imagine, education is being sort of reinvented. Our North Carolina museums are struggling and we’re trying to figure out how to make educational resources as widely available to as many individuals as possible.
00;06;58;14 – 00;07;14;00
Ernie Hood
Lou, on June 2nd, in the wake of the widespread demonstrations following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, you issued a statement on the fund’s stance on social justice. Would you briefly recap that statement for us?
00;07;14;15 – 00;07;41;10
Louis Muglia
Well, Ernie, as you know, I think deeply affected all of us at Bruce Walker Fund, as well as our country as a whole and the world as a whole as we’ve seen in the outcry after it. And as you know, the Burroughs Wellcome Fundhas been an organization that has had as one of its core foundational values a commitment to foster diversity, equity and inclusion in science, education and society.
00;07;41;20 – 00;08;20;07
Louis Muglia
We are absolutely passionate about that. I think you can look at our portfolio and see that we’ve invested in diversity enrichment programs at the K-through-12 level, undergraduate level graduate student level and into early careers. And we are passionate about that and we feel we just cannot be silent on these issues of enormous social injustice that continue to manifest themselves in our society that was really founded on the values of human dignity, freedom and justice that we seem to abandon and let struggle through our existence in this country.
00;08;20;08 – 00;08;54;17
Louis Muglia
We are a country of diversity, and that has been one of our great prides. I think it was especially challenging for us knowing that we have been invested in this area and we recognize how science and STEM education in diversity have been one of our core driving factors. But now we have to go past that. We have to go past that to address the inequalities and injustices of race more broadly, because it’s a pervasive aspect of society that affects all of these other things in our pipeline, and we are committed to doing that.
00;08;54;17 – 00;09;23;26
Louis Muglia
We will not stand quiet. We will look to engage other philanthropic organizations. And in joining us in this. And I think, as you will see, we’ve gone beyond the traditional boundaries of just science, technology, engineering and mathematics to really address social injustice and what race means at a more fundamental level with things we’re investing. And like the race exhibit we’re bringing to North Carolina, which we’re very proud of in terms of engaging the public.
00;09;24;07 – 00;10;00;02
Louis Muglia
And we continue to try to build networks of diverse voices in our portfolio of family colleagues at every level, whether they’re awardees, advisors and the community. We’ve had some great engagement with people in the region and in the country around building diversity programs, both with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, with colleagues in the region about opportunities to bring these voices more into everyday occurrence in not only science education, but in how we think about funding science in general.
00;10;00;19 – 00;10;06;16
Ernie Hood
Lou Tell us about some of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund’s efforts and planning over the next six months.
00;10;06;26 – 00;10;30;16
Louis Muglia
Ernie I think the last several months now have caused us to really think strategically even more so about where we want to go and what kinds of new activities or enhanced activities we want to have as an organization. And I would say, given the current events, one of the things we feel most passionate about is a desire to improve science communication broadly.
00;10;31;05 – 00;10;51;09
Louis Muglia
And one mechanism I see to do that is to better integrate science in the arts, which is going to be an overarching theme at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. And to do that, we feel we need to do several things better meet to educate scientists, better on how to communicate and how it’s a part of their role as a scientist to communicate.
00;10;51;09 – 00;11;27;17
Louis Muglia
It’s not something extra. We also really are passionate about bringing diversity voices into science communication. So we are partnering now with a media outlet called The Conversation to develop a program specifically around engaging diversity Voices more in putting out scientific articles on timely events in the world, which I think will be unique, drawing upon both historically black colleges and universities, some of our awardee networks of enrichment program scholars and building this network that never existed before.
00;11;27;17 – 00;12;09;11
Louis Muglia
And I think it will be very impactful for understanding and being more inclusive in race, gender diversity in the scientific media and communication to the public, and engaging the public from those diversity communities as well. So it’s a bi directional dialog that we hope to hear from diverse communities in ways we have not in the past. And one thing I think we can particularly do to enhance that is to not only better show what we want to convey in words, but also do it in images, because I think the way we see information can sometimes be much more informative than the words alone.
00;12;09;21 – 00;12;31;21
Louis Muglia
So we are having a major initiative in better data visualization, data graphics to convey information clearly, accurately and informative that will engage the public, will engage scientists, and just hopefully generate new ideas and understanding of the very complex problems that are plaguing us in the world today.
00;12;33;08 – 00;12;51;24
Ernie Hood
Lou, thank you so much for taking the time to update everyone on the fund’s response to COVID 19 and social justice. I will look forward to sitting down in person with you in the near future to conduct a proper, welcoming interview with you. Now that you’ve taken the helm at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.
00;12;52;14 – 00;13;16;16
Louis Muglia
Thank you so much, Ernie. There’s been no better time for the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to be able to really use its vision and mission, which have not changed to impact the critical issues that are facing our society right now. We are deeply committed to that. And we have the we have the team that I know can do it together with our colleagues around the country that serve to advise us.
00;13;16;16 – 00;13;23;04
Louis Muglia
So more to follow. Much more to do and hopefully much progress ahead.
00;13;24;12 – 00;13;35;07
Ernie Hood
We hope you found value in the special edition of the Focus In Sound podcast. Until next time. This is Ernie Hood. Thanks for listening.
