Racial and Social Justice

The faculty of the Department of Biomedical Informatics in Emory University's School of Medicine believe that Black lives matter and promote racial, social, and other forms of justice.

While medicine has benefited the many, the long history of medicine is also one of unequal progress and ethical failings. In too many cases, marginalized groups have received fewer benefits of medical progress or were subjected to grievous harm for the sake of progress. Even now, after decades of efforts to recognize and remedy these shortcomings, unequal and inequitable treatment and outcomes remain common in medicine.

These issues are even more concerning with the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning in medicine. Despite the opportunity of algorithmic approaches to democratize medicine, algorithms can also serve to amplify our biases – intentionally or unintentionally – while applying a veneer of objectivity. The indiscriminate or malicious use of AI and ML in medicine are antithetical to the missions of racial and social justice.

The faculty of the Department of Biomedical Informatics pledge to promote racial and social justice in our research, teaching, and hiring:

• Much of our research already addresses unequal and inequitable access to healthcare. We are committed to the pursuit of projects that advance justice in medicine.
• In the future, all of our courses will include societal impacts as a learning objective. We will develop a standalone course in ethical computing, and we will integrate practical ethics into our current and future course offerings.
• BMI has also committed to hiring faculty and researchers in this domain, and specifically to hire a tenure-track faculty member whose research focuses on bias in machine learning in the context of healthcare data with a start date in the fall of 2021 or soon thereafter. We strongly encourage applicants whose race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability and/or socioeconomic status have historically been disadvantages for advancement in academia.