Leadership positions have been created and filled to ensure that our DEI mission is at the forefront of decision making processes at our school.
Left to Right: José Caro, Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha, Damian Archer
Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha, PhD, MPH, CHES serves as Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for the Department of Public Health & Community Medicine and for students enrolled in the department's programs. Dr. Amutah-Onukagha holds the Julia A. Okoro Professorship in Black Maternal Health and an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine. She co-chairs the Diversity, Equity, and Anti-Racism (DEAR) Council.
Damian Archer, MD serves as Assistant Dean for Multicultural Affairs. Dr. Archer is an Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Family Medicine, as well as Associate Director of the Tufts Student Service Scholars program.
José Caro, MD serves as Assistant Dean for Multicultural Affairs. Dr. Caro is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Geographic Medicine and Infectious Diseases at Tufts Medical Center. Dr. Caro is particularly interested in mentorship of underrepresented students, and improving the patient-physician relationship by creating safe environments based on openness, compassion, and cultural competency.
The Anti-Racism committee is a standing committee at Tufts University School of Medicine. This committee and its charge are part of the bylaws of the school, signaling the importance of its mission.
The group is focused on insuring that the School of Medicine makes progress toward achieving its Strategic Goals, especially those related to diversity and inclusion. The group also analyzes school data related to this mission and makes recommendations for change based on best practices.
The Anti-Racism Task Force is a group formed by the MD Curriculum Committee and is charged with making recommendations as to how the MD curriculum can become more anti-racist. This group is evaluating all courses in the MD program for their anti-racism content. They are also using paid interns to review course material using anti-racism informed best practices.
This group provides its feedback to the Curriculum Committee, the dean of educational affairs and directly to the faculty.
The MD Admissions Task Force is charged with identifying and reviewing the MD admissions process to ensure that we practice the highest standards, and to identify and remove biases that may disadvantage those underrepresented in medicine or other students from marginalized backgrounds.
The Diversity, Equity, and Anti-Racism (DEAR) Council provides oversight and support to the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine to ensure the achievement of diversity, equity, and anti-racism in students, faculty and staff and provide a climate of inclusion to everyone.
A new MD curriculum was implemented in 2019 that emphasizes social determinants of health and historically overlooked aspects of health care. This curriculum helps students understand health inequities and brings this problem to the forefront of the curriculum
It was a really helpful frame to know that Tufts was prioritizing social determinants of health inequity—looking at racism in medicine, misogyny in medicine, and a lot of these larger threads that we then continue to follow throughout medical school.