Hey everyone, I'm welcome. How are you here? My name is Godwin Omuchokwa. I'm the head of Communities at E-Life and I decided to welcome all of you to today's webinar for September, the ECR webinar. I think it's called ECR Wednesday and today is Monday so you're at the right place. Thanks very much. Welcome. If you're unfamiliar, this series aims to give any career researchers a platform to discuss issues important to you and your research career. You can follow us on Twitter, E-Life Community and with the hashtag ECR Wednesday. The session is being recorded and will be made available on YouTube in the near future. So the ECR Wednesday webinar series is usually led by members of E-Life's Early Career Advisory Group. Yeah, so these are the members of ECR. Yeah, thank you. So for the first two special webinars, we have been led by members of E-Life's 2022 cohort of the Community Ambassadors and it brings me great pleasure to welcome our panelist, Narabi Ones, Emily Meyers, Shannon Koslovic, and Hannah Jeanette that alongside today's chair, Nick Bogozinski, please join me in welcoming Nick and our panelist and I'll pass it on to Nick now. Thank you. Thank you, Godwins, and hello everybody. Thank you for joining us today for our ECR Wednesday slash Monday webinar on science policy in action. My name is Nick Bogozinski and I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the Yale School of Medicine and an E-Life Community Ambassador and I'll be moderating this webinar. E-Life is a non-profit organization that is operating a platform to improve all aspects of research communication by encouraging and recognizing the most responsible behaviors in research. Today, our webinar panelists will discuss real-world applications of science policy and science policy related projects in detail. Following the panelists' presentations and discussion, we will invite questions and comments from the audience. But first, let me start with some housekeeping. During the webinar, please be respectful, honest, inclusive, accommodating, appreciative, and open to learning from everyone else. Do not attack, demean, disrupt, harass, or threaten others or encourage such behavior. And if you feel uncomfortable or unwelcome on any of these webinars, please contact E-Life by email via elife-safety-team at protonmail.com and we reserve the right to ask anyone to leave and or to deny access to a subsequent webinar. And so before I introduce our panel, I'd like to say just a few quick words about what I think it means to put science policy into action in our times. And I'll just say I'm really excited about this event. And I think that we have a lot to learn here. So what I'll say to sort of frame the conversation that we'll have throughout the rest of the webinar is that now more than ever, I think scientists are leaving academia and finding new ways to engage in science both at the bench and away from it. And one important implication of this for science policy, in my opinion, is that it highlights how building collective political subjectivities that span industries and expertise is going to be crucial to changing science at the policy level. And that means engaging professors and student workers and lab techs and journal editors and many other people in science policy so that we can actually build a more equitable and just scientific culture in the future. And so I'm incredibly excited about our panel today because our panelists represent an incredibly diverse range of experiences in science policy from community outreach to labor organizing to public health and biotech. And so I think there will be many lessons to be learned about effectively engaging in science policy. So with that, I'll turn the floor over to our first panelist, Naomi Wallace, the manager of impact initiatives at the Association of Science and Technology Centers. Naomi, we invite you to share your screen. Thank you for the introduction. Like Nick said, I'm Naomi and I work at the Association of Science and Technology Centers. In my previous life, I was a graduate student studying neuroscience at Washington State University where I met Nick and we worked together on a graduate student science policy group. Throughout grad school, I had an increasing interest in sort of communication and science policy. So after I finished my PhD in 2020, I started looking for a position outside of academia and I found the Association of Science and Technology Centers. So ASTC is a membership organization for science centers and science museums. And we are really working to expand the role of museums and increase their capacity to engage with their communities in new ways and really enter this space of sort of civic engagement and policy work. So some of our goals are to have museums not just support lifelong learning but also work at things that are at the intersection of science and society, encouraging museums to start engaging more diverse communities in deeper conversation and to really partner with other organizations to start helping tackle these local and global challenges that are related to science. Some of the other speakers might address some more traditional science policy things, but I'm not talking as much about the part where we are talking to the politicians or writing the policy, more about talking to communities and figuring out what their priorities are. Ultimately, no matter how much of an expert you are in your fields or an expert you are at doing policy work, you really need to know what is that your community is prioritizing and looking for to affect that positive change that you want to see in the world. So what makes museums a good place for doing this kind of work? Well, museums already have deep connection with their local communities. They often have partnerships with school districts, neighborhood organizations, and things like local climate change advocacy groups or other science-related policy groups. So they can already be sort of a doorway into those communities. Museums are also a great place to work as conveners. They often have large meeting spaces. They have things like exhibits and visualizations that can help to make data more accessible and understandable to people. And of course they have their wonderful staff, a bunch of people who are already trained in educating and talking about science. And finally, and most importantly, museums are trusted. So we all know well that general interest, trust in scientists, in the government, in traditional media has really been eroding recently. But what we see consistently is that people really trust the information that they get from museums. In a 2021 study by the American Alliance of Museums, their random sample rated museums as the second most trusted source of information, only coming second to their own friends and family. And this is true across the political spectrum, which of course is really important when you are trying to engage people in talking about different potential policy solutions, people who have different opinions about what should happen need to be in the room. So this consistent trust is a really important thing that museums can leverage to start working on science policy issues in their community. So ASTC has been working to leverage this through what we are calling our Community Science Initiative. So you've probably heard about citizen science, which usually refers to people gathering data points about something, using an app on their phone to say what birds they see in their local area. And this is obviously a great way to get people engaged with and interested in science. But it's still a very sort of top down process where the research questions are decided on by the scientist. And usually the output of that is a traditionally published research paper that might be behind the paywall. So when we're talking about community science, we're talking about really going beyond that, finding ways that community members can collaborate with scientists to answer their own questions and to find their own solutions to problems that will actually work for them in their communities. And this often involves projects that involve both scientists, like researchers and science engagement practitioners, like the people who are on museum staff. The solutions that communities can come to can mean a lot of different things. Sometimes that's about the behavior of the community or a policy of an institution, but it can also often result in advocacy, writing policy, all of these different ways that people interact with government at all different levels. Once they've had a chance to talk about it as a community and really come to a solution that a lot of people can get behind, which makes for stronger policy. So when we talk about community science, we're talking about a wide range of different approaches that can look anywhere on the spectrum from that sort of citizen science thing to all sorts of different policy work. But I'd like to zoom in on one of the approaches that we've been working on a lot recently, and that is dialogue and deliberation. So dialogue and deliberation is sort of a way of approaching these structured conversations to come to solutions together. A dialogue portion will be focused on listening and learning from one another so people in the community can get a stronger sense of what the scientific consensus is, as well as what the different opinions are of the different stakeholders throughout their community. While deliberation work is more focused on examining and weighing options, talking about pros and cons, finding ways that different solutions can be combined so that people can actually come together to common ground and make decisions about these solutions. So these events can look very different depending on what the needs are. It can last anywhere from a few hours to being multiple sessions that occur over weeks or even months. It might involve 10 people in a small town or 1,000 people talking about a national issue. But the things that really make a dialogue and deliberation event that you see across them, that you're bringing multiple stakeholders to the table. So for the types of events that we are talking about in the community science round, this can mean bringing local politicians, scientific researchers, and different community members all together. And that slice of the community might look different depending on what the issue is. Maybe it's people who live in an area that frequently floods. Maybe it's agricultural workers or people who work in public health. It can involve the people who really have the strongest stake in your topic to be having this conversation all together sort of outside of the idea of expertise or just lecturing or telling someone about the science. These are structured conversations that often start with some way of providing information that might have some of that giving a talk or giving something for them to read before the events start. Then it moves into these structured smaller group conversations where you have trained facilitators who are ready to ask good questions and guide the conversation to keep people on track towards thinking about solutions together. And it also always needs some way of gathering this information so that you can use it later. So this might mean making audio recordings of the discussion, having your facilitator take notes or having the participants take notes themselves or even do interesting things like make art projects that represent the change that they want to be in their community. And then finally, you go into the phase of sort of developing and sharing solutions. Once people have come together to decide on what they would like to do, then you then decide that into a report and find ways of communicating it to all of the people who can actually make the change that you would like to see. So I'd like to give you just a couple of brief examples of some dialogue and deliberation at Museum. The Nurture Nature Center is one that we point to often. They were started off after a series of floods in Pennsylvania in the early 2000 and they've worked on having people together to have conversation about climate resilience in their communities and talk about ways to do things like improve the national weather systems, flood warning system, which has actually changed based on some of the things that they put in their report after their dialogue and deliberation event. And also things like doing needs assessments for particular communities, which are really doing this in this much more community-centered, collaborative way. We also have two examples here from our fellowship program, which I'm very proud of, that they are still in process. So at the Natural History Museum of LA, we have a fellow who is working on talking to people in underrepresented communities about what makes them feel welcome in green space and what makes green spaces accessible to them, working on putting together a report for the city and county there to help make better parks that are accessible to all. And we have someone at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science who is working on scientific misinformation, particularly around COVID-19, and figuring out ways to increase trust in media, both through influencing the media itself, community member behaviors, and local government policies. So to close it out, I know that was a quick lying overview. You can learn way more about all of this cool work at communityscience.astc.org, including guides that can help you think about how you might want to incorporate some of these approaches into your own science policy work. And also please feel free to send me an email anytime at nwallisatastc.org. We are working to find some new ways of incorporating more research scientists into the work that we do at the museum that would be very interested to hear any of your ideas. Thank you. Thank you, Naomi. That was fascinating. And I can't wait to see how some of that develops over the next few decades. Our next panelist is Emily Myers, an organizer and policy and political advisor with UAW 4121, the union representing over 8,000 academic student employees, postdoctoral scholars and research scientists at the University of Washington. Emily, the floor is yours. Thanks, Nick. Yeah, hi, everyone. My name is Emily Myers. I usually hear pronouns. Everyone can see my screen all right. Is that, can I get a thumbs up from someone? Great. Okay. Perfect. Yeah, so I, in my previous life before starting this role, I was a PhD student at the University of Washington in pharmacology doing proteomics research research. And now I work in this role as a organizer as well as I do a lot of our policy and political work within our union. And so the UAW, as Nick mentioned, we represent, you know, undergrad and graduate teaching and research assistants, postdoc scholars and research scientists at the University of Washington. And I should also mention that the United Auto Workers, which is the UAW, we represent about 100,000 academic workers across the United States, including folks at Harvard, the University of California system, Columbia and more. So I'm going to start the stage just by quickly touching on science policy. Science policy is such a large topic and can have so many different pieces to it. So I wanted to touch on this a little bit that there, you know, when I think of science policy, I think of different types of science policy, both working on science for policy as I mean, like, you know, incorporating our science into the policy decision making that's happening at all levels of government, but then also policy for science and scientists. So, you know, we think of science for policy as using our research or data and our evidence to push evidence based science driven policy, as well as study the impacts of policy, policy decisions that are being made, you know, at every level of government. And then on the other hand, there's also, I also work on policy for science and scientists, meaning that, and these things could be things like advocating for increased research funding, higher education funding, pushing for better policies to make science a public good. And how, you know, how does science, how do policies impact us as scientists, both at the bench in the field and in our, in our, you know, writing and grant making fields. So I really want to touch quickly on the first aspect that we're going to spend most of my time talking about policy for scientists, but we also do a lot of science policy work in helping bring science into policy making. So for those, you know, if anyone here is part of the union or involved in other labor organizations, I really just want to highlight this quickly to know that you can plug into science policy work with your union. So we typically have both political and policy teams as part of our international unions. And we often employ lobbyists as well at the federal level. And then, you know, if you drill down into like local unions, a lot of times we have work groups where members come together to work on specific issues. And those can be things like climate justice, you know, reproductive justice, all sorts of things, where we're able to both go into the community and go into, you know, our state houses and things like that, and advocate as both scientists and union members. And it's, and it's really impactful to be able to come just to, you know, when I go down to our state capital and talk to our policymakers, you know, I can go down there and say, you know, I represent 8,000 people at the University of Washington. I'm not just here me by myself. And so, you know, that has a tremendous impact. And so here on the screen, you'll see one of my members is advocating for some climate justice recommendations that were put together at the state level. And so she's testifying in the Senate Ways and Means Committee. You'll also see here that, you know, unions also often have an existing infrastructure for doing political and policy work. And so I see my colleagues here, you know, had an open membership meeting with Congresswoman Katie Porter, which is just to say that we can really use our unions to plug into science policy advocacy. But then also, there's always a lot of opportunities to do science communication with both labor in the labor community and as well as the local community. So a few years ago, we helped a lot on this initiative 1631, which is about carbon pricing. And we had a lot of educational and other types of events to educate our communities as well as our labor community here locally around carbon pricing, what that meant for jobs, just transitions, things like that. So it's kind of switching gears and thinking more about policies that impact scientists. You know, I regularly advocate for things like increased science funding, you know, access to training grants and things like that. We had a letter writing campaign early in the pandemic calling on our government to increase research funding and protect scientists very early on in the pandemic, especially early career researchers who are particularly vulnerable to some of these aspects, especially under our previous presidential administration. But what I really want to, and, you know, you can see here, you know, the March for Science, our UAW folks out at Columbia were there for that. And then, you know, policy decisions are impacting us as far as like open science and how science is translated into the public.  So things like that are also things that we touch on. But what I really want to focus on today is policies that impact scientists. And I really got my start in policy around the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Mass, and put out this report in 2018 talking about sexual harassment and gender harassment in the academy and particularly in science. You know, we do have a culture of harassment and bullying inside of science. And personally, after facing, you know, gender and sexual harassment and discrimination at every institution I worked at, I already did research and it was particularly bad in grad school. So when this report came out and it said, you know, 50% of women have been harassed on the job, I was actually surprised that it wasn't closer to 100%. So as I dove into this issue, and I saw more and more of the issues facing us as early career researchers, you know, our working conditions tend to be unsustainable and our institutions are either too slow or, you know, avoiding dealing with the issues directly.  And we have several overlapping crises always inside of science. You know, there's a crisis for parents and caregivers who, you know, can't afford childcare.    Or things, you know, like I mentioned, harassment is, you know, pretty common in academia, unfortunately. And then even touching on things like, how does the immigration policy affect us as scientists? And, you know, when the Trump administration put forth a ban that would ban scientists from particular regions or other students from coming in or, you know, our international students here at the University of Washington, we're facing deportation. You know, these are the types of conditions that we work under. And these are extremely rough and stressful. And it's no wonder that we have a mental health care crisis within the scientific community, especially among early researchers. So after all, we are whole people who are doing science. And, you know, I always say, like, science and research should be intellectually difficult, but it should not be difficult to feed and house yourself while you're doing that research. So we are whole people and our living and working conditions do impact us as scientists. So, you know, currently, a lot of the top data approaches just aren't working, and in some cases can actually cause further harm. But through collective bargaining, which is the process that we use as a union to bargain as equals with our universities and our employers, we are, we are able to then bargain as thousands of people together and have a direct collective say in what aspects of our work that we want to change. And so we do this, our postdocs at the University of Washington go into bargaining in just a few weeks here for their next contract. Our research scientists are in bargaining for their first contract. But what this allows us to do is really take a bottom-up grassroots approach in how we want to change our working conditions. So, for example, to just kind of piggyback on some of the issues raised in the last slide that we see over and over again, you know, because of our contracts, we've been able to win improvements on our mental health care coverage, especially for the graduate students who have almost, who have very low costs now for mental health care coverage. We, through our collective bargaining agreements, have childcare funds to help support postdoc and graduate student parents. That childcare is extremely expensive. And it would be, it's just a lot of money to be able to pay out when you are on such a low stipend. We also have a language on mentorship and career development, making sure people have access to secondary mentors, you know, to really help disrupt the power structure of our apprenticeship type models that we have in science where one person has a lot of power over your career and your path forward.  We have appointment security and just cost protections. You know, you can't get fired for getting pregnant here. Things like that, you know, things have to, you have just, you have to go through a just cause procedure if someone is being terminated. We have strong protections against harassment, including we have a state of the art program, which the university pays three graduate students and three postdocs to lead skills-based intervention training to help improve the culture of research here at the University of Washington. We have transparent wages and wages and yearly raises, health insurance, protection for international scholars, healthy and safe conditions. This was a really big part of our contract in the last few years, making sure that people had proper safety precautions and COVID procedures. And then lastly, you know, the last thing I'll highlight is our grievance procedure. The grievance procedure is where we are able to make complaints that the university has violated the contract if we need to. And the university isn't the final decision maker in those. We have the ability to go to neutral third-party arbitration, which gives us real recourse, especially in cases of harassment and discrimination to be able to actually, you know, have our employer not be the final decision maker of something. So if something bad happened or what types of remedies we need in order for that person to be able to continue their work. And then really quickly too, we'll just say that off campus, you know, as a collective, because we all have so many different areas of expertise within our union, you know, we are the entire campus that we're able to do a lot of advocacy and science policy work outside of that. So, you know, on outside of campus, we're fighting for things like affordable housing and renters rates. And so many of us are renters. We won paid family medical leave here at the state of Washington, which, you know, also also like the same folks that are here doing their their public policy degrees are also, you know, fighting at the state for paid family medical leave. As I mentioned, we do a lot of work on climate justice and reproduction reproductive justice, as well as improved immigration policies and more. So, you know, our unions really are these places that we can plug in and leverage our collective ability to win on big things. Whereas any of us individually might have a really hard time, but when you know, we are thousands of people doing this work together, we're able to really make the improvements that really impact people's lives, especially as science workers. Thank you, Emily. That was great. And as a non unionized postdoc, I'm incredibly grateful for the work that you do. So, we can now welcome our next panelist, Shannon Kozlovich, a science and policy contractor working on projects for local, national and international organizations. Shannon, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Nick. So, I am Shannon Kozlovich, and I just wanted to kind of bring the conversation back to the impact that policy has on human health and well-being. And so, this is the intersection that I work in. It's kind of where science meets policy meets community. And I got there from a very interesting path. I was what's called in the United States an untraditional student, which basically as far as I can tell means that I was old, when I started by PhD or walked into my first college class. I was the single parent of a third grader the first time I stepped into a college classroom here in the United States. And from there, I decided that I liked college so much. I was going to stay for nine and a half years and get a PhD. My PhD is in pharmaceutical sciences. So, basically I'm a biochemist. From there, I went and I did a traditional postdoc. I made it about eight months in a traditional postdoc academic environment and was like, I am out. This is not where I'm spending my career. I probably shouldn't be here for any more time at the wage that the United States is allowed to pay postdocs. So, I went and I worked for a couple of years at a nonprofit organization that worked on civil rights and social justice for the lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, and queer community. And so, I worked in a space where I was a scientist that was working directly on policy, particularly health equity policy. So, looking at where the policies are that impact human health and well-being. Right now, I am self-employed. So, I take independent contract work from organizations like Health Care Department or Departments of Public Health within the United States. I've also had contracts with the World Health Organization and numerous other entities that are looking for the skills and expertise that I have. I just kind of wanted to find some terms because I know we are all scientists here. So, a lot of health equity focuses on social determinants of health, which is the quality of life that someone lives that determines the health that they have through their entire life. Whereas, I spend a lot of my time working on political determinants of health. And this is where health and well-being are impacted by groups that hold power. It is the institutions that operate our lives, whether it's the government or your school, your higher institution, anything, the stores that you shop at. All of these institutions hold policies and processes, and they have interests, their ideological position that are held within both political systems and cultures at multiple levels of government. From something as simple as policies in your local store where you go shopping to the policies that are held in your national government. And impacting those policies, in my opinion, is where I see myself fitting the best in helping advance health and well-being for all of humanity. I very much have a world savior complex, and I have always wanted to save the world. So, this is why I do the work that I do. When you're looking at creating policy change, you can create policy change within a government. You have been creating policy change from the inside by getting elected or appointed into positions, however that works within the nation that you live in, or your local area, or you can lobby for change from the outside. In a lot of societies where we vote for our elected officials, the voters in those areas tend to have play in what the government does and the policies that they hold. And then there are a lot of nonprofit and for-profit companies that have government relations positions that you can look for and explore and get into that just like both Naomi and Emily were talking about, can impact policy, whether it's policy for science or science or policy. And then there are institutions. These places have so much power in our lives, or they don't nearly have enough power, which is what we saw as the pandemic and the World Health Organization. But these institutions also hold policies that can be changed by the communities that they serve. And it's very similar work to changing policies within government. It's just different in a lot of ways because you're not writing policies and then convincing politicians that they need to change them. It's a little bit more needing to bring the community in some marketing, occasionally shaming campaigns, and things like that to change the way that our institutions are functioning. So basically the way that I see all of the work that I do and how these things come into play together are at the various ways that science, policy, and community intersect with each other. And for anyone who's not familiar, the intersection of science and community is at community-based participatory research. And what this is, and this is a research model that actually says the community should be driving the questions and involved in every stage of research development. So it's creating community advisory boards, bringing in target populations that are most impacted by the research that you are proposing to do, and teach them a little bit about what is unknown or what is already known, and then ask the community. What do you see are the best avenues to go? What are the best approaches? How do we best get participants from your community to come into our research project? Because a lot of clinical research can't happen unless we have participants for our research. And then there's a lot of science policy work, but it's the intersection of science and policy, which you've heard a lot about already in past webinars today. And then there's where community of policy come together. And this is where you get the activists, the ones that are out there on the street corner with signs, the protesters, the things that are happening, where the community is out there being loud and in your face and very much activating community members for policy change. And then we have where all three of these come together. And this is mainly the intersection of where I work, and I'll give a couple of examples of what this work looks like. And this is community-centered research that works for institutional change. I am a research scientist. My biochemistry was all about tobacco and how tobacco causes cancer, so I work in a lot of both tobacco and cancer spaces. One of the spaces I work in is tobacco as a health equity issue for the LGBTQ plus community in general. And what I do is I help institutions build research programs where the communities that are facing the highest levels of inequity are involved in creating the research project. This means that the community is engaged from the very beginning to build community trust and science and the scientific process because they have eye in from the first stages of the project development. And in this arena, we do a lot of work to combine community capacity-building grants that are available. And this is different depending on where it is that you live and your research is centered. In the United States, we've got a lot of subnational and national programs that provide community grants, but there are also a lot of international organizations and programs and other nations that have similar types of grant mechanisms. And when these are combined with the usual suspects in funding research, I can think of words. That provides the resources and the blueprints to be able to build a research program where the community is involved and engaged in this type of research.  And what cancer registries are is when there has been a confirmed case of cancer, a national program is set up to verify that that is a cancer case, collect patient demographics, and then store that information in a national system that can be pulled from to look at do we have an area of our nation or the world where a certain type of cancer is highest, and then using that data to create solutions to decrease that cancer burden. When there are particular items or parts of data that aren't being collected about people in certain areas, that means that those populations are not included in the solutions that come from that data. So one of the things that I say in every webinar that I talk about the stuff that I do is data equity is health equity. All of the research that you do, you should think about what other identities people in the community that you are targeting to work in, and ensure that you're not making someone invisible in the work that you do. And that is a huge political determinant of health, and it's held by our research programs themselves. And that is the specific determinant that I work on most to try and change, is to make sure that the data exists so that the solutions are there. Thank you. Thank you, Shannon. And so then finally, last but not least, we have Hannah Genevdar, the co-founder and CEO of Juno Bio and Illumina Back to Startup. Hannah, it's all yours. Amazing. Thank you. I'm just going to share my screen. All right. So hi, everyone. As Nick said, I'm Hannah, and I am the co-founder and CEO of Juno Bio. So we're a startup. And we exist to forge the standard of care that we deserve, and we're a women-powered platform decoding gynecological health, and we're starting with the vaginal microbiome. As a point of clarification throughout my talk, you'll hear me use the term women. And of course, that's really just a shorthand for women and people with vaginas. Our route to engaging with science policy at Juno is definitely unconventional. As I say, we're a startup, but we're very much doers. We like big, fast, responsible impact. And for the world that we currently live in, we, and for us at Juno, we definitely see the startup vehicle as being the most effective way of addressing the very dire need of the women that we look to serve. So we're very conscious that everyone has a part to play in shaping science policy. And we're definitely honored to play our role and to be stewards of women's voices. But ultimately, of course, it's people and not-for-profit companies that should drive science policy. So having said that, let's jump in and I'll share a little bit about how we started, what we do, and how we've played a role in shaping science policy. So we started in 2018. I have a background in biology and biochemical engineering, and I worked as a microbiome scientist in the lab, optimizing bacterial consortias. And around this time, we had an enormous explosion of research and commercialization of almost every single aspect of microbiomes under the sun, from the gut to the skin to the soil. But nobody was meaningfully working on the vaginal microbiome. And that really shocked me, because the vaginal microbiome is a key component of women's health. It's implicated in over 30 women's health conditions from recurrent bacterial vaginosis all the way through to things like infertility and miscarriages. So billions of women are affected by vaginal microbiomes when they're disrupted. And it's not an insignificant sort of impact that it has. So even the sort of conditions that are considered primary or simple, things like recurrent bacterial vaginosis, deeply impact the people that are affected by it. So two-thirds of women that have recurrent bacterial vaginosis or that type of recurrent infection, for instance, have depression and anxiety and a quality of life score lower than people with diabetes or COPD. And the current solutions, they just don't work. The gold standard, for instance, for diagnosing people with bacterial vaginosis is the only ever right 61% of the time, which is obviously abysmal. And given that of all the microbiomes, this is actually the most readily accessible in terms of sampling. It's the most actionable, and it's hugely impactful in women's lives. For me, it just didn't make sense that we weren't paying any attention to it, that it wasn't getting the dollars behind it that it should have, and that really, you know, the talent that should be working on it wasn't. But ultimately, that was a symptom of where we are with women's health and indeed healthcare more broadly. The healthcare system fails women at every single level. So we know that one in five women and some studies show that it's actually more than this have their symptoms completely ignored when they go to the physician's office. It takes women four times longer to reach a diagnosis across 700 conditions than it does men and women are twice as likely to have adverse stroke reactions, because they were never really included in the research and clinical trials to begin with. So women are unacceptably dismissed, they're severely underserved, and the research that is needed, the science research that's needed, is significantly under-researched. To address this is the challenge we would need to and still need to. Number one, educate women and make sure that they have the access and ability to advocate for themselves in order to get the healthcare that they need. We would need to retrain healthcare workers so that we root out the conscious and unconscious biases that are involved here. We would need to equip healthcare workers with better diagnostics and therapeutics. We would need to address the disparity in research and clinical trials and of course we would need to reconfigure the national guidelines and spend here. And that's a tall order and it's a it's a thing that would take a while because it's re-addressing, reframing the whole entire way that we deal with women's health. And so at Juno, for us, you know, while this is incredibly important, we also wanted to make sure that we were addressing the need of the women today. And so that's how and why we started Juno as a startup. So as I said, we're building the standard of care we deserve. We're a platform for gynecological health and we're starting with vaginal microbiome tests. So we decided that there's a lot of investor money out there and it's going into getting you your groceries faster or a whole host of other things that really in our opinion shouldn't be getting the dollars that it does. And so we subverted that money into actually addressing the issues that women face. And it was a little, you know, easy to do that because the macro trends are in our favor. So we have key enabling technologies that are enabling us to build and bring solutions to women today. There's a massive shift to at-home testing. There's a market with increasing purchasing power and there are business models that have been proven in this space where consumer tests power up further research and development that at the end of the day change the course of healthcare available to everyone. So we were quickly backed and we started and set about running the Juno study. And so in 2019, we launched one of the biggest initiatives of its kind when it comes to the vaginal microbiome. An IRB approved study over a thousand women from all over the US took part and we built one of the richest repositories of vaginal microbiomes. So this was everything around what is the best way of analyzing this? Where are we making the biggest impact? And how do we access the people that we need to access? All of that information went into the launch of our first product, which was the Juno vaginal microbiome test kit. It's a simple at-home sort of collection. Samples are sent back to our lab and we use sequencing to give women a comprehensive view of what's in their vaginal microbiome. We personalize everyone's results and women use this to go and advocate for themselves, often women that have a history of recurrent infection and the current tools available are just not there for them. And over time, we've really worked to iterate on the product, listen to our community and provide them with the solution in the form that really is the best for them. And it's having an impact and that's what makes us really excited about Juno and what we do. Women are finally getting the answers that they've been looking for. Yeah. And over the last sort of two years, we've been able to really hit product market fit in the US and that means that we're able to serve the women that we're trying to serve with the kind of solution that really meets the mark. And the interesting thing about our work over the past two, three years is that it platformed the women's health issue and it platformed women and the things that they wanted to stay. And in doing that, it attracted and caused the sort of like avalanche of more people working in the space and the growth of the Femtec industry. And what that did in turn was it sort of perked up the ears of government and the policymakers. So when industry moves or it grows, government responds typically. And so in the UK, number 10 Downing Street and the Department of Health and Social Care set about working on a women's health strategy. And for the first time, they put together a six point plan to address the needs of women. And Juno played a part in making sure that they had the evidence that they needed and also in giving feedback to the shaping of that policy so that it addressed the needs of women that we were seeing from access at the physician's office all the way through to things like the holes in where the research is scientifically. So that's what we do at Juno. That's how we started. And that's the little role that we've played in science policy. I hope that gives you an idea of how Juno had a vision for the world, how we started to build towards that vision outside of a traditional route and how now we're reengaged in putting in place the long term changes while impacting women daily in the short term aspect of things. So I think that's me. Thank you, Hannah. That was fantastic. And thank you to all of our panelists today. I can say personally that I love the work that you're doing, Hannah, as you're aware because of my deep fascination with the vaginal microbiome as a researcher of sexually transmitted diseases. So I guess that will bring us to the Q&A. So if there are any questions, we have just a few minutes. Maybe if you want to go to the next slide while people are writing any questions they might have, I'll just point out that if anyone is interested in continuing this discussion, you can contact elifecommunity at community at elifesciences.org. You can also continue this discussion online using the hashtag ECR Wednesday, even though it's Monday. And you can tag at elifecommunity in your tweet. And I'm not seeing any questions popping up in the chat right now. And I would say because we only have one minute, we might just forego the Q&A, but I will wrap this up by saying thank you again to all of our panelists. That was fantastic. And I'm sure that everyone will have a lot to think about moving forward. I do see if we can maybe answer one question here. And we have one question that says my impression is that there are, and this is from Nadine, I should say, my impression is that there are a very large number of spaces where scientists could contribute to policy work. Would the panelists then advise us to follow our interests and try to make policy spaces for ourselves there, rather than chasing a role? Does anyone want to comment on that really quick before we close out?  They have no idea what to do with you. So you actually have to walk into non-academic spaces and say here is where I see I fit. And I had to do that with the nonprofit organization that I went to. I said, hey, this is what I can bring to your organization. And I do think that we have more than ability to do that as scientists and PhD holders than a lot of people do, especially when we step outside of academia. So just kind of think of a role that you want and go pitch that role to a place where you want to work. Great. Thank you, Shannon. I think that'll probably do it for us today. And thank you again to everybody. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. And we hope to see you next time. Wonderful. Thank you so much to everyone who's joined. And thank you, Nick, for staring that. I'll be in touch with everyone here. And if there are any questions that come through, I will email them onto you all. Thank you all again. I'll speak to you all really soon. I think for anyone who's still here, Shannon has put her email below. And I can email that on as well. Thank you so much for your work. Thank you so much for your time. Brilliant. And you. Thanks, folks. Bye. Bye.


Morning everybody. We're in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. We got to unload this freight that I picked up yesterday in Manitoba Unload it here and then run down the road to Mawson, Wisconsin pick up some utility trailers put them onto my trailer tie him down secure them And race on back home. That's the plan for today. Let's get to it. All right, so we got here We're in our unloading position. I'm gonna get all my straps and equipment off We'll get unloaded And then I have received my confirmation.  It happens can't really help it. It was a mud blot remember So I got to sweep all this off because if I don't when I go down the highway These are gonna fall off the trailer and go through someone's windshield or into someone's windshield I would hope that rock like this wouldn't go through But you never know you don't want to hitting people's windshield and I think it all mad and it's your fault I mean, I don't know what would happen in that situation Who would be at fault? I would assume ethically and morally I would be at fault because I knew that there was rocks on my deck And I didn't clear them off and it damaged someone's vehicle Legally speaking, I don't know who would be at fault Because if a truck throws a rock at you, right, it's not the truck's fault it happens But if it's because of negligence and you can prove that and then they got you right and they got you So we'll clear this off here so that we don't got a deal with that. I got this riser right here I didn't need it for this last load. I'm gonna need it for my next load. I'm picking up those trailers and Oh, I also figured out what was going on with my tires. Remember this inside tire We had patched it had a hole in it Got it patched and then it started wearing a lot faster. You can see this already You see how that Tire is worn and look at the tire right beside it You can see the difference, right? I Found out why Now when the guy patched that tire he didn't check the pressure of all my other tires all my tires are set to a hundred psi He felt this one to 110 psi So that tire was running at 10% more p on 10% I guess it would be a 10 more psi than this tire And that's why it was wearing down faster. So I leveled them out now. So that problem should be fixed though They are a little bit that one is a little bit more worn than this one now Hopefully they'll even out over time and it won't get worse But that was the problem tire pressure and a lot of you in the comment section had it, right? So make sure when you get your tires fixed or replaced that the guy who's fixing your tire balances the air pressure to the tire beside it If this one's at a hundred that one should be at a hundred costly mistake That wasn't my fault There's nothing I can do about it now right because it's weeks down the road And I've already put like 10,000 kilometers or 10,000 miles on them already since it's been patched. So Next time I'll just remind the guy who's changing my tires make sure you check all the air pressure Because they're set to a hundred not 110 it was late at night and I I didn't think of it I didn't think of telling him. So maybe it's partly my fault Maybe it's partly his because the standard for a lot of tires is 110 psi I run mine a little bit lower gives me a little bit more traction, especially in the snow in the wintertime. I Mean there's been studies shown that you can actually make tires last longer By having lower psi like an 85 to 90 psi in your tires And that sounds like heresy to a lot of old-timer truck drivers because they needed at least at 100 or 110 in their mind, right? but I'm referring to an article from truck news comm and I read it just the other day and there's been several fleets that have actually lowered the air pressure in their drive tires to 85 That's lower than I would want to go But they've found that their tires wear more evenly Have more traction on the road because more of the tire surface touches the road, right? And they last longer They're getting four five hundred to eight hundred thousand kilometers. That's like What three four hundred thousand miles five hundred thousand miles off these tires is crazy, right? I don't think these are that long. These are cheap Chinese tires. I'm they're not gonna last that long But that's okay because they're cheap. They don't have to last as long But I can get a few hundred thousand kilometers out of them anyways, right and so I run them at a hundred The studies are shown that with the weights that we haul here in North America We can get away with as low as 70 psi in our drive tires, but I wouldn't recommend you go that low That's really low, but it's not the tires that hold up your load It's the air inside the tires and Legally speaking if you look at the specifications of most tires not all tires most tires You only need about 70 psi to hold up the loads that we're carrying. I Just I wouldn't recommend going that low, but you know Around a hundred is where I usually have mine And a hundred hundred and ten. I'm trying a hundred out with these tires. See how that goes, you know I'll keep reading keep studying and researching and reading other people's research and seeing what works for people What doesn't work and From what I've from what I've all read and understood. I felt comfortable having my tires at about a hundred psi and As we can see if one is a bit higher than the rest that one's gonna wear down really fast Good thing is a cheap tire Otherwise that would have been an even more expensive lesson to learn There's always lessons to learn and in trucking every lesson is very expensive Seems every other week the US flags are at half-staff I have to turn left is no trucks straightforward, okay Tell you on this road for 11 kilometers Just about in Boston I don't know what town this is this Lisbon That was the sign said In very close.  Maybe around Alexandria or Roth say maybe even for a girl we'll see what What trucking brings us later see how long it takes me to tie these things down I've hauled these kind of loads many many times before You got to be very careful with them because they're light trailers and even if they just barely move and touch each other Because they get loaded very close together Barely move and touch each other it can cause significant damage to them right away, and it's not good So you got to make sure that they're absolutely Rock solid tied down to the trailer without damaging them So that's the challenge, but I've done it many times before and so far knock on wood haven't damaged a single one We have the trailers on everybody's gone home for the day already. I've got them all tied down And it's time to hit the road our clock is ticking and there's a fly in here again. How every day every Day, I'm gonna get you.  Is it just me? Do they like me? I don't smell. I promise Karen's calling it a u-turn. It's actually just a sharp left how to get onto that road there with that motorcyclist I usually use miracle whip Well, this time I bought mayo mayonnaise needs a whole lot better. I never use mayo I always use miracle whip.  There was one spot available for trucker Josh Guess who took it. It's the next morning. We're gonna continue on now. We drove all the way from Mosmo Wisconsin all the way up here last night We got here really really late really really late So a little bit of a later start today, but we only have five hours left to go back to our yard So there's the good news. So we'll head over there to the yard. We'll drop this trailer We'll head to our shop. We'll tuck old blue in for the night And we're gonna go home for a couple days to pack pretty much actually Excuse me this weekend Is canadian thanksgiving so happy belated canadian thanksgiving to all of you out there my canadian friends and family I know in the u.s. Your thanksgiving is in november It's already winter here at that time So we do our thanksgiving a month early because our seasons are a little bit different than yours So happy thanksgiving everybody. Hope it was a good one We got a couple of family gatherings to attend this weekend lots of food to eat. It's gonna be good And we got to get back to work because we got to make some money. We got to pay for our new house We're moving in a few weeks still so we got just a few weeks to pack up and get ready Oh, let's continue on down the road We need to get out there. It is windy today windy windy. We're gonna test out my load Securement. I'm not worried 99.99999% sure everything is tied down Tight enough that it's not gonna blow away Let's get going. So this is uh, like I'll say in the big chief truck stop I've stopped here many times over the years. It's one of my favorite places to stop It's got a nice little cafe inside here Fuel pumps at the back off to my left Quite a bit of parking in the back here. It's a gravel lot. So you Are at the mercy of drivers parking straight and not taking up more space than they need to So as long as everybody parks properly, you can fit quite a few trucks in here a little cold out 9 degrees Celsius It's getting cold What is 9 degrees Celsius in fahrenheit? 9 degrees Celsius is equivalent to 48.2 degrees fahrenheit That's where we're sitting right now Definitely had to turn on the bunk heater last night Got a little bit chilly So earlier in this vlog yesterday for night and then take the entrance to the ride in 80 meters That's Karen interrupts me like usual We had a pretty uneventful night like I said driving late into the night drove through minneapolis wasn't a lot of traffic It was great. I like night driving. It's quieter, right? But it does eat into the next day. I wanted an easy day today I didn't want to have a long day of work and then get home all tired and No energy this way. I only got five hours to drive drop the trailer and go home off lots of energy Interstate 94 westbound. It's that cold biting winter air. It's just Getting sucked in here. Got that wonderful wind from the north just Oh, okay It's always those first couple of weeks Fall into winter where the cold hits us hard Then after about two weeks, we're like, huh, you know what? It's actually not that bad Then the rest of winter is fine. It's just that first bit is like, oh happy with summer I'm in morris Manitoba on the canadian side again Got my timmage Very happy. Let's give it a taste test Oh Decent smells good hot. Yep. It's hot. Good. Yeah, it's good It's only eight degrees celsius. I mean, what's eight degrees celsius in fahrenheit? Eight degrees celsius is 46.4 degrees fahrenheit not even that cold yet. It's gonna get a lot colder before it gets warmer, so Can't complain Yeah, let's get back out here Going to brit's families the day after or is it the other way around? No, wait I think we're going to brit's families tomorrow and my family the day after That's right Lots of eating ahead this weekend. Oh, oh And i'm hungry and we move into our new house pretty much all the leaves will be gone Except for this tree look on the right here that tree's still green What a trooper other trees have lost all their leaves already Yeah, we'll have to wait until next summer to enjoy summer in our backyard, but That's okay. We can enjoy winter Winter isn't the worst thing winter can be fun It's just when it gets down to the deep freeze last two weeks of january first two weeks of february where it gets down below minus 30 That's not as fun, but the rest of winter isn't actually that bad your body gets used to it pretty quickly That was a windy day I was nuts I haven't driven through wind like that in quite a while. It must mean the seasons are changing or something Feels you just feel it in the air something's happening Something's happening Might be the fact that all the trees are losing their leaves too might be that But something I can feel it in my bones Something's changing out there got a little blue in the shop here Since the weather was so bad today. I didn't bother washing it today because it would have been just as dirty if not more dirty Uh, let's see. I've got everything Take a few things with me here That's everything I need Okay Oh, did I turn that light off? That's why I went in there. I went in there to turn that light off Yes, okay the light and sleeper's off. I can't remember anything Okay, it's time to go home everybody. It's been fun So this vlog included all the way from moss in wisconsin No, actually from olclar, wisconsin down to moston back all the way home So about a 1300 kilometer jaunt or 700 800 mile jaunt Over two days I'm ready to go home. How about you all blue? Yeah along with me as usual. We will make another vlog Tomorrow or the next day we make new vlogs almost every day So if you want go down below the video make sure you're subscribed because we're doing something different and well actually Our next video we're gonna be going to canora again and then headed down to brainer and then down to miniapolis So maybe it's something similar, but every day is different and I'd love it if you'd join this So don't forget to subscribe down below be safe out there everybody and when you're on the road remember Please drive safe


entertain us for lunch. Thank you. Thank you Cynthia and it's great. We're really excited to be the lunchtime entertainment and so I'm going to kick us off. We're both going to be focused on equity in Oakland and I think as we heard this morning equity is one of those things where we all get to do the work and in fact we all have to do the work. So I think this is going to be a fun conversation for me because we're going to kind of talk about how doing the work is advocates and doing the work as city staff comes together and how that really works for raising up equity in a whole community in this case Oakland. So we'll be doing a little bit of a case study and so before Jeffrey gets into the awesome work that he was involved with as the temporary Oakland DOT director I'm just going to talk a little bit about Mikey Spay as the advocates in the community and the work that we've done around equity on our side of the equation and so I've been executive director of Mikey Spay for seven years now and I think when I came into the organization it was 2011 and you know it was a pretty white organization I think you know the board was 93 and a half percent white and well we didn't have any staff then so it was just building up from there and I think but they made a good decision to bring me on and you know bring someone in with a different lens of being mixed race queer gender non-conforming and bringing a new perspective into the organization which has made you know resulted in a lot of changes over this time and even so it's been a tremendous amount of work to start to really address equity and really have equity and transportation justice or social justice be something that is at the center of what Mikey Spay is about that has taken this whole seven years to really accomplish that to get everyone on the same page and I don't think we could have done it without everyone really being willing to do the work including like I will really call out actually my white board members though we are now 75 percent white it's still it's been very slow to change on the demographics of our organization but everyone has really died in to do the work and the white board members actually self-organized to do their own education around equity and racism and white privilege and white supremacy to really be able to move the board to a place where they could say this is our this is absolutely at the core of what we're about and a top priority for our organization so I just wanted to give you a little bit of a overview of just the work of the past year in terms of us really articulating our values around equity and social justice as well as sort of what that means for us in our everyday work so this is kind of sort of setting the stage to how we would then work with our city to advance equity there and that'll you know and what after Jeffrey talks about what's happening in the city of Oakland then we're going to have a kind of conversation back and forth that really talks about this partnership of advocacy so just to go over I'm going to just this year we've adopted a statement of values around equity and social justice for Mikey's Bay and this was a very involved process of the board and staff and I'm just going to go quickly through what we came up with but at the end there's a link if you want to go I really recommend it's a little bit of a lengthy document but I recommend checking it out to skip more of the details but I think going through a statement's a pretty boring thing is to do at lunch so I mean that would not fit the bill at lunchtime entertainment so we're going to go through this fast um so just first of all as a core value we believe the transportation justice is an essential part of our work as advocates and we've broken that into three areas one is transportation justice so here we're really looking at really looking at the environment we work in and looking at the way that racism bias inequity and historical disinvestment shows up there and that and really saying that we are working to redress those inequities in our environment we're really looking for leadership from the community and sort of similar to what we heard in the CalBike statement of strategic plan this morning and this means really that we're lifting up the champions that are already in the community particularly POC leaders, POC-led partner groups and so on and making sure that the people who are affected are part of decision making and then that we see strength and diversity that we're really working to build an environment within our organization and in our work externally that is a place where everyone is welcomed, celebrated, recognized, treated effortlessly so those are the values but I think what's more interesting is to say well how is that really affecting us day to day in our work as advocates in the East Bay and I want to say you know the East Bay is a place where you know you say oh we're doing this work because we really feel it's right but it's also a reality in the East Bay that if we don't do this work we're not one of them that's just that's the reality we could have we have high minded reasons for doing it or we could have practical reasons for doing it we have both but I think we see over and over in the East Bay that if you don't do the work and really engage the community in a very authentic way it's just you're not it's things are kind of a non-starter and we've seen that a little bit at the bike share launch in the East Bay where actually there was a lot of equity built into that it wasn't made maybe communicated as well as it could have been and the outreach wasn't done so people didn't know and there's been you know a lot of backlash because of that so um so here's just a few examples of just things for the past year or so one of you know our values I said is really um finding the leadership in the community and and supporting that so last November we were working out in Richmond and Hunter Costa to pass a couple of great revenue measures from the benefit transportation and you know where in the past we might have run those campaigns in our own office we partnered with a group at Richmond Rich City Rides if you all know Nezari Smith who's just doing amazing work in Richmond um we got the campaign to fund opening an office up in Richmond um getting money to Rich City Rides to pay their staff to work on this campaign that's probably work we would have all been doing anyway and um and then our staff worked out with the Richmond office for the campaign season and that actually ended up being the most valuable part of the whole thing for Pikes Bay because we were actually working side by side with the Rich City Rides staff over that campaign season and we got to really be in Richmond and just had to learn more from that than I think we could have there's no way we would have learned as much of even sitting in Oakland um so just a few pictures from the campaign season it was a lot of fun working up in Richmond and another one is uh the over if you've heard about the Oakland scraper bikes out in East Oakland doing amazing work keeping kids in school and getting them to donk their bikes and show them off and have a great time so we've helped connect the scraper bike team with funders to build a shed which is a container um bike kind of a community bike shop out in East Oakland um that's really um really helped a bit uh what the scraper bike team is doing and again we don't have much visibility as part of that it's something that we do in a purely supportive role to really make sure that they are successful because there are the best ambassadors we can have for biking in East Oakland another thing we've been been really confronting is racial bias in um in terms of bike and pedestrian stops this is a reality everywhere if you're not confronting this reality you're delusional it's um but we happen to know in Oakland for sure that um like there's a great business referencing a great article from Tampa um about bias and police stops in Tampa we see the same thing is happening in Oakland we have open data so we know that uh in terms of bike people on bikes were being ticketed 63 percent are black the population uh is about 25 28 percent black in Oakland so we know the system is broken so when it comes time to talk about things like vision zero or other enforcement we cannot get behind any enforcement as long as it's a broken system this has to be addressed before we can use enforcement as a tool the thing we've been doing is just diversifying the people who are teaching our bike ed classes and um we recently ran a free lci training this gets people trained to be instructors in our pool of instructors they make $50 an hour teaching our classes and we're committed to making sure that for every for our programs over the course of a year that at least 50 percent of all teaching slots are women and at least 50 percent of all teaching slots are poc um so we paid for a whole training to get more women and poc folks trained and so we've been actually exceeding our goals in terms of instructor hours bought for POC and for women so those are just a few of the things you know that like I just wanted to kind of give you a sense of how we're developing our values and how we're living our values and that really gives us the basis to when we're working with a partner like the city of Oakland to come with a lot of integrity in demanding that equity be addressed at the city level so I'm going to leave it there and then we'll talk a little bit more after Jeffrey talks about you know how we work together thanks for that it was central to the amazingly powerful partnership that Mikey Spade was able to establish with the city of Oakland the fact that they had done their homework in diversifying their board diversifying their membership doing community engagement in all of our neighborhoods and very importantly bringing data to us and the community of large made them very effective both by getting the larger city to move but also allowing us as staff in the Department of Transportation to work with them in order to get stuff done so I'm going to talk about this is a very nerdy presentation about getting real about equity to the point where it moves beyond being simply a slogan but it's actually a quantitative tool that we use for allocated scarce resources because if you actually want to you know have your values be made real you've got to buy one of the starting points though is pointing out that many of us don't really know what equity means it's very difficult to define and there's a lot of confusion about the difference between equity and equality equity and quality are not the same in fact they are at odds with each other we found at the city of Oakland that we were actually doing a remarkably good job of distributing our resources with equality in mind but not with equity so if this half of the room had all of the privilege you all had advanced degrees from fancy institutions and big inheritances and you own homes and you had you know the full array of privileges that are awarded to people based on gender and age and ability and ethnicity and this side of the room did not have those privileges if I were to split my resources equally between both sides of the room the gap in disparity between the two sides of the room would increase equality is not the same as equity and understanding what we mean by equity we go back a little bit and look at our history particularly in the transportation industry of exactly how we created such profound inequality through inequitable investments and a good place to start are the redlining maps that cover every city in the United States and these maps existed up through the 1970s but these policies still exist today before these these rules were made illegal in the mid 1960s in the red areas of the map in Oakland it was not possible to get a private mortgage it was also not possible to get federal coverage for your mortgage or really get any federal funding in order to support housing the red areas in the map on the other hand were our favorite places for demolishing neighborhoods in order to build big freeways or big industrial facilities and dump polluting loads on our neighborhoods now even i in the pattern of you see in the red and the yellow because you're going to see that pattern when we look elsewhere in our data now these um active investments in inequity not only drive a lot of the disparity gaps today but are also a source of conversation about reparations which we'll let's get into that later so our task in the city of Oakland broadly particularly under this mayor and this council and the city administrator are aligning Oakland's deeply held values with all of the mechanics of governance and i was tasked as the interim director of the department of transportation to go through all of our rules and procedures and design guidelines and signal warrants all of the dna of how day to day decisions get made in a municipality and to check to see to what degree are our own internal mechanics and alignment for values and to the extent that they weren't to fix them and probably not surprised into any of you almost everything that we do was profoundly misaligned with our supposedly deeply held uh inconsistent values so our first task was to develop uh private transportation strategic plan we got a lot of help from Bloomberg associates there's a big staff effort where we define what the heck we meant by our values and then decided what are our goals as the department for operationalizing those values what are the strategies that we would need to implement to achieve those goals who was responsible what were the resources that were needed what was the timeline for implementing those strategies how would we measure whether we knew whether we've achieved the strategies and our values like how would we quantify whether we were actually achieving our goals very importantly how would we tie our budget to our alleged values and then how are we going to report back to our council members and to the public in order to build trust particularly in a very resource constrained city like and i want to emphasize this point about budget will be coming back to again and again every city in california that i work with has beautiful statements of values almost all of them have very beautiful statements of policy that support everything that we're trying to do none of them tie their policies to the budget with perhaps the exception of oakland and i want to talk about how we did that i also want to point out that because in oakland we focused on our values and did this exercise and evaluated everything that we were doing in accordance with them we were able to get accomplished about 10 years worth of work in nine months so we completely eliminated minimum parker requirements for the urban part of the city and i want to point out actually i am not responsible for any of the things on this list this is just half what happened when i was there like as executive director all you need to do is try to remove obstacles from staff and hold some risk so we eliminated minimum park requirements the urban part of the city we eliminated use of level of service uh in environmental analysis with all california cities will be required to do in the next two years adopted our strategic plan completely rebuilt the entire organization invented equity analysis tools because nobody had ever done that before level uh restructured all of our department management passed a six hundred dollar bond six hundred million dollar bond of which 350 was four streets with 82 percent of the vote we have our construction private impact rules hired a permanent uh director of the DOT is great adopted entirely new capital and operating budgets with the new evaluation mechanisms and adopted our pedestrian master plan this is just like crazy rate of change that i i was amazed we were able to get away with it the other thing is if you send me an email or i can give the carlman presentation of your organizers here you can look at our equity analysis tools online all of those are open source the data is available play around with them and i'm going to walk through them right now so the first place where we started in trying to define what equity meant for bond was we knew we had to quantify we knew that we needed to use data um and we also realized that talking about the past or talking about issues like reparations was incredibly controversial um and was not going to give us the consensus that we needed to move forward but what we found is that there was perfect alignment in the data once we mapped it between present day disparities and terrible things that the city and state had done to our communities in the past and by focusing on the present and particularly by focusing on for example children even the most racist white people in the city of oakland when you show them a picture of a brown child suffering with asthma right they are going to get out of your way so focusing on present day disparities really really helped us and by that i mean issues like health in some neighborhoods in oakland we knock 15 years off of your lifespan because of where you grow up and largely because of the transportation investments that dump pollute loads under neighborhood that make it very difficult or unsafe to walk or bike and that make it very difficult to access jobs that provide good health care so transportation decision making is driving dramatic problems for public health in specific neighborhoods in oakland and we have all that data from the alameda county health department and we mapped it we also have great data about accessibility to all the paths out of poverty particularly access to good jobs that is something that's straightforward to map and the data is really clear again and the patterns follow the same pattern


Good morning everyone and welcome back to the course on Classics in Total Synthesis part 1. So we have been discussing about you know 3-mumber ring, 4-mumber ring, 5-mumber ring, 6-mumber ring based natural products and today we will talk about very interesting alkaloids. These alkaloids are very very interesting natural products. So we will be discussing many synthesis of alkaloids and the first synthesis of alkaloid today we are going to discuss about perhydroestrionicotoxin, the name itself looks little longer but you can break it like this, perhydroestrionicotoxin, perhydroestrionicotoxin okay. So there are 3 natural products isolated from the same source, the first one is called estrionicotoxin okay. So here you can see there are 2 side chains, there are 2 side chains okay having an enine moiety okay, there are 2 side chains having an enine moiety but the core structure is a spirofused system okay, 1-6-mumber ring fused with a piperidine ring okay, a 6-mumber ring fused with a piperidine ring with 2 side chains having an enine moiety okay. The second natural product is the one where the triple bond is reduced to a double bond okay, the triple bond is reduced to the double bond while the double bond is fully reduced. So this is called octahydroestrionicotoxin okay. The third natural product is fully reduced natural product called perhydroestrionicotoxin, it is completely reduced, the side chain is completely reduced. So this was isolated from the venum of a columbian frog called tendrobatus estrionicus. This was isolated and reported way back in 1971 and 73 by Vidkop and coworkers okay and in fact they asked Professor E.J. Coray to see whether this can be synthesized by his laboratory okay and immediately E.J. Coray's group took upon the total synthesis of this molecule and then they reported the first total synthesis of perhydroestrionicotoxin and his synthesis involved 2 important reactions, one is pinnacle, pinnacle and rearrangement, other one is Barton reaction. So before we actually go into the details of the total synthesis of perhydroestrionicotoxin by E.J. Coray, we will briefly discuss about or briefly recall the pinnacle, pinnacle and rearrangement and Barton reaction I am sure all of you would have gone through these 2 reactions but it is a brief recall, it is very important to know before we actually proceed to look at the total synthesis of perhydroestrionicotoxin reported by E.J. Coray which involves these 2 key reactions. So what is pinnacle, pinnacle and rearrangement? So if you have a 1-2 diol okay if you have 1-2 diol and upon treatment with acid this undergoes a facile rearrangement to a ketone called pinnacle. So the whole process is called pinnacle to pinnacle because it goes from pinnacle to pinnacle. How does it happen? So when you have a diol one of the alcohol is protonated. So once it is protonated automatically it becomes a good leaving group. So once it goes then it generates a carbocation. Though this carbocation is stable because it is a tertiary carbocation it is stable but the presence of a hydroxyl group, presence of a hydroxyl group adjacent to that makes it less stable because the lone pair on the oxygen now can push one of the alkyl groups or aryl groups to migrate so that you will get this intermediate where now the positive charge which is formed here is stabilized by the oxygen okay. So this is more stable than the tertiary carbocation. So this is the driving force for the migration of an alkyl or aryl group from the adjacent carbon with respect to the carbocation form okay. So one can ask why this migration should take place when already the carbocation is tertiary and there is no ring strain but still the migration takes place because the stability of the carbocation by the lone pair on the oxygen okay that actually helps the migration of an alkyl or aryl group to facilitate this pinnacle and pinnacolon rearrangement okay. So there are many examples I will just give few examples at least 2 or 3. So when you have a diol like this, this upon pinnacle, pinnacolon rearrangement first protonation takes place and followed by the leaving of water to generate the carbocation. Now the lone pair pushes this C-C bond okay. So it is a symmetrical does not matter this C-C bond to migrate or in other words ring enlargement takes place because of the migration of the C-C bond ring enlargement takes place. So what you get is a spiro system okay, the spiro 4-5 system you get okay. Then one can also see if we have unsymmetrical diols which alcohol will be protonated first. So if you have an unsymmetrical alcohol obviously it will protonate the alcohol which will give more stable carbocation. So now if you look at this example there are 2 alcohols. So between these 2 alcohol, this alcohol will be protonated because that will give a carbocation which is more stable than the other carbocation. This carbocation will be stabilized by 2 phenyl groups okay. So that is why that will be more stable and then this bond will migrate so leading to the formation of 1 and this is the predominant or major products and not the other one okay. So the migrating group preference is important but at the same time first the formation of most stable carbocation is the real driving force for the migration of the next one okay. The second reaction which is used by EJ Coray in the synthesis of perhydro nicotoxin is Barton reaction. The last 2 decades or more one has witnessed large number of publications on CH activation and functionalization but Barton has reported this reaction long time ago where angular methyl group angular methyl group in steroids can be easily functionalized by this reaction. What is this reaction? So if you have an alcohol like this it is very important that alcohol should be axial okay axial. Now if you treat with NOCl and pyridine okay so that OH will become ONO okay OH will become ONO. Now this I am shining with light it pumps oxygen radical okay and NO also comes out. Now if you look at this carefully through a 6 membered transient state this oxygen radical can pick up this hydrogen. If that happens then you will get OH and the CH3 now will become CH2 radical okay. The CH2 radical immediately will combine with the NO radical which came out when this ONO bond got cleaved you got oxygen radical and NO radical. So now what will happen the CH2 radical will combine with the NO radical to form CH2NO. The CH2NO immediately tautomerize the CH2NO immediately tautomerize to give the corresponding oxide okay. So what you have seen now in the whole process the angular methyl group which is really very difficult to functionalize has been functionalized by this reaction. So this reaction was reported by Barton so normally this is called Barton's reaction. Once you have this oxide one can hydrolyze the oxide to get the aldehyde or if you have an oxide you know another famous rearrangement can be considered. So Wegman rearrangement can happen so that way the CH3 will be converted into amine okay amide followed by amine. So many things can be done having the oxide moiety at angular methyl group. So these are the two reactions which you should remember when we talk about totals synthesis of perhydro histrionicotoxin reported by E.J. Corre. So this is the structure of perhydro histrionicotoxin then the first step the first retrosynthetic step was to remove the 5 carbon units okay. But before I actually talk about retrosynthesis if I tell that this compound this natural product was made from cyclopentenol can you believe this compound was synthesized from cyclopentenol. Cyclopentenol is the commercially available starting material and that was the starting material for the synthesis of perhydro histrionicotoxin. It may be difficult to believe for the simple reason that if you look at the natural product there is no 5-mombard ring is there any 5-mombard ring? No you have 2 6-mombard rings one is normal cyclohexane other one is 5-mombard ring derivative okay they are fused in a spiro fashion and I am climbing that the starting material is cyclopentenol. So that is the power of retrosynthesis if you logically think and logically write a proper retrosynthesis that can lead to a very very simple commercially available inexpensive starting material and also the whole reaction sequence will be very simple and straightforward okay. So now the first retrosynthesis was the addition of this 5 carbon unit addition of this 5 carbon unit to this imine okay. If you have an imine okay if you have an imine the equatorial addition equatorial addition of this 5 carbon Grignard or lithium that will give you the natural product and afterwards you have to protect the remove the protecting group of course when you do this the hydroxyl should be protected. So that is the first 2 retrosynthetic steps. Now once you have this imine this imine can be obtained from the lacto okay this imine can be obtained from the lacto in 2 steps okay. So whenever you have a lactum or whenever you have an amide there are many reactions you can think of.  Then one can also think about Beckman rearrangement is not it one can also think about Beckman rearrangement where you have an oxyde that oxyde can undergo Beckman rearrangement. Again the position of the nitrogen depends on the regiochemistry of the oxyde. So for example if you have this oxyde okay if you have this oxyde then this can possibly this can possibly give you this lactum how because if this is the leaving group then the bond which is opposite to that leaving group only migrates that will give you exactly the same lactum okay. So the key reaction so far if you look at is the Beckman rearrangement to get the 6 number ring okay 5 number to 6 number ring okay. Now normally how do you get oxyde normally how do you get oxyde all of us will immediately think okay oxyde it is very easy you can start from the corresponding ketone is not it you can start from the corresponding ketone if you have the ketone then treat with hydroxyl amine you will get the corresponding oxyde that is how normal people will think but as I said this synthesis was reported by the Nobel laureate E. J. Corey so he has some special disconnection for this particular step so instead what he thought was this oxyde should be prepared or can be prepared from this alcohol and there is no ketone okay this is where you should recall the reaction which I mentioned that is Barton reaction. So if you have this alcohol and then treat with NOCl pyridine and the photochemical condition the NO group will be transferred to this CH2 through the 6 number transition state then that NO will become oxyde and that oxyde you can treat with acid to get the corresponding Beckman rearrangement product. So this is a very very important reaction and people normally would not have thought about using Barton reaction to get the oxyde okay that is a very clever thinking and because of that because of that the whole synthesis become much much simpler okay because you do not have to introduce a ketone just CH2 is there just you do this Barton reaction. Now the next step if you look at you need to introduce a hydroxyl group okay this is a phymobacteric no problem but here you need to introduce a hydroxyl group and as well as this 4 carbon unit. So what is the relationship between these 2 they are 1, 2 and they are trans to each other 1, 2 and trans to each other how you can introduce this okay how you can introduce this see if you are thinking about alcohol you can start from the ketone reduce it we do not know whether it will be selective in that case your butyl group is in axial position the hydroxyl is in axial position both normally you do not expect is not it the normally all the groups will try to go to equatorial position here both butyl as well as hydroxyl groups are sterically hindered axial position. So another very interesting reaction is a query used to fix this 2 stereo centers when you do a hydroboration when you do a hydroboration so what you do see for example if you take a phenyl cyclohexene okay. Now if you do hydroboration and oxidation if you do hydroboration oxidation hydrogen and boron hydrogen and boron will come from the same side because it is a cis addition okay hydrogen and boron will come from the same side that means the boron which will essentially be converted into hydroxyl will be opposite to that of phenyl group correct will be opposite to that of phenyl group basically what you get is the alkyl or aryl group and the hydroxyl group trans to each other and when the hydroboration takes place the hydrogen and boron will come from the least hindered side. So that means if you look at this the hydrogen and boron will come from the least hindered equatorial side soda equatorial side so that your alkyl group will go to axial so the precursor is nothing but this alkyl if you take this alkyl do a hydroboration oxidation you will get this compound okay then how do you get this compound very simple if you have this ketone then add butyl lithium followed by dehydration you will get this is not it butyl lithium and dehydration and this compound and I talked about pyrnacol pyrnacol rearrangement I told you this is a spiro ketone can be obtained from this pyrnacol okay can be obtained from this pyrnacol now this pyrnacol is obtained from cyclopentanone. So this is what I said when you can think about proper retro synthesis and use some clever disconnection and use some mice reactions one can get a very simple starting material and the whole strategy will be a classical one this is one of the classical total synthesis reported in the literature by E.J. Korn okay now let us see whether the retro synthesis what he had proposed he could easily follow it in the lab to complete the total synthesis okay those who are interested they can go through these two references first he started with cyclopentanone then pyrnacol coupling got the pyrnacol this upon treatment with acrosulfuric acid you get the corresponding the pyrnacol pyrnacol rearrangement. So this is quite easy and straight forward and once you have that add n butyl lithium so n butyl lithium adds to the ketone and then followed by dehydration done by thionylchloride pridine to get the corresponding alkene okay. So now that you have the alkene next step is the hydroporation oxidation yes hydroporation oxidation with hydrogen peroxide and sodium hydroxide gave the corresponding secondary alcohol and the secondary alcohol as well as the butyl group they are anti to each other okay. Now this can be written like this this can be written like this it is a relative stereochemistry it is not asymmetric synthesis this is relative stereochemistry and that is why I have written this solid bond okay. Now once you have this you can clearly see you have introduced the spiro system and the butyl group and the hydroxyl group with correct stereochemistry spiro system butyl group hydroxyl group with correct stereochemistry. Now you have to use this handle the hydroxyl handle to introduce the oxide okay you have to introduce the oxide as planned. So for that what one has to do Barton reaction. So he took this alcohol and then treated with NOCl pridine then shine light. So first it forms the ONO so under photochemical condition the ONO bond breaks and then it gives oxygen radical and NO radical. Now the oxygen radical picks up the hydrogen radical from here through a 6-membered transient state okay through a 6-membered cyclic transient state okay. It picks up the hydrogen and that gives you the corresponding radical in the 5-membered tree okay. Once the hydrogen is picked up you get the corresponding radical here. Then the NO radical which went out will combine with this cyclopentyl radical to form the corresponding NO okay. It is like cotton paste if you look at this chemistry it is very nice interesting chemistry.  Then once you have NO this NO immediately tautomerizes to corresponding oxide immediately tautomerizes to the corresponding oxide. So you have the oxide the next step is carry out the Beckmann rearrangement okay the Beckmann rearrangement is very simple so one can use acid. So what they have done is they have treated with para toluene sulfonyl chloride okay. So selectively they can tocellate the oxide OH then followed by migration of this bond gives you the lactam. You have the lactam the next two steps first treatment with LAH what will happen if you treat with LAH what will happen when you treat a lactam with LAH it will become the corresponding amine. The carbonyl group will be completely removed the lactam will become amine okay. Then you have the free hydroxyl the free hydroxyl will be protected by the TBDMS chloride. So what you get is the corresponding OTBDMS or one can write OTBS also a TBDMS can be written as TBS as well. So now what is left? So you need to introduce the 5 carbon unit at this carbon. You need to introduce a 5 carbon unit at this carbon and that 5 carbon unit also 5 carbon unit also has to come from the equatorial side. So for that as per the original plan as per the original plan you need to introduce a double bond okay you need to introduce a double bond you have NH and you need to introduce a double bond. How will you do? Yes you can brominate now if you treat with base potassium amylate N amylate potassium N amylate it undergoes elimination of HBR okay it undergoes elimination of HBR to introduce the double bond okay. Now once you have the amine next you have to add the 5 carbon unit you have to add the 5 carbon unit. What you have to do? The 5 carbon unit is corresponding N amyl lithium amyl is 5 carbon okay. So you add the 5 carbon unit so once you do that then that 5 carbon unit also you can see it will add from the less hindered equatorial side okay the 5 carbon unit will add from the less hindered equatorial side. After that the Tbuff is a fluoride source is used to remove the TBS group. Addition of N amyl lithium followed by removal of TBS group you get the natural product that is per hydro is trionicotoxin okay. So as I said this is one of the classical synthesis of an alkaloid where two very simple reactions but cleverly utilized one is pinocchiole pinocchiole rearrangement the other one is Barton reaction. The Barton reaction the use of Barton reaction is really ultimate thinking otherwise normally people think that the oxide can be made from ketoglue but here we cleverly use the Barton reaction from CH2 to introduce the oxide that once you have the oxide that paved the way for the ring expansion to get the lactam and that is how you could make the other 6-membratory okay. So overall in few steps E.J. Coray and his group could synthesize this per hydro histio nicotoxin starting from commercially available cyclopentyl okay. So thank you I will stop here.