Medicine by Design Healthy and Inclusive Labs: Manu Platt, PhD, and Anita Balakrishna, LLB

Theme of this talk: Bridging the racial divide in society and academia

Medicine by Design Healthy and Inclusive Labs Committee invites you to join us for this interactive discussion with Associate Professor Manu Platt, PhD, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Emory University and Anita Balakrishna, LLB, Director, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, Temerty Faculty of Medicine, U of T about bridging the racial divide in society and academia.

This is the first in a series of events offered by Medicine by Design’s Healthy and Inclusive Labs Committee. These events will create opportunities for the Medicine by Design Community to engage in conversations about the importance of equity, diversity and inclusion in innovation; systemic racism; unconscious bias; barriers to inclusion in the academy; and much more. The goal is to spark change in our labs, our community, and in STEM more broadly.

Click HERE to register for this virtual event.

Manu Platt

Manu Platt received his BS in biology from Morehouse College in 2001 and his PhD from the Georgia Tech and Emory joint program in biomedical engineering in 2006. He finished his post-doctoral training at MIT in orthopedic tissue engineering and systems biology prior to returning to Georgia Tech and Emory’s Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering in 2009, where he has since been promoted and tenured. His research centers on proteolytic mechanisms of tissue remodeling during disease progression using both experimental and computational approaches.

Integrated with his research program is his mentoring goal of changing the look of the next generation of scientists and engineers to include all colours, genders, and backgrounds. Aligned with that goal, Dr. Platt, along with Bob Nerem, co-founded and co-directs Project ENGAGES (Engaging the Next Generation At Georgia Tech in Engineering and Science), a program paying African-American high school students from Atlanta Public Schools to be researchers in Georgia Tech labs since 2013.

Anita Balakrishna

Anita Balakrishna is currently serving as the Director, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine. Anita is a lawyer and educator with a human rights background. She has focused on a social justice based practice, providing legal advocacy, education, and law reform activities alongside low-income and other underserved communities through her work at the Human Rights Legal Support Centre, the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario and the Rexdale Community Legal Clinic.

Event Agenda