Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Social Justice in Clinical and Translational Research

The CCTSI is committed to improving human health by accelerating scientific discoveries and their implementation and dissemination while building the research teams of the future. We strongly believe that teams of diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality foster progress and innovation -- and when we engage our communities as part of these teams, we advance our research in a way that improves health and increases health equity. We value principles of fairness, equity and social justice in relation to, and across, intersections of race, age, color, disability, faith, national origin, citizenship, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender identity and gender expression.

The CCTSI is fully committed to the ongoing examination of our organizational policies and practices to ensure that we are in alignment with these values and to work in partnership with our faculty, staff, trainees and community partners to create an inclusive culture of equity.

• Proactively implementing anti-racist principles and practices
• Evaluating our organizational policies and procedures regularly to ensure DEI in hiring, promotion and funding practice
• Including community members in our executive leadership team
• Convening a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee made up of core leadership and others
• Monthly, mandatory training series on DEI issues for all staff
• Revising marketing and recruitment strategies to reflect our value of DEI for all of our CCTSI workforce development programs
• Reviewing and revising the selection process for all CCTSI workforce development programs, which includes training on holistic review, selections scoring/rating criteria and review/discussion of applicants
• Integrating health equity and social determinants of health considerations into the planning, conduct and dissemination of research across the clinical and translational sciences spectrum
  
• Detecting and mitigating algorithmic bias in artificial intelligence (AI) systems and machine learning

Land Acknowledgement

We humbly acknowledge that University of Colorado – Anschutz Medical Campus is located on the traditional and contemporary homelands of Indigenous peoples. Our campus resides on unceded lands of the Arapaho people, established to the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851. We recognize the enduring presence of more than 40,000 Indigenous peoples in the greater Denver area. The sprawling urban American Indian and Alaska Native presence in Denver consists of other tribes native to Colorado such as Apache, Comanche, Shoshone, and Ute community members yet is now home to numerous other Indigenous people from many of the 560 plus federally recognized tribes in this country.

Together, we acknowledge the history of genocide and ongoing systemic inequities while respecting treaties made on this territory as a step towards reconciliation and strengthening relationships with Indigenous peoples. We give thanks to the past, present and future stewards of this land and respect all tribal nations’ sovereignty and right to self-determination. We recognize the lessons, including many medical and public health lessons Indigenous communities have offered and continue to teach us.