Elizabethtown College Associate Professor of Biology Anya Goldina recently worked with alumna Alexandra Gates ’22 and collaborators from Boston University Medical School to co-author an academic article, “A Call to Action for Improving LGBTQIA2S+ Inclusive Policies and Practices in Educating Science and Medical Professionals” in the Medical Science Educator Journal.
“As we become more knowledgeable and inclusive of all people around us, it is imperative to recognize that education is our path to inclusion and equity,” Goldina said. “We must develop and offer educational opportunities that will allow us to broaden our understanding of human variation and foster development of the needed vocabulary, policies and basic social, scientific and medical practices to insure inclusion and equity.”
Through research, the collaborators found a lack of guidelines dedicated to standardizing LGBTQIA2S+ topics. The group followed with recommendations that sex and gender considerations become mandated in medical and science education.
The collaborative research was developed through Gates’ Summer Creative Arts and Research Program (SCARP) project in the summer of 2022, throughout which Goldina was her mentor.
During SCARP, Gates, who majored in Neuroscience and Biology at Etown, and Goldina read a paper about raising the bar for sex and gender reporting research. As they discussed the research, they realized that some ideas in the paper could be expanded upon and addressed formally.
“The experience is wonderful because through research my former student has become a collaborator and a colleague,” Goldina said.
