Malcom said in a phone interview from Egypt, where she was attending a conference, that women and minorities “collectively are the majority of who’s in higher education, but the higher the level one goes, the more underrepresented they are in certain fields.

The Cook Society colloquium, named for the first black professor at Duke, comes as other campus events will highlight the topic of women and minorities participating in the sciences.

Malcom, who previously was an assistant professor of biology at UNC-Wilmington, said she challenges universities to examine how women and minorities fare, by department, at each stage of advancement, and to conduct exit interviews with those who leave early.

“Lots of things get framed so as to blame the students and very little attention gets paid to the institution,” she said. The question universities should ask about women and minority students is, “Are they being enabled to be successful?”

At Duke, Dr. Nancy Allen recently has been appointed special assistant to the provost for faculty diversity and faculty development.

“We are doing as well as, if not better than, many of our peer institutions” at recruiting and retaining women and minority faculty, said Allen, a professor of rheumatology and immunology.

She pointed to recent Duke initiatives to hire and retain women and minorities in all disciplines. Last year’s faculty work climate survey has yielded faculty satisfaction data that can be broken down by school, department, race and gender; a recent measure passed by the Academic Council expanded tenure clock relief to men and women raising young children; and the provost has established a “target of opportunity” fund, from which he allocates more than $1 million a year for departments to use in hiring highly sought-after minority and women faculty in departments where they are underrepresented.

Students and faculty participating in the Cook Society colloquium cite three factors that contribute to the success of women and minorities in the sciences: mentoring from a sympathetic senior faculty member; a critical mass of peers of the same gender or race who formed a supportive cohort; and a work environment that allows for cultural differences to be expressed and discussed.

“Administrators can invest huge amounts of money and get up on their soap boxes, but if faculty don’t pick up their spears and join the fight, then it’s not going to work,” said William Reichert, a professor in the Pratt School of Engineering. “They have to share their passion with these kids.”

“You don’t just mentor certain people, you mentor everybody,” he added.

Sherilynn Black, a graduate student in neurobiology, agrees about the importance of mentoring. In regularly meetings with neurobiology professor Erich Jarvis, she can discuss challenges particular to African-American scientists.

“I really appreciate that effort because it shows me [the department’s] committed to graduating more minority students,” she said.

Charles Anamelechi, a graduate student in Reichert’s biomedical engineering lab, said having the camaraderie of other minority students in his department has been important because “being a graduate student is such a lonely road.”

“It helps to have other people around who help integrate you into the [scientific] culture,” he said. “If you want to recruit talented minorities, you have to have a community on campus where they’re going to feel welcomed.”

Chiatogu Onyewu is a graduate student from Nigeria in Duke’s M.D.-Ph.D. program, who will lead a series of skits at the colloquium intended to prompt discussion about how to handle conflicts in which race or gender play a role.

“There needs to be a general understanding that the experience of a minority student is different,” said Onyewu, president of the Bouchet Society at Duke, which gets its name from the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in the United States. “There’s a cultural difference that I don’t feel people are sensitive to.”

She gave the example of a photograph of a dead African man shown in one of her medical classes. “The comment was made that this was pretty much life in West Africa,” she said. “But that’s not the life I know in West Africa.”

“Sometimes there are cultural insensitivities, but I never faced any racial discrimination,” Anamelechi said. “Overt racism is no longer a popular thing.”

Beyond Duke, an important source of women and minority scientists is historically black colleges and universities, said Professor Amal Abu-Shakra, chair of North CarolinaCentralUniversity’s biology department and a scheduled panelist at the colloquium.

“We believe strongly that the serious investment that Central and other HBCUs are making in the sciences will increase the numbers of minorities and women with BS and MS degrees, prepared for doctoral programs,” she said.

“We have very strong representation by women in the sciences,” she added about her university.

The sponsors of the colloquium are the Baldwin Scholars; Center for Biologically Inspired Materials & Materials Systems; Center for Biomolecular & Tissue Engineering; Dean of the Faculty, Arts and Sciences; School of Medicine Multicultural Resource Center; Office of the Provost; Pratt School of Engineering; School of Medicine and the Graduate School.