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Selwyn Vickers, MD, FACS (Host):  Welcome to Checkup. Dr. Thomas, I’m honored to have you on our August episode of the Checkup Podcast. I’m even more excited to have you finally here at UAB. We had a conversation just at the end of your recruitment but there’s been great anticipation to your arrival on campus. So, we are honored to have this as a way that we can welcome you to the School of Medicine and get a chance to know you and for our community to understand both a bit of your background and history as well as your interests and passions. So, again, welcome. It’s an honor to have you here. And I can’t tell you how proud we are to see you serve as the new Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences.

Kecia Thomas, PhD (Guest):  Thank you.

Host:  So, I’ll start out by asking you if you can give us, and a lot of times it’s framed this way now and you’ve heard the term, give us a sense of your distance traveled from getting where you started to being the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at UAB.

Dr. Thomas:  Great. And thank you Dean Vickers for this welcome and opportunity to be with you today. So, I am a Jersey girl. I am first gen and like many families in the northeast, I have deep southern roots, a dad from Albany, Georgia, a mom from Wilson, North Carolina. But of course, their families were a part of that northern migration in the 40s. And I’ve always loved psychology. I grew up with an aunt who had schizophrenia and although it was an interesting kind of experience to observe her in and out of hospitals; I like psychology but understood early I didn’t want to deal with any kind of psychosis or even neurosis. And eventually, I found industrial and organizational psychology.

And that was of interest to me because work defines so much of our life, right and takes so much of our day. Because my dad worked a second shift job and then cleaned in an office building after that, got a few hours of sleep before he picked me up and took me to my Catholic school; I came to understand how his work drove so much of our experience. What time we ate dinner, whether or not I could engage in after school activities. So, I feel very fortunate that I found IO psychology early, decided that’s what I wanted to do around my sophomore year in high school, chose Bucknell University for undergrad because I knew it had a very high hit rate of students getting into PhD programs. Went straight from Bucknell to Penn State. Was there for five years and then began my career at Georgia at 26.

Host:  Well I – that’s a great story. I think I was just telling someone today just about the migration of people moving for a better life. It was typically the next generation when those families moved, they got a chance to go get an education. Because they were leaving the places where they could go to school to go and get better jobs. And you’re certainly a product of a vision of your parents who really wanted you to have all the options and the only option you didn’t have is not to go to school. So, and choosing Bucknell for appropriate reasons to say I want – it will help me get where I want to go. And Penn State is a great school, but I will make one fun comment. So, I visited Penn State when I was in Baltimore when I was in medical school and a couple of kids and I drove to see a football game. Penn state played Alabama. I will tell you getting to Penn State is like a camping trip. It’s not an easy – it’s a massive school but it is – state college is not a straight line to get there. You got to know where you are going to get there. But it is clearly a well run community, great educational history and school that has a great legacy for training.

Dr. Thomas:  Well and Bucknell and Penn State are only an hour apart.

Host:  Oh, so you were close.

Dr. Thomas:  I spent nine years in central Pennsylvania, and I did that because it was an investment in my future.

Host:  Yes, I hear you. I hear you. I can get that yes. Very much so. Well I had a great visit. It was a great trip to go there. And it was fun. So, it looks though like a lot of your professional formation did occur in the south. Even though you are a Jersey girl, at Georgia.

Dr. Thomas:  That’s right. I’ve spent my entire career at UGA. I was there for 27 years. I actually retired last summer. And I went there though and what I failed to mention is that I went to grad school to be a consultant. So, when I took the position at Georgia, it was okay I’ll be here two years and then I’ll get a real job in Atlanta. But it ended up even though I had never taught, I love teaching. I was good at it. And I loved working with graduate students with PhD students. And so I think my proudest accomplishment is that I have chaired over almost 25 dissertations and I’ve trained the majority of minority IO Psychologists.

Host:  Well and observing your curriculum vitae, you’ve obviously been rewarded and honored for your teaching and you’ve been obviously a committed person and successful in research as well as scholarship. So, all the things that were necessary to really advance in the academic world. Tell me what barriers you found as you were in this new academic institution and did you perceive those barriers were due to being in the south or barriers due to being a woman of color or barrier just that are in academic universities or universities in general?

Dr. Thomas:  I would say all of the above. I think as a black woman, studying industrial and organizational psychology which at the time only had about a half of a percent African Americans. So, I was the only black woman teaching PhD students at that time in the country. And then on top of it, choosing to devote my scholarship and research to diversity and inclusion. Those issues together presented I think some unique challenges in regards to credibility, why are you studying those issues, are they really important. My students often being asked oh what do you do in Kecia’s lab. What are you talking about in her courses. Questions that other students and other faculty never had to address.

So, fast forward 27 years later and now diversity in organizations is one of the top three areas that IO Psychologists are studying.

Host:  So, you were studying diversity before it became popular.

Dr. Thomas:  Exactly.

Host:  Oh my goodness. I do and can imagine that people were quick to discredit it as a nonscientific area of work.

Dr. Thomas:  Well they just didn’t study it and I think part of that comes out of our socialization to think about issues of race, gender from a colorblind perspective. And so it’s really interesting now that we are finally kind of addressing how colorblindness actually creates the opposite results in regards to what we want when we think about recruiting more diverse students or faculty. It works against us.

Host:  Common in the context of your observations around diversity, specifically, you mentioned a word that has had its own evolution, colorblind. Whereas people who had good intentions about what they think they want to be in diversity quickly adopted that word, but you mentioned that that in some ways is actually counterproductive to think that’s where you want to end up. Can you comment about that and as a part of how you seen it evolved in your journey?

Dr. Thomas:  Oh sure. Certainly. I think as I mentioned, been in central Pennsylvania for nine years and there were many people again, who were well intentioned, were supportive but didn’t perhaps understand their boundaries. And that approaching for example graduate student mentoring without ever addressing the unique challenges of being one of a kind or the first of your kind in the community where you rarely saw anyone like yourself, you perhaps didn’t have an opportunity to worship in your group’s cultural tradition or even get your hair cut. I was fortunate in that the IO Psychology program had four white men as faculty. And they were the top of their game. It was the most highly ranked program at that time. And my major professor who was the most junior person consistently reinforced my value there, that I was prepared and competent to be there and that there were a lot of things he didn’t understand about being a woman or about being African American or even thinking about diversity as a research program but that he would find people to support me in that and to help me understand my concerns around work life balance as a woman doing this work.

So, he understood his limitations. He didn’t seek to kind of fold me in to a universal experience and then he diversified my network which was really critical to validating the work that I was doing but also validating my concerns and the experiences that I was having.

Host:  Well I learned - my father is a PhD and significantly earlier than you but I gained as I hear in your voice, somewhat even different than in medicine, that the impact of a single individual that is your advisor in your graduate program is so powerful either in a positive way or a negative way of giving you confidence, connecting you with the right people to help you grow and expand your project, to be sensitive to not only your academic progression but to also be aware of the social surrounding issues that you are facing that others don’t have to think about. All of those things are inherent as we think about trying to create more diverse communities, individuals have to be intentional. That process you described at Penn State was not by accident. And it wasn’t necessarily the cultural norm in central Pennsylvania for somebody to be thoughtful or thinking about the stuff that they never had to consider.

So, it really is a great lesson for us today. As we end on the part of your career at Georgia, tell me what do you – what memories positive, negative do you leave your 27 years there as you come to UAB?

Dr. Thomas:  You know the last few months was just incredible kind of culminating experience. I saw many of the seeds that I had planted and really toiled over and sometimes faced some resistance about really come to fruition. And I think that in part, was driven by the George Floyd murder, the protests, and the sense of urgency that our country is facing right now in regards to race and social justice. So, I saw my home department of psychology develop a diversity committee, put statements, set goals and expectations. As divisional Dean of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, within the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, I left behind 13 black and Latino faculty who are Assistant Professors in the Social Sciences. I see now that at the University level, the President is seeding a task force on diversity and inclusion that expands beyond the central office for institutional diversity. So, a lot of the things that I just kind of kept chipping away at, seem to all come together and it was a great way to leave, honestly after having spent my career there.

Host:  That’s a great story. I am really glad to hear and it can’t be a better way to leave than to see your really as you said, your seeds grow and come to fruition and really have a sense that you’ve had a measure of value through the legacy you’re leaving through people there who are now in faculty. Let’s maybe move into sort of the bit of the medical aspects as it relates to disparities, an area that I think you certainly can relate to. So, COVID-19, I think has shed light on the real implication of living with disease in a disparate way. Typically, we see it at the end of someone’s life and we measure that because you were African American, as a woman or a man, your life expectancy ended up being shorter than your majority counterpart. But now COVID took that and accelerated it. It showed you that in a crisis not only were you going to have a shorter longevity, you were going to risk to die suddenly in the context of this virus compared to waiting until you were 75. So, it accelerated, and it created an unbelievable link of lethality and chronic disease like we’ve not seen before.

And particularly targeted at people of color. Whether you are in the south or across the country, those numbers stood pretty consistent. But the parameters that put these individuals at risk were not just their chronic illnesses they were living with. It relates maybe to some of your science. It was the density of where they live, the work sights where they work, where there were often crowded, cramped and being on the frontline of being exposed to someone else or others with the disease and the travel to get there often in a mechanism that broadened their opportunities to be exposed as well. How do you see both the studies that you’ve seen and done define what we were seeing and then potentially also what might be done to help in the future mitigate the damage that we’ve seen in this population because of those other factors in addition to their chronic disease?

Dr. Thomas:  Right. So, yeah, I consistently see the manifestations of black and brown folks experience with access discrimination and treatment discrimination. So, I think in the workplace, as well as in healthcare, there’s access discrimination that occurs when we don’t have the opportunities for good healthcare, good food, safe environments, good education that leads to opportunities to better the standards of our families. My own family has encountered COVID. I have a group of cousins in DC who all work in hospitals. They are the people working in the cafeteria or the people who are cleaning the rooms and so I have one cousin who had two brothers in the hospital with COVID and then her husband dropped dead the next day, all while this is going on. My former husband had a stroke at the beginning of the summer. And so it’s interesting because when I talk to my peers, who are not people of color, they have a different interaction, perhaps perception about what’s going on in the world, may not understand my levels of safety that I engage for myself and my children and I have to remind them, this is showing up differently for me and my family than it is for you.

And so, we are going to be a little bit more cautious, have more safeguards in place and I think people might see me as a Dean and as a PhD and it’s like oh well, but you have education, you have money. yes, but I still have a family, right. I still have a peer system and friends who cut across lots of different dimensions of identity and class and education and so the picture is much more complicated for us. And again, I think about how historical access to things like education, safe environments, good food, exercise are showing up in our experience as people of color in this country.

Host:  Well I think you’re right. I think you described one of the things I didn’t mention is that COVID which people didn’t understand our experience is different sometimes than the majority community and COVID made that very clear.

Dr. Thomas:  And colorblindness will not work for this.

Host:  No, it does not work in that space at all. So, with your expertise in the psychology of workplace diversity, what are your thoughts on a couple of things. Number one, I will say the second question related to your school but in general, we have a real clear desire to diversify our medical school class and we’re working to do that, our residency and our faculty. And clearly, that pipeline is very important. But what do you tell a majority chair whether it be medicine or arts and sciences, who is in a field that is the day’s industrial psychology, there just aren’t many. It’s a 0.5 percent world. What do you tell them when they have from all your measures, a sincere desire to diversify their department at every level. How do they go about doing that when the natural response is, I just can’t find anybody.

Dr. Thomas:  Right. And so, Dean Vickers, I had the opportunity to lead the ASPIRE summer institute this past summer which is focused on cultivating a more diverse and inclusive STEM community. And someone presented that question in a small group and one of the participants gave a great answer and said, have you been on Twitter. There’s a whole community of black women neuroscientists on Twitter. There’s a black IO psychology group. So, those communities are out there oftentimes though they have rejected the academy because the academy has rejected them. Their experience in graduate school often was not one that supported their interests in becoming faculty or academic researchers. So, for my chairs, one of the conversations we’ve already had is about whose in your network. So, when you have the opportunities to go to conferences, who did you spend time with. What did they look like? Where did they come from? Recruitment is not one season or one conversation. It’s a long, long term and intentional commitment. And I actually reject the language of the pipeline. Because if I look around various institutions, I see people showing up in lots of different ways. By saying pipeline, we almost suggest that there’s only one way in.

And we’re both experienced to know that that’s not the case. So, I really am supporting my chairs like I did the department heads at Georgia in diversifying their networks, finding ways to cultivate more diverse speakers with a variety of experiences to come and meet with the faculty and graduate students especially. We’re going to implement some different practices as it comes to developing recruitment ads, setting expectations for search committees, documenting how we’re diversifying our pools before we bring finalists to campus. All those things really paid off for me in my past life. But it has to be an expectation for their role as well. So, as we select future chairs and as we move forward in evaluating the current chairs, there will always be a question what are you doing to support diversity and inclusion in this department. How are you supporting students’ professional interests? And what are you doing to kind of build relationships with institutions that have paid off in the past? Perhaps you had a student five years ago who came from Morehouse. How have you maintained those relationships so that future students will want to come? And how are you using those alumni in sharing kind of the good news about your department?

Host:  That is – those are some great terms and lessons you’ve used and that you just shared. I think what resonates the most to me is that recruitment is not a season. Right. And it is an ongoing process of building relationships and you’re right, it’s not a search firm just looking for somebody. It is who do you network with and knowing where to actually find them. I had a friend of mine who is Latino, but from Argentina, lived in the vast majority of his professional career was in Seattle. And it was a chair of Surgery and he was really – I won’t use the term desperate, but he was committed to recruit African American faculty and residents.  And there just not are a lot of them in Seattle. It’s a five percent minority population particularly of African American in numbers and you don’t end up in Seattle by accident. It’s a fun town but you don’t get there because you are on your way to San Jose. You end up having to fly directly. But he went to every time he met an African American leader, he says, I’m looking for this. And there happens to be a nerdy weird little group, it’s called the Society of Black Academics Surgeons. Which most people would think – I didn’t know such thing existed. But it’s well-established, started probably in the 1980s by a number of – a few senior white surgeons and a few black surgeons who felt – I mean powerful surgeons at that day academicians who felt it was really necessary to have a clear identification for black academic surgeons.

So, it is a quite influential powerful group in the world of academic surgery. And so, he didn’t know about it but he finally – he knew several presidents and he didn’t know that he knew several presidents and he also realized that the group also has honorary fellows who are all white. So, that it had a network for him, and it became a source for him to recruit two to three African American women surgeons to come to Seattle, but it was through no traditional means. It was really being intentional, making it clear what you wanted to do, discovering networks you normally would never know about, having that organization come visit your campus for their annual meeting so you can introduce your world to them so they can tell everybody about that job. It was an effective way to do it and he was willing and understood the need.

So, I fully agree and resonate all those things you’ve said. One of the things we’ve said in the School of Medicine and I want to hear your comments on it, because of your background and academic expertise. I’ve said first to our faculty when I first came because of my experience in Minnesota with a lot of fortune 500 companies. That diversity in my mind is first and foremost about excellence. I learned from multiple boards there that if that board was homogenous, they were not their best. Right? If the thought process of everything they had to do came from a singular point of view that didn’t have diversity included they were not competitive. Now equity is a very credible reason to do it. But I wanted to clarify for my leaders that one reason is not an option. It’s not that I just on a kick because I want to see some color, it’s because you’re not your best if you don’t have them. You’re something less than what you should be.

And that’s the level of accountability that I hold them to. If you think I want you to have a great department, you aren’t great until there’s color, significant people of color in your department. And I’m here to help you to do that. But that’s a measure of excellence. Not just a box you check on diversity. And clearly there’s an equity benefit but I think even more so there is this issue of you wanting to be your best. Does that resonate with you as well?

Dr. Thomas:  Oh certainly. I’ve had many undergraduate students over the years pursue graduate education and they will come back to me and say oh, this program is really recruiting me, what do you think. And they would easily be able to tell me about the number of under represented students in the program but I would always go back and say well tell me who they’ve graduated and how long did it take. Because for me, that’s a better indicator of what your experience may be like.

Host:  Yes, I can imagine.

Dr. Thomas:  So, it’s interesting that you share that. So this week, the College of Arts and Sciences launched a campaign around race and social justice. And yesterday, we launched a new initiative around developing a more multicultural curriculum. So, incentivizing faculty to develop new courses, or reimagining current courses in ways that would provide more content around under represented groups, women, the disabled, and the intersections of those various dimensions of identity. And the goal there is really about how do we prepare our students to live, thrive, and lead in a more diverse society. By again, adopting a colorblind mindset that we train people in the ways that we were trained is just not sufficient. And it’s not going to lead to the levels of outcomes that we expect for our students.

Host:  So, as you mentioned what you’re starting to do with the college; UAB clearly by paper and by experience is a uniquely diverse student body. Tell me your first impressions. You’ve been at a traditional flagship state school for most of your career. UAB is a little bit of an abnormality. It’s sort of a tweener. Not truly a traditional flagship school, and yet not just a truly urban school either. What have been your early observations both about opportunities and surprises?

Dr. Thomas:  You know I feel as though UAB represents more of my own upbringing. I think my interests in pursuing this opportunity once I got to know the university more, was this was a unique opportunity for me to support, guide, and see students like myself kind of reach their potential and their goals. First gen students, students of color, so, that’s why it’s been so exciting for me. In the time that I was at Georgia, I saw some significant shifts. When I first arrived in 1993, it was a flagship that really trained students from across the state. But with the implementation of the Hope Scholarship and subsequently the Zell Miller Scholarship which gave free tuition for students who had like a 3.8 and a certain level on their SAT or ACT. The institution started serving students from the Atlanta metro, primarily. And so even for the black students, who I think make up only seven percent, even those students were coming from professional families. I used to teach a freshmen seminar every year. Can We Talk About Race? And so it would attract almost a majority of minority students and we would go around the room and students would tell me about where they were from, their parents. These were the kids of anesthesiologists and surgeons, and lawyers and so they were not first gen kids. They were not kids from south Georgia or from north Georgia or the coast. They were primarily kids who had resources, who had educational opportunities and great. Good for Georgia. But I think for someone whose reached this level in my career, I wanted to find a way to meet the needs of students who are like myself. I think other people have opportunities to do that. I want to have that opportunity as well.

Host:  That is great. So, in the context now that the other thing that’s unique about UAB, and maybe different than Georgia, is that you now have a university that actually has a sort of a health platform. And School of Medicine obviously but other schools of health services. Tell me what you see the opportunities are, broadly and specifically maybe with the School of Medicine, with the Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Thomas:  Yes, and I am still adjusting to that honestly. Even I spoke with a colleague this morning about the two days it took for me to decide what my name would be on my ID because I normally would just put my first name. But I needed to check around and finally, a few people said no Dr. Thomas. And I’m like oh. They are like well, it’s the medical history of the institution. And I’m like oh okay, I’ll give in on this one. So, again, I’m still adjusting to this, but I think one of the areas in which the Arts and Sciences, especially the social sciences might contribute to the medical on health mission of the institution is around cultural competence. And not simply from a workplace scenario but also how would are doctors, nurses, physician assistants behave, serve and treat differently if they understood the history of African Americans in regard not only to the syphilis experiments but the trials that poor people of color have been put through from the times of slavery on forward.

And today I think the conversation is around populations who are imprisoned and their families feeling unable to turn down “opportunities” when they are presented to them to participate in trials that are connected to mental health, assessing risk for future criminal behavior in the siblings of people who are in prison. All sorts of histories that perhaps the medical establishment has not really thought about or had a responsibility in the past to I think share and convey to students. Because that history is in room when practitioners and physicians are meeting with those families. Those stories get passed down from generation to generation and there is a climate of distrust that health providers have to understand in order to best meet the needs of the people that they are trying to serve.

Host:  We have a course which is the first course that students get exposed to during medical school called Patient Doctor and Society. It is a course that really begins to have them think about the backgrounds, the distance travelled, the world that their patients live in when they meet them particularly if they are of different ethnic backgrounds. Because most of them, many of them, I can’t say most; many would never had substantive relationships with anybody who comes from that background and the assumptions and the mistrust can be significant on both sides. I can see that’s a space where getting maybe some part of your world to share in addition to what is done for people to be fully aware of the responsibility as a caregiver to know as much as you can the world of the patients you’re treating.

Being able to speak and understand their world is just short of speaking their language gives a tremendous amount of comfort that you might understand who they are and it allows the beginning of trust almost at the level where someone is speaking a foreign language and when they hear someone speak that language, it just gets them to change their whole perspective of the world they are in. Because they think and hope somebody can identify with them. So, I look forward to that. Let me ask you this, what do you think of – do you have a platform around bioethics because one of the things we face now in the world of precision medicine and genomic studies is the issue around the bioethical considerations of enrolling and appropriately managing populations of diverse backgrounds in these areas largely because of our past history and largely because of the long standing disenfranchised that we’ve seen in relationship to social determinants of health.

Host:  Yeah. I think that’s exactly spot on and something certainly we discussed I think during my interview with the philosophy department. But I think it’s more than kind of bioethics. It’s also around the use of data and bioinformatics. So, I could imagine some sort of conversation between the health units on campus, philosophy, computer science around again, the appropriate use of data, the collection of data and for what purposes are all really critical issues right now.

Host:  Well we actually have faculty who have appointments in your department of computer science. So, we are trying to pursue that, and we’ll try to take advantage. Let me end on one final question that I think I’m going to ask you to address faculty broadly. But here in the school, but also broadly. What are the messages you want to share from your experiences for women of color who are advancing their careers in an academic community? What’s the currency? What are the relationships that matter? And what are the goals you need to have to be successful?

Dr. Thomas:  Well they are probably already pretty high performing. Many of them I think are likely to have had an experience where they may have been the only person like them in the room. And so, it’s critical to find opportunities for collaboration, partnership, and networking. Even if that means stepping out beyond kind of the medical enterprise. Because there are some shared experiences around being the first of your kind or being a pioneer, the isolation, dynamics with peers but also with family. I wrote a chapter several years ago that about every four months pops on Twitter and I get 1000 new followers and it addresses the experience of under represented people who are recruited into new environments. Moving from pet to threat. And women of color especially have really kind of grabbed onto that concept of early in their careers, they are embraced. They are kind of shown off a bit. They change the optics of a department but oftentimes they feel underutilized and perhaps seen and promoted for the wrong things.

Oftentimes they opt out. Those who stay around sometimes feel as though the rewards and recognitions aren’t there and that sometimes people see them as a threat. And the threat is really to the status quo. So, it’s important for us to have opportunities to talk about those dynamics with one another and validate our experiences so that we can support each other in moving forward.

Host:  That is an outstanding way for us to end. Great advice and great insight to the transition from pet to threat. I can understand what you mean, and I think that will be great value for our listeners to understand a real significant topic to have conversation about and a culture to change. Dr. Thomas, thank you so much for taking time. I know your school has high demands on you. And I feel a bit guilty pulling you away to do this. Because I’m sure there are many who want a conversation but I’m very appreciative of you taking the time to do so and to share your experience and to meet our medical community in the School of Medicine and in UAB Medicine. Thank you so much.

Dr. Thomas:  Thank you Dean Vickers. I’m very happy to be here.

Host:  Absolutely.