The Black Association at Salk (BAS) affinity group invites the Salk community to celebrate Black History Month and attend the annual BlackInSTEM event. This panel features outstanding scientists across diverse disciplines who will share their research and professional journeys. This event aims to raise awareness, broaden opportunities for mentorship, and support professional and academic growth.

Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Panel discussion + Q&A: 1:00 – 2:30 p.m.
Light networking reception: 2:30 – 4:00 p.m.

Location: Conrad T. Prebys Auditorium, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, 10010 N Torrey Pines Rd. La Jolla, CA 92037

Registration deadline: February 14, 2025

Register Now

KARINE A. GIBBS
Dr. Karine A. Gibbs studies the social behaviors of tiny organisms. Her team wants to know how bacteria recognize one another, engage in collective behaviors like territory formation, and cause disease. They use molecular biology, biochemistry, and live-cell imaging to examine shapeshifting, fast-moving residents (and opportunistic pathogens) of humans and animals. Dr. Gibbs (A.B., Harvard University; Ph.D., Stanford University) is an Associate Professor of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering in 2012. Dr. Gibbs, a Jamaican American, enjoys running, biking, and skiing with family and friends.

GENTRY N. PATRICK
Dr. Patrick is the Kavli and Dr. William and Marisa Rastetter Chancellor’s Endowed Chair in Neurobiology and Professor in the Department of Neurobiology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of California San Diego.  Dr. Patrick is a leader in the field of ubiquitin-dependent protein turnover in neurons in health and neurodegenerative disease with a particular interest in the trafficking and turnover of synaptic proteins including AMPA-type glutamate receptors. He served as Director of Mentorship and Diversity for the Division of Biological Sciences at UC San Diego and served as the Associate Director of the Neurosciences Graduate Program (NGP) at UC San Diego from 2013 to 2019.  Dr. Patrick received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1999 after working in the laboratory of Dr. Li-Huei Tsai. He was a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation and a United Negro College Fund/Merck postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Erin Schuman at California Institute of Technology. Dr. Patrick joined the UC San Diego faculty in 2004.

Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Dr. Patrick’s lived experience is a testament to the power to access, mentorship, and advocacy. His personal and professional journey into Neuroscience and academia has presented him with opportunities to leverage his own experience as an underrepresented minority student in STEM to innovate and advocate for systemic change in STEM education. Committed to diversifying the STEM and healthcare profession pipeline by building networks of support and access for under-resourced communities, Dr. Patrick has made a significant impact across the San Diego community.

In 2018, Dr. Patrick he created and launched the PATHways to STEM (PATHS) thru Enhanced Access and Mentorship scholars program.  The PATHS program was funded by a $6.9 mil grant from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI)  to support partnership between UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, and University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), for the replication of UMBC’s Meyerhoff Scholars Program to both UC campuses.  The purpose of the program is to “increase the number, persistence, and success of under-resourced and underrepresented minority (URM) students in STEM in San Diego.“  The integrated approach adopted by the PATHS Program leverages dynamic, multilateral partnerships to systematically address historic challenges facing students from socio-economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in San Diego and across California. The PATHS Program’s all-access model for support, empowerment, and professional exposure will mobilize a new, diverse generation of STEM leaders.  In 2021, he was named the founding Director of the Center for Empathy and Social Justice in Human Health (CESJHH) within the Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion (TDSI). The mission of CESJHH is to bring empathy and compassion to the work of addressing health injustice through research, communication, and advancing representation of marginalized communities in the STEM and healthcare profession pipeline.

QUINTON SMITH
Quinton Smith is an Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and holds joint appointments in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering. He received his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of New Mexico in 2011 and his Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2017. As a graduate student, he was mentored by Dr. Sharon Gerecht and used engineering approaches to investigate the role of mechanical forces on stem cell differentiation towards vascular populations. He was named a Siebel Scholar as a graduate student, and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and a National Institutes of Health F31 fellowship supported his work. As a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Hanna Gray Postdoctoral fellow under the mentorship of Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Smith focused on leveraging microfluidic and organoid technology to model liver development and morphogenic processes. Dr. Smith was recently named a PEW Biomedical Scholar, which supports his research at UCI using stem cell-based model systems to study health disparities in the context of metabolic and cardiovascular disorders.