To our Stanford Community,

In response to the recent racist attacks on Professor Hakeem Jefferson and the open letter published in The Stanford Daily from the Early Career Black Faculty Group, we, the chairs of the Basic Bioscience Departments in the Stanford Schools of Medicine, Humanities and Sciences, and Engineering, the directors of the Biosciences Institutes and the directors of the Interdisciplinary Biosciences Programs, express our support for Professor Jefferson and the requests made in the open letter. We condemn the coordinated, racist attacks against Professor Jefferson and call on ourselves, our community and our University to help protect and defend our Black colleagues in response to these attacks. We commit to developing proactive strategies, in coordination with our Black faculty, to prevent these attacks in the future, and when we cannot prevent them, to respond to them quickly and to mitigate their negative impacts. We hope that we can help Stanford become a community where all of our members feel safe and included as we pursue our scholarly endeavors and career aspirations.

— Chairs of Basic Biomedical Science Departments in the Schools of Medicine, Engineering, and Humanities and Science, directors of the Biosciences Institutes and the directors of the Interdisciplinary Biosciences Programs

Stephen A. Baccus — Chair, Department of Neurobiology

Melissa L. Bondy — Chair, Department of Epidemiology and Population Health

James K. Chen — Chair, Department of Chemical and Systems Biology

Jennifer R. Cochran — Chair, Department of Bioengineering

Martha S. Cyert — Chair, Department of Biology

Miriam B. Goodman — Chair, Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology

Sherril L. Green — Chair, Department of Comparative Medicine

Theodore S. Jardetzky — Chair, Department of Structural Biology

Paul S. Mischel — Vice Chair for Research, Department of Pathology

Thomas Montine — Chair, Department of Pathology

Douglas K. Owens — Chair, Department of Health Policy

Sylvia K. Plevritis — Chair, Department of Biomedical Data Science

David S. Schneider — Chair, Department of Microbiology and Immunology

Michael Snyder — Chair, Department of Genetics

Aaron F. Straight — Chair, Department of Biochemistry

Anne Villeneuve — Chair, Department of Developmental Biology

Steven Artandi — Director, Stanford Cancer Institute

Carolyn Bertozzi — Director, ChEM-H Institute

Mark M. Davis — Director, Institute for Immunity, Transplantation, and Infection

Mary Leonard — Director, Maternal and Child Health Research Institute

Crystal Mackall — Director, Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy

William Newsome — Director, Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute

Carla Shatz — Director, Bio-X Program

Irving Weissman — Director, Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine

Joseph C. Wu — Director, Cardiovascular Institute

Olivia Martinez — Director, Immunology Interdisciplinary Graduate Program

K.C. Huang — Director, Biophysics Interdisciplinary Graduate Program

Tushar Desai — Co-Director, Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine Interdisciplinary Graduate Program

Gerald Spangrude — Co-Director, Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine Interdisciplinary Graduate Program

Julien Sage — Co-Director, Cancer Biology Interdisciplinary Graduate Program

Laura Attardi — Co-Director, Cancer Biology Interdisciplinary Graduate Program

Justin Gardner — Co-Director, Neurobiology Interdisciplinary Graduate Program

Merritt Maduke — Co-Director, Neurobiology Interdisciplinary Graduate Program