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Marie A Bernard was born in New York City and moved to Oklahoma City, USA, as a young child when her physician parents established a private practice there. “They were told that there were a lot of opportunities for Black doctors in Oklahoma”, she says. “It was segregated at that time, segregation that persisted in southern parts of the US for many years…I grew up in a segregated system until doors opened as I entered high school.” Following in her parents’ footsteps, Bernard studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1976, before training in internal medicin...

Microbiologist Senjuti Saha is the Director of the non-profit Child Health Research Foundation (CHRF), in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and a strong advocate for equity in global health research. When she received a grant in 2018 to set up a sequencing facility at CHRF and got the non-governmental organisation's first sequencing machine, she says, “I wanted to show the world that you could be anywhere in the world and be able to sequence. You don’t have to ship samples out to the US or UK. You can sequence wherever you are and everybody's capable.

Margo Greenwood was born in Wetaskiwin, AB, Canada, to a Cree father and English mother, and was raised and educated in Ponoka, AB. Both places are located in Treaty 6 territory. Tragically, Greenwood lost both her parents, “in my mid-teens”, she recalls, “and so I was really on my own”. It was an experience that influenced the focus of her work. Greenwood is now Professor in the Education programme at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) in Prince George, BC, Canada. She is also Academic Leader of the National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health, hosted at UNBC, I...

Yin Paradies, the Alfred Deakin Professor and Chair in Race Relations at Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia started his academic life studying applied mathematics and computing. His first job, at the Indigenous Health Statistics Unit of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, took him towards his work in heath inequalities, on racism as a determinant of Indigenous health in Australia, and his current focus on decolonisation and Indigenous knowledges and perspectives. Paradies, who is a Wakaya man, and “the first person”, he says, “in any part of my family to get a PhD”, has sinc...

Delan Devakumar, Professor of Global Child Health and Co-Director of the Centre for the Health of Women, Children and Adolescents at University College London (UCL), UK, has always understood racism and what it is like to be discriminated against. About a year before he was born, his parents’ house in Sri Lanka was burnt down. “It was a targeted attack”, he says. “My father comes from the Tamil minority group.” Later, as a south Asian boy growing up in north Wales, UK, he experienced racism first hand and recalls how “in the 1980s and 90s there weren’t many people who looked like...