Leading Change at Berkeley Public Health: Building the Anti-racist Community for Justice and Social Transformative Change.

A transformative change grounded in a commitment to antiracism and racial and health equity is underway at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health. Responding to a confluence of national, state, and local circumstances, bold leadership, and a moral and disciplinary imperative to name and address racism as a root cause of health inequities, our community united around a common vision of becoming an antiracist institution. Berkeley Public Health has a long history of efforts supporting diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice. Building upon those efforts, we pursued an institution-wide initiative, one that creates a more equitable and inclusive school of public health that models and supports the development of future public health leaders, practitioners, scholars, and educators. Grounded in the principles of cultural humility, we recognized that our vision was a journey, not a destination. This article describes our efforts from June 2020 through June 2022 in developing and implementing ARC4JSTC (Anti-racist Community for Justice and Social Transformative Change), a comprehensive, multiyear antiracist change initiative encompassing faculty and workforce development, student experience, curriculum and pedagogy, community engagement outreach, and business processes. Our work is data informed, grounded in principles of change management, and focused on building internal capacity to promote long-term change. Our discussion of lessons learned and next steps helps to inform our ongoing work and antiracist institutional change efforts at other schools and programs of public health.

Unpredictable mealtimes rather than social jetlag affects acquisition and retention of hippocampal dependent memory.

Some degree of circadian rhythm disruption is hard to avoid in today's society. Along, with many other deleterious effects, circadian rhythm disruption impairs memory. One way to study this is to expose rats to daylengths that are outside the range of entrainment. As a result, circadian processes and behaviors occur during phases of the light dark cycle in which they typically would not. Even brief exposures to these day lengths can impair hippocampal dependent memory. In a recent report, we created an unentrainable light dark cycle that was intended to resemble aspects of social jetlag. As predictable mealtime impacts circadian entrainment, in that report, we also created an unpredictable meal schedule with the idea that failure to entrain to a meal might afford a disadvantage in some instances. Both of these manipulations impaired retention in a spatial water plus-maze task. Using the same manipulations, the present study investigated their effects on acquisition in distributed and massed spatial water plus-maze paradigms. As in other reports with unentrainable daylengths, acquisition was not affected by our lighting manipulation. Conversely, in accordance with our past report, unpredictable mealtimes had a harmful effect on hippocampal dependent memory. Notably, impaired acquisition in the distributed version, and impaired retention in the massed version. In tandem, these data suggest that failure to consolidate or retrieve the information is the likely culprit. The unpredictable mealtime manipulation offers a unique opportunity to study the effects of circadian entrainment on memory.

The Power of Place: Travel to Explore Structural Racism and Health Disparities.

PROBLEM: Dismantling structural racism is essential to achieving health equity, but there is little guidance for medical educators who wish to teach learners to recognize and confront structural racism. APPROACH: Critical consciousness provides a framework to identify and dismantle structural racism. Using a critical consciousness approach, the authors developed a novel 5-day travel experience to the American South for medical residents and faculty to explore the history and legacy of structural racism and the Civil Rights Movement. The purpose of the travel was to examine the connection between structural racism, especially anti-Black racism, and health disparities to better address health inequities within the participants' own home environment. Throughout the trip, faculty leaders applied principles of cultural humility and techniques from critical pedagogy, including recognizing the value of everyone in the room, creating cognitive disequilibrium, and promoting authentic dialogue. OUTCOMES: End-of-week surveys revealed that the trip was well received. Organizers learned important lessons related to faculty and resident dynamics, race-based affinity group meetings, and the respectful use of stories as a tool for learning. Post-trip surveys at 1, 6, and 12 months revealed 3 major themes: participants experienced (1) transformed understanding of systemic racism, (2) increased motivation and bravery to act when witnessing interpersonal and structural racism, and (3) increased practice of cultural humility. NEXT STEPS: Cultural humility and critical pedagogy can be used with travel to support learners in recognizing and confronting structural racism. The application of such techniques should be explored in local learning environments to foster commitment and action toward dismantling structural racism. In teaching structural racism, medical educators must be willing to consider new ways of teaching and learning.

Consistent meal times improve performance on a daily time-place learning task.

The ability of an animal to learn the spatiotemporal variability of stimuli is known as time-place learning (TPL). The present study investigated the role of the food-entrainable oscillator (FEO) in TPL. Rats were trained in an operant conditioning chamber which contained two levers that distributed a food reward, such that one lever provided food rewards in morning sessions, while the other lever provided food rewards in afternoon sessions. We expected that having access to the FEO would provide rats with more accurate depictions of time of day, leading to better performance. Rats received either one meal per day (1M group), which permitted FEO access, or many meals per day (MM group), which prevented FEO access. As predicted, 1M rats had a significantly higher percentage of correct first presses than MM rats. Once rats successfully learned the task, probe tests were conducted to determine the timing strategy used. Of the 10 rats that successfully learned the time-place discrimination, six used a circadian timing strategy. Future research should determine whether the advantage in learning seen in the rats having access to the FEO is specific to the daily TPL task used in this study, or to learning and memory tasks more generally.

Rats in a levered T-maze task show evidence of time-place discriminations in two different measures.

It is difficult for rats to learn to go to an arm of a T-maze to receive food that is dependent on the time of day, unless the amount of food in each daily session is different. In the same task, rats show evidence of time-place discriminations if they are required to press levers in the arms of the T-maze, but learning is only evident when the first lever press is considered, and not the first arm visited. These data suggest that rats struggle to use time as a discriminative stimulus unless the rewards/events differ in some dimension, or unless the goal locations can be visited prior to making a response. If both of these conditions are met in the same task, it might be possible to compare time-place learning in two different measures that essentially indicate performance before and after entering the arms of the T-maze. In the present study, we investigated time-place learning in rats with a levered T-maze task in which the amounts of food varied depending on the time of day. The first arm choices and first lever presses both indicated that the rats had acquired time-place discriminations, and both of these measures became significantly different from chance during the same block. However, there were subtle differences between the two measures, which suggest that time-place discrimination is aided by visiting the goal locations.