Diversity of perspective, including race/ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, physical abilities, socioeconomic status, religion, and other life experiences, is essential to enhancing the training experience for all residents and providing the best care for patients across the system. The program seeks applicants who have a balance of attributes that allows the promotion of social and racial justice, prioritizes the values of patients and the broader community, and combats individual and structural racism.

System Wide

UT Southwestern is committed to Diversity and Inclusion, recognizing the importance of achieving excellence in every area. The university has a system-wide committee that promotex equity, justice, and diversity, with each department designating representatives, and many departments having their own committees to promote department-specific efforts. In addition to these efforts, many education domains across campus have ongoing efforts.

Undergraduate Medical Education

The existing Office for Student Diversity and Inclusion, led by Vice President and Chief Institutional Opportunity Officer Dr. Shawna Nesbitt, provides local mentorship and support for national organization engagement (SNMA, LMSA, PRIDE) for medical students in addition to pipeline high school, college, and pre-med programs.

Recently, UT Southwestern's Medical School established an Ad Hoc Committee to the Medical Education Curriculum Committee on Health Disparities to explore meaningful curricular reform that is longitudinal and equips students with a strong foundation in understanding the systemic and structural aspects of health disparities including racism, preparing them to advocate for change.  This curriculum will be multi-modal, will include assessment/testing of concepts, and will be modeled after very specific objectives recommended by the AAMC.

UT Southwestern faculty, including Dale Okorodudu, M.D., lead the way in supporting the path to medical school for underrepresented minorities.

Graduate Medical Education

The HEAL Program, for underrepresented groups, provides mentorship, career development, and networking opportunities for house staff. The Housestaff Mentoring Network matches trainees with faculty who share interests, goals, or align on specific areas of diversity or life experiences. The Minority Housestaff Association is a group of current trainees dedicated to wellness, peer support, diversity recruitment, and community outreach.

Faculty Development

The Department of Internal Medicine’s Vice Chair for Diversity and Inclusion, Quinn Capers IV, M.D., also serves as the Associate Dean for Faculty Diversity and promotes anti-racism training and application efforts for faculty and leaders across campus.

In the past two years, more than 300 Internal Medicine faculty members attended a series of Bias Reduction in Internal Medicine (BRIM) workshops, and the Department of Pediatrics is now implementing the same curriculum across the department. Workshops focused on faculty-learner interactions and faculty patient interactions, and how implicit bias can influence recruitment of trainees and faculty.

The Office of Faculty Diversity sponsors a quarterly faculty and resident virtual book clubs to mutually explore autobiographies, novels, and other humanities resources to promote ongoing conversation about racial injustice and its impact on health. Resent books include Yaa Gyasi's "Homegoing" and Bryan Stevenson's "Just Mercy."