The funders’ perspective: Lessons learned from the National Institutes of Health Diversity Program Consortium evaluation

Advancing diversity in the biomedical research workforce is critical to the ability of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to achieve its mission. The NIH Diversity Program Consortium is a unique, 10-year program that builds upon longstanding training and research capacity-building activities to promote workforce diversity. It was designed to rigorously evaluate approaches to enhancing diversity in the biomedical research workforce at the student, faculty, and institutional level. In this chapter we describe (a) the program’s origins, (b) the consortium-wide evaluation, including plans, measures, challenges, and solutions, and (c) how lessons learned from this program are being leveraged to strengthen NIH research-training and capacity-building activities and evaluation efforts.