Workforce diversity is key to advancing One Health, scientists say

A new article highlights a critical issue in the One Health approach—an emerging global framework for tackling complex health challenges at the intersection of human, animal, and environmental health. In the article in The Lancet Planetary Health, scientists Amélie Desvars-Larrive and Fariba Karimi from the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) point out that One Health’s current framework fails to explicitly address workforce diversity.

According to Desvars-Larrive and Karimi, true innovation in solving public health challenges requires not just an interdisciplinary approach but also a diverse workforce that reflects a range of human differences—including ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, and more.

“We usually think of diversity in One Health in terms of teams with experts from different knowledge areas,” explains Desvars-Larrive, who leads CSH’s research team on Health Across Species. “After meeting Fariba at CSH, I learned that diversity goes far beyond that,” says Desvars-Larrive, also a professor in Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna.

“Diversity has multiple facets. As we argue here, those differences in terms of social constructs such as ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation, contribute to diverse lived experiences that are important when addressing complex health challenges,” says Karimi, who leads CSH’s research team on Algorithmic Fairness.

“Such global challenges are often complex problems and to solve them we need a diverse group of people to examine the problem from different angles and bring a variety of perspectives and methods,” explains Karimi, also a professor of Social Data Science at Graz University of Technology.

In her research, Karimi explores a wide range of social problems and phenomena through computational social science. Her recent work addresses the emergence of biases and inequality in social networks, as well as the visibility of minorities.

According to Desvars-Larrive and Karimi, diversity fosters creativity, reduces groupthink, and improves the quality of scientific research.

“Teams that encompass a diverse mix of genders, sociocultural backgrounds, and perspectives, while fostering inclusiveness, tend to be more productive, more competitive, more innovative, and better equipped to find effective science-based solutions. Notably, diversity in teams enhances community participation, particularly when researching minority populations,” add the CSH scientists.

“CSH fosters interdisciplinary research and communication, which allowed me to chat with Amélie about this topic ultimately leading to this shared understanding and this publication, showing the importance of creating space for diverse views,” adds Karimi.