Medical illustrators hear Raven Baxter's opening-day keynote at their 75th annual meeting

Raven Baxter gave the opening-day keynote of the Association of Medical Illustrators' 75th annual meeting on July 20, 2021. Her talk, "Unapologetically You in STEM," was Session 1 of the online conference, which ran July 20 to 28.

The session began at 3 p.m. Eastern. It followed the welcome, the president's address and a segment on the association's history that opened its Salon exhibit.

The association's Board of Governors had moved the meeting online because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Four days before the keynote, as the Delta variant spread, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told a White House briefing that "this is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated."

According to the association's program, "Raven speaks from her unique perspective as a scientist and educator and her STEM pathway." The program said she would teach attendees how to be themselves in STEM, and the broader impacts of doing so. The session was listed under diversity, science communication, inclusion and equity. It carried continuing-education credit in business and biomedical science.

The keynote came five months after the association launched #AMIdiversity. In a February 2021 statement, its Diversity Committee said the field had been "largely male and largely white." It wrote that illustrations used by medical schools "include depictions of mostly white, male, able-bodied figures." Researchers had reported a similar gap in medical publishing. A July 2020 letter in the British Journal of Dermatology found an absence of images of skin of color in publications on the skin signs of COVID-19.

The association dates to July 1945, when 30 delegates met at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago and named it. About 55 illustrators were charter members. Many founders had studied under Max Brödel, who led Art as Applied to Medicine at Johns Hopkins, the first school of medical illustration, from 1911. The first annual meeting was held in Philadelphia in 1946.

By 2021, the international nonprofit counted more than 800 members across four continents. Its mission, in its own words, "furthers the use of visual media to advance life sciences, medicine, and healthcare." The 75th meeting marked the milestone with a virtual AMI History Art Gallery beside the Salon.

Baxter is a molecular biologist and science communicator. She had defended her dissertation at the University at Buffalo in June 2021, and Fortune named her to its 40 Under 40 in health in 2020. Two months after this keynote, she gave a separate talk with the same title at VOICES 2021.

The recording was available only to registrants. The July 20 program is archived, and the association's history is on its website.