In this Inaugural Diversity Lecture I trace the diversity struggles in my own life over the past 46 years since the historic
1963 “I Have a Dream” speech of Martin Luther King, which has changed this nation forever. After a brief personal history,
the paper is divided into three major parts; “My consciousness raising years”, “Fulfilling the dream”, and NIH Minority Scholars
Program. The paper ends with some concluding thoughts on the importance of being taken seriously.
Keywords Diversity in biomedical engineering - Teaching - Civil rights
CUNY Distinguished Research Professor Sheldon Weinbaum received his BAE degree from RPI in 1959, his MS degree in Applied
Physics from Harvard in 1960 and his PhD degree in Engineering in 1963, also from Harvard. In the early part of his career
he was widely recognized for his contributions to re-entry aerodynamics and basic studies in fluid mechanics nearly 40 of
which have been published in the Journal Fluid Mechanics. Starting in the early 1970s he shifted his interest to transport
and cellular level biomechanical phenomena in the human body. He is widely recognized for the Weinbaum-Jij equation for microvascular
heat transfer, his discovery with Shu Chien of the endothelial pore for the entry of LDL cholesterol, his studies with S.
Cowin and M. Schaffler on fluid flow and mechanotransduction in bone, his studies on the role of the endothelial glycocalyx
in mechanotransduction and microvascular fluid exchange and the role of brush border microvilli in glomerulo tubular balance.
Most recently he has proposed a new hypothesis for vulnerable plaque rupture and a new concept for an airborne jet train that
flies on a soft porous track within cm of the earth’s surface at speeds approaching jet aircraft with 1/5 their fuel consumption.
He is one of eight living individuals elected to all three U.S. National Academies and is the only engineer to have received
a Guggenheim in the area of cell and molecular biology.