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Roy Hamilton\u2019s varied racial, social, and religious identities helped him in his former role as a chief diversity leader at the University of Pennsylvania<\/a> \u2014 and now they will help him in his new role as chair of Penn\u2019s faculty senate.<\/p>\n The behavioral neurologist at the Perelman School of Medicine is the son of a Japanese immigrant and an African American. He is married to a white woman who is Jewish, while he was raised as one of Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses and now is a secular humanist. And one of the couple\u2019s children is LGBTQ+; he is<\/a> an ally. Add to that growing up in a lower middle-class family and learning to navigate an Ivy League education system, first as an undergraduate and then as a medical school student.<\/p>\n That background has made it easier for him to understand a range of factors in his own life and how they affect his thinking, Hamilton said, and more readily understand where others are coming from and look for common ground. <\/p>\n \u00bb READ MORE: In a rare interview, Penn\u2019s president opens up about leading the school under the Trump administration<\/a><\/p>\n Those same skills, he said, will be just as valuable as he steps into a position leading Penn\u2019s faculty senate, the representative body for the school\u2019s approximate 3,000-member standing faculty in a system of shared governance.<\/p>\n Hamilton said one of his primary goals will be to make the faculty senate representative of the collective views of a vastly diverse staff and foster conversation across those views. <\/p>\n \u201cIt does call for a person who is interested in hearing and honoring a multiplicity of opinions and perspectives and then coming to some kind of collective consensus as to how to act in the face of that,\u201d Hamilton, 53, said during an interview in his office this month. <\/p>\n The senate plays a key role on campus discussing issues<\/a> of faculty concern, making policy recommendations, responding to regular reports of university administrators, and providing oversight on issues that include academic freedom and research policy. And Hamilton, who has spent 24 years at Penn, comes in as chair at a pivotal time. The school is searching for a new president to replace J. Larry Jameson, who will step down<\/a> next summer, and continuing to operate under the scrutiny of the federal government, which has targeted elite universities. There are ongoing concerns about access to federal research funding, and the school this year plans to adopt<\/a> new guidelines for open expression on campus that have drawn strong objections from faculty. <\/p>\n \u00bb READ MORE: In a rare interview, Penn\u2019s president opens up about leading the school under the Trump administration<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cAs Penn confronts the major questions of our time, the Faculty Senate\u2019s contribution is not to provide a single set of answers, but to pursue a constructive process of thoughtful deliberation and principled engagement conducted in good faith,\u201d he said in a message <\/a>to faculty last week. <\/p>\n \u2018Trying to thread a needle\u2019<\/p>\n Hamilton has been in the hot seat before. He was the medical school\u2019s vice dean for inclusion, diversity, and equity when President Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s administration last year cracked down on diversity initiatives in higher education and Penn scrubbed<\/a> its websites of those programs. Hamilton\u2019s own title was changed to special adviser to the dean.<\/p>\n \u00bb READ MORE: Penn scrubs diversity initiatives from its website to comply with Trump order<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cIt would be disingenuous to say that it was easy,\u201d Hamilton said. \u201cIt was a huge change. It was a difficult change. It was a change that I wish the institution didn\u2019t feel like it had to make.\u201d<\/p>\n But Hamilton \u2014 who for more than a decade held administrative roles centered on diversity and inclusion at Penn \u2014 said he understood that Penn felt it had to make changes, given its reliance on federal research funding. Hamilton pointed out that he gets National Institutes of Health funding for his work. <\/p>\n \u201cIf you jeopardize some of the fundamentals of how the institution works and runs, you jeopardize lots of positions and roles, including the roles of persons like myself and the very diverse lab that I run,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I understand the Sophie\u2019s choice that the medical school was faced with. That doesn\u2019t mean I have to be happy about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, he said, some of the work continues.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are the same people, and I believe that Penn\u2019s values will endure,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Penn at times has stood up to the Trump administration and at times negotiated. It ardently opposed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission\u2019s quest to get lists of Jewish people on campus for its investigation into antisemitism. The EEOC dropped its subpoena<\/a> last month and said it would not take further measures to seek the information through other means. <\/p>\n \u00bb READ MORE: Trump administration drops its subpoena seeking names of Jewish people at Penn <\/a><\/p>\n Last summer, the school entered<\/a> into an agreement with the administration over the past participation of transgender athlete Lia Thomas<\/a> on the women\u2019s swim team. Penn met <\/a>a number of the White House\u2019s demands, including adhering to the Trump administration\u2019s definitions of sex, female, male, women, and men only as they apply to athletics, and sending letters of apology to female athletes who felt aggrieved by Thomas<\/a>\u2019 position on their team during the 2021-22 season. <\/p>\n \u201cPenn has acted judiciously in a difficult time\u201d when responding to Trump, Hamilton said. \u201cIt\u2019s trying to thread a needle. Time will tell whether that strategy ultimately pays off.\u201d<\/p>\n Hamilton\u2019s upbringing was instrumental to his interest in diversity. <\/p>\n \u201cEvery step of the way has felt like I was \u2026 some kind of explorer finding some new territory,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve historically been very interested in seeing to it that other people don\u2019t have that level of alienness in the process.\u201d<\/p>\n Raised as one of Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses, then on to Harvard<\/p>\n Born in Long Beach, Calif., Hamilton grew up as one of Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses. His late father worked in a brewery and his mother, who got her undergraduate degree in Japan, earned money as a seamstress, working from the family home. (She later returned to college, earned a master\u2019s degree, and became a teacher.)<\/p>\n Neither of his parents was raised in the Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses faith, but his father had several family members who belonged. When his mother emigrated from Japan, she told his father she would like to go to church, and he took her to a Kingdom Hall, the worship place of Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses.<\/p>\n \u201cBy the time I was a small child, she was one of Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses, and so that was the background in which I was raised,\u201d Hamilton said. \u201cI was one of those guys, even as a small child, sort of door-to-door trying to talk to people about the Bible and what God had planned.\u201d<\/p>\n But he and his family parted ways with the religion when it came time for Hamilton to go to college. Hamilton was in the gifted and talented program as a child, did well in school, and wanted to continue. At that time, the faith generally discouraged higher education, he said.<\/p>\n He recalled congregation elders pulling him aside and questioning his intent to apply to college.<\/p>\n \u201cIt had the same kind of vibe as if I had been caught smoking in the boys\u2019 bathroom,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Hamilton did not just go to college \u2014 he went to Harvard University. His father feared flying, so Hamilton took the train from California and arrived three days later in Massachusetts.<\/p>\n The Ivy League experience was \u201ca huge adjustment,\u201d he said. One of his roommates hung out with a son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, he recalled. A student down the hall was dating then-Vice President Al Gore\u2019s daughter.<\/p>\n He got his bachelor\u2019s degree in psychology and graduated from Harvard\u2019s medical school, where he said he felt a bit of \u201cimpostor syndrome.\u201d He also got a master\u2019s degree in health sciences technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. <\/p>\n At Harvard, his interest in the brain grew and was amplified when he worked in the lab of cognitive neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher, whose work led to the discovery of the region of the brain that processes facial recognition. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the reason why we recognize incredibly subtle differences between faces,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Another key moment came when neurologist Alvaro Pascual-Leone visited his medical school seminar and showed how magnets aimed at the head could temporarily affect behavior in the brain.<\/p>\n \u201cI was like, \u2018That is the most amazing thing I\u2019ve ever seen in my life,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201c\u2018I\u2019m going to do that for the rest of my life.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Magnets and the brain<\/p>\n After an internship at UCLA, in 2002 he came to Penn, where he now runs the Laboratory for Cognition and Neural Stimulation, as well as the Brain Stimulation, Translation, Innovation and Modulation Center. Putting it simply, he said: \u201cI take magnets. I put them on people\u2019s brains and I make them think different things.\u201d<\/p>\n He sees patients struggling with memory and cognition disorders, such as dementia and aphasia.<\/p>\n \u201cThe central but not sole clinical focus of my research is in persons with language loss,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n He is married to Dawn Mechanic-Hamilton, a clinical neuropsychologist and associate professor in Penn\u2019s department of neurology. <\/p>\n