Mihal Emberton, MD, MPH, MS
Pictured with my parents in 2003, upon starting medical school.
My journey to unravel the science of democracy and social justice could be considered ordinary in origin. I was born in 1973 to two UC Berkeley-trained chemists and am the oldest of three children. I graduated from UC San Diego with a degree in biochemistry-cell biology in 1996 and got my Master of Science in biology a year later. While nurturing a career in research and education, I then received my Master of Public Health from UCLA in 2001. My passion for science, education, and social justice culminated in a medical education for which I received my MD in 2007, explored an internship in general surgery for a year, and graduated from my family medicine residency in 2011.
What makes my journey unique, however, are the questions I pondered and wrestled with along the way. As a young graduate student in the 1990s, I began to wonder about the “rules” of teaching and learning. I intuitively understood that standing in front of a lecture hall and telling students what would be on the exam was not teaching. The literature at the time discussed active learning, creating an environment where students were actively processing the new concepts in real time, allowing the teacher to find ways to enhance student understanding and application of the new concepts. My efforts to create such a learning culture were rewarded with consecutive teaching awards at UCLA and an invitation to create and facilitate a graduate curriculum to teach others how to teach.
Then, as a young medical provider in the 2000s, I began to witness unconscious bias in medicine and wondered what the “rules” of unconscious bias were. The medical literature was sparse on the subject and so I began to explore the social science, political science, and psychology literature, but the literature merely outlined the “patterns” of unconscious bias, the end result of bias, rather than the etiology of unconscious bias. Intuitively I understood that unconscious bias was a key element to social justice but needed to unravel the connections further.
And finally, as a practicing physician and university faculty in the 2010s, I began to scrutinize the patterns of great leadership and lacking leadership, wondering about the “rules” that cause these patterns. It was at this juncture that I realized that the patterns of learning, unconscious bias, and leadership are the same patterns.
While we often devise experiments to discover patterns of human behavior, I recognized that the patterns of learning, hierarchies, and unconscious bias have already been thoroughly described by thousands of years of human observations in disciplines such as education (Active Learning, Growth Mindset-Fixed Mindset, Montessori Education, Feedback-Feedforward evaluations), social science (unconscious bias, Social Styles Model), psychology (Psychological Safety), medicine (mood disorders, personality disorders, burnout, stress), political science (social justice, restorative justice, democracy, autocracy, fascism, cults, slavery), business (Six Sigma, Scrum, Agile, Lean, Humble Leadership, Servant Leadership, Theory Y-Theory X), history, religion, art, literature and music. Einstein emphasized the value of this type of integrative exploration in 1944 when he commented that,
“A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion— the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.”
Armed with this integrative insight and by gathering and sorting these patterns, I was able to uncover the “rules” and “pathways” that cause these universal patterns, rules and pathways that remain constant across culture, discipline, and time, unlocking the inextricable link between learning, unconscious bias, and social justice. With this Belief-Behavior Systems Archetype© we are now truly able to conquer and prevent burnout, discrimination, racism, xenophobia, sexism, and all the other unjust consequences of our human unconscious biases.
Raelyn Ruppel, MFA
Raelyn and I met in 2006 and were married a year later in December 2007. We then were one of the 18,000 couples to obtain a California marriage license in the summer of 2008 after the California State Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples can and should benefit from the socio-political protections of marriage.
Raelyn is an endlessly generous, forgiving, and supportive best friend, wife, and partner, as well as a phenomenal and loving parent. And, perhaps most notably, she is an amazing woman who volunteers endlessly to ensure the sustainability of our community and her passion for civic engagement.
Our Little Human and Budding Social Justice Advocate
We are so grateful to be blessed with raising a young person, one who challenges us to toggle into our democratic belief-behavior system© regularly.