Roy Hamilton’s varied racial, social, and religious identities helped him in his former role as a chief diversity leader at the University of Pennsylvania — and now they will help him in his new role as chair of Penn’s faculty senate.
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’s Witnesses and now is a secular humanist. And one of the couple’s children is LGBTQ+; he is 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.
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.
Those same skills, he said, will be just as valuable as he steps into a position leading Penn’s faculty senate, the representative body for the school’s approximate 3,000-member standing faculty in a system of shared governance.
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.
“It 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,” Hamilton, 53, said during an interview in his office this month.
The senate plays a key role on campus discussing issues 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 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 new guidelines for open expression on campus that have drawn strong objections from faculty.
“As Penn confronts the major questions of our time, the Faculty Senate’s 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,” he said in a message to faculty last week.
‘Trying to thread a needle’
Hamilton has been in the hot seat before. He was the medical school’s vice dean for inclusion, diversity, and equity when President Donald Trump’s administration last year cracked down on diversity initiatives in higher education and Penn scrubbed its websites of those programs. Hamilton’s own title was changed to special adviser to the dean.
“It would be disingenuous to say that it was easy,” Hamilton said. “It was a huge change. It was a difficult change. It was a change that I wish the institution didn’t feel like it had to make.”
But Hamilton — who for more than a decade held administrative roles centered on diversity and inclusion at Penn — 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.
“If 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,” he said. “So I understand the Sophie’s choice that the medical school was faced with. That doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.”
Still, he said, some of the work continues.
“We are the same people, and I believe that Penn’s values will endure,” he said.
Penn at times has stood up to the Trump administration and at times negotiated. It ardently opposed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s quest to get lists of Jewish people on campus for its investigation into antisemitism. The EEOC dropped its subpoena last month and said it would not take further measures to seek the information through other means.
Last summer, the school entered into an agreement with the administration over the past participation of transgender athlete Lia Thomas on the women’s swim team. Penn met a number of the White House’s demands, including adhering to the Trump administration’s 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’ position on their team during the 2021-22 season.
“Penn has acted judiciously in a difficult time” when responding to Trump, Hamilton said. “It’s trying to thread a needle. Time will tell whether that strategy ultimately pays off.”
Hamilton’s upbringing was instrumental to his interest in diversity.
“Every step of the way has felt like I was … some kind of explorer finding some new territory,” he said. “I’ve historically been very interested in seeing to it that other people don’t have that level of alienness in the process.”
Raised as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, then on to Harvard
Born in Long Beach, Calif., Hamilton grew up as one of Jehovah’s 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’s degree, and became a teacher.)
Neither of his parents was raised in the Jehovah’s 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’s Witnesses.
“By the time I was a small child, she was one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and so that was the background in which I was raised,” Hamilton said. “I 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.”
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.
He recalled congregation elders pulling him aside and questioning his intent to apply to college.
“It had the same kind of vibe as if I had been caught smoking in the boys’ bathroom,” he said.
Hamilton did not just go to college — he went to Harvard University. His father feared flying, so Hamilton took the train from California and arrived three days later in Massachusetts.
The Ivy League experience was “a huge adjustment,” 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’s daughter.
He got his bachelor’s degree in psychology and graduated from Harvard’s medical school, where he said he felt a bit of “impostor syndrome.” He also got a master’s degree in health sciences technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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.
“It’s the reason why we recognize incredibly subtle differences between faces,” he said.
“You can basically force the brain to fire,” he said. Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
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.
“I was like, ‘That is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life,’” he said. “‘I’m going to do that for the rest of my life.’”
Magnets and the brain
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: “I take magnets. I put them on people’s brains and I make them think different things.”
He sees patients struggling with memory and cognition disorders, such as dementia and aphasia.
“The central but not sole clinical focus of my research is in persons with language loss,” he said.
He is married to Dawn Mechanic-Hamilton, a clinical neuropsychologist and associate professor in Penn’s department of neurology.
Last year, Hamilton became chair elect of the senate, which functions under tri-chairs — chair-elect, current chair, and past chair — all one-year terms for a three-year commitment.
The senate earlier this year was charged with naming faculty to serve on a committee outlining priorities for Penn’s next president. Among its priorities this year, the senate will focus on implications of artificial intelligence on teaching and learning, he said.
“While Penn’s future remains full of promise, the road ahead may not always be easy,” he wrote to faculty. “Difficult moments, however, provide an opportunity to think carefully about the principles that give purpose to our work and ought to guide our decisions.”
