Western University of Health Sciences’ College of Pharmacy celebrated the milestone 20th annual Ray Symposium April 2, 2026, on the WesternU California campus. Click below to watch the Ray Symposium in full.
Dr. Aaron E. Carroll, President & CEO of AcademyHealth, presented “Science You Can Trust: Leading with Evidence in a Distrustful Time.” Public trust in health institutions has been declining for some time, Carroll said. It was not caused by the pandemic, although the pandemic absolutely accelerated that.
“Only 23% of Americans have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the public interest, as of a poll in 2024, which is down 40% from 2020. So that has dropped significantly since the pandemic,” he said. “This is not just a science problem. And it’s not just a communications problem. It’s also a leadership problem. When we default to fear-based framing, when we cherry-pick evidence, or when we refuse to acknowledge trade-offs, we contribute to that erosion of trust.”
Carroll focused on three ways to combat this erosion of trust: lead with solution-focused research, embrace innovation with guardrails, and learn to communicate in ways that build trust.
“These are not just nice ideas. I think they’re actually obligations,” he said.
Carroll told the audience that everyone here is a leader in some way in their respective professions, and therefore shape how evidence is produced, how innovation is deployed, and how health information can reach people.
“You don’t need anyone’s permission to do this better. In your practice you can, today, present absolute, accurate numbers and risks, as well as the relative ones. You can acknowledge what we know and don’t know, and how sure we are. You can name trade-offs out loud. These are the risks, these are the benefits, and it’s up to you to make a choice,” Carroll said. “And if they don’t want to make a choice and they ask you to because they trust you so much, it’s totally fine to tell them what your choice would be and what you think. They’ve already given you the trust at that point. That’s fine, but make sure you have that trust first.”
He encouraged championing innovation, but with guardrails, and demanding that equity not be an afterthought.
“In your research you can ask, ‘how will this matter to patients? How will this matter to everyday people? And are we actually doing research that’s designed to solve a problem, or just point another one out?’” Carroll said. “You can build in evaluations from day one of everything that you do. This is not work that we can ignore. No single discipline owns evidence or communication or trust. We all do together. And we can build them together, or we could lose them together.”
The Ray Symposium, an annual interprofessional speaker series, honors Max D. Ray, MS, PharmD, Dean Emeritus of the WesternU College of Pharmacy. As Professor and Dean from 1996-2006, he created a stimulating educational environment that fostered excellence and professionalism.
