Netz Lab DEI Action Plan
Our plan to diversify lab demographics includes:
- Active recruitment of students from underrepresented groups by Dr. Arroyo. This includes participating at specialized national conferences including, for example, SACNAS and ABRCMS.
- Continue to develop and grow our academic partnership with the Vieira Lab at California State University Dominguez Hills and with the Lukeman Lab at St. John’s University Queens, to offer access to advanced research experiences and equipment to students from CSUDH and St. John’s.
- Host local undergraduate students from historically excluded backgrounds for research internships and/or mentoring sessions.
- Advocate to promote diversity in departmental seminar series by inviting speakers in our field from diverse backgrounds.
Our cumulative demographics (including visiting, undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral trainees) since 2019 are:
As a team, we commit to provide a safe, inclusive, and equitable environment where:
- All members feel emotionally and physically safe at all times. Particularly while expressing frustration, addressing conflict, and/or making mistakes.
- All members feel comfortable and capable of sharing their opinions and experiences.
- All members do everything in their power to actively make everyone else feel included and valued. We acknowledge that our actions and implicit biases can directly or indirectly make others in the group feel more or less included.
- All members treat each other as equals without preferential treatment of any kind.
To build and maintain this environment our action plan as a group includes:
- Take and discuss implicit bias training.
- Offer and value feedback to and from all members of the lab.
- Stand firmly against any form of conscious or unconscious bias or lack of respect in one-on-one or group interactions. We will work to both take responsibility for our own actions, and to act as allies for one another if we witness such behaviors.
To collectively pursue these goals, we commit to yearly discussions about our demographic goals, our definition of a “safe, inclusive and equitable environment”, as well as our action plan to build and maintain this environment.