The Sustainable Health Ecology Lab and our collaborators are personally diverse: we vary in age, gender, sexual orientation, race, physical ability, mental health, cultural and religious backgrounds, nationalities, and socioeconomic backgrounds. We are also professionally diverse: we vary in our career stages, career trajectories, academic disciplines, skills, and preferred research methods. We value our individuality and our collective diversity, because we recognize that diverse teams are better at solving problems and more fun to work with! To ensure that our shared work environment is equitable and inclusive for all lab members, we (1) commit to a common set of lab values, which we annually re-affirm; (2) complete and tri-annually update individual mentoring plans for all early career lab members, to foster individual career development given individual circumstances; and (3) complete and annually update our individual trainings and evaluations related to fostering a safe, equitable, and inclusive work environment. If you have suggestions for other ways that we can improve as a team, please let us know via the anonymous suggestion box (lab members have a link). If you have a specific problem to report or discuss, contact Skylar. If you do not feel comfortable talking about the problem with Skylar, please contact Michelle Jewell. Michelle is a staff member in Applied Ecology who has agreed to serve as a safe and unbiased ally, and she will not discuss your concerns with Skylar unless you ask her to share them.
Our shared values:
We are a science team, and therefore, we first and foremost commit to doing good, reproducible science. We will use our time and funding to find answers and solutions for important questions and problems, and we will strive to make our data, process, and results open for all to see and use. To that end, we will completely document every step of our scientific process for every project. We will be proud of our work and its impact on the world.
We will be collaborative, not competitive. We will ask for help and give help when needed. We will foster a culture of constructive criticism and celebrate small and large achievements.
We will learn and create knowledge with equal vigor. We will say we do not know when we do not know, and rather than being ashamed of our ignorance, we will use knowledge gaps as opportunities for learning.
We will recruit and support a diverse research community. We will especially encourage historically excluded groups to consider applying to work with us or collaborate with us, and we will constantly strive to create an inclusive work environment for all lab members and collaborators. We will use the correct pronouns for all lab members and our collaborators, and we will ask if we do not know the correct pronouns.
We will strike a healthy balance between work and our lives outside of work. (We love our jobs, but they are *only* jobs.) To achieve that balance, different people will use different strategies to manage their time and responsibilities. All strategies that achieve well-being and productivity are good strategies. We will encourage each other to explore strategies that optimize our individual needs. Although our scheduling will be flexible, we will start and end all scheduled meetings on time, because we value the time of our team members.
We will appropriately credit everyone who contributes to our research, as well as the people/ideas that came before our work that we build on. We will stay up-to-date on recent research and well-versed in past research so that we can be effective members of the scientific community.
We will be careful and try not to make mistakes, but we will still make some mistakes. When we make mistakes, we will own them, learn from them, and fix them.
We will be mindful and try to avoid conflicts, but we will still have some disagreements and conflicts with other team members. When we have them, we will respectfully address them as soon as possible, including a third-party mediator if necessary. We will not tolerate disrespect or hostility.
We will maintain respectful, professional boundaries with all lab members at all times, including at work social events. We will be mindful and respectful of individual differences in boundaries.
We will not tolerate any form of harassment, including sexist, racist, or exclusionary language, images, or behavior. If asked to stop any harassing behavior, we will comply immediately.
Sustainable Health Ecology Lab 