Promoting Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Accessibility within the NPRL

The NPRL strives to actively promote, embrace, and support the unique experiences, backgrounds, perspectives, identities, and abilities of all lab members, as well as research collaborators and affiliated scientific communities. The lab collectively prioritizes the curation of an inclusive, open, collaborative, and welcoming environment, while simultaneously providing individualized opportunities for all members of the lab to thrive, taking into account each person’s unique background, skill sets, and future goals. The NPRL not only aims to continuously create trusting spaces that are inclusive to the researchers that the lab seeks to recruit and retain, but also to the community members that volunteer to participate in our research studies.

NPRL Key Values & Beliefs

The NPRL works to actively uphold our shared beliefs on diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and justice to generate high-quality science that meets the needs of lab members and the communities we serve. This is a continuous, ongoing process that we collectively prioritize and address as a lab. Find some of our key values & beliefs below.

  • Diversity
    • – Embracing and encouraging diversity of thought, experience, background, education, identity, ability, career stage, work style, personality, expression, culture, and perspective.
    • – Ensuring that individuals feel represented and heard within the lab space and within the scientific community at large.
  • Equity
    • – Providing opportunities for all members of the lab to thrive through opportunities, resources, and support that takes into account their individual needs, based on their unique backgrounds, skill sets, future goals, and timeline.
  • Inclusion, Community, & Belonging
    • – Creating physical and virtual spaces that are inclusive and welcoming to the diverse members that the lab seeks to recruit and retain.
    • – Fostering a sense of belonging and community between individuals in the lab.
    • – Involving individuals in patient populations and members of the local community in all parts of the research process to conduct research with, not on, individual participants and communities. 
    • – Informing our research by taking into account the cultural context of identity groups being serviced by the lab (e.g., stroke patients, older adults, individuals with Parkinson’s, gender groups, racial/ethnic groups, etc.) to ensure that all participants are treated in equitable and inclusive ways while participating in research studies.
  • Accessibility
    • – Maintaining easy accessibility of the physical lab space for individuals with disabilities (e.g., motor impairments, wheelchair usage), as well as the accessibility of all other physical and virtual lab spaces in taking personal accommodations into consideration.
    • – Creating avenues to increase accessibility to scientific knowledge and open-source data and materials (e.g., developing, publishing, and sharing open-source tools, technologies, and resources).
    • – Communicating scientific findings to the local community and relevant community members (e.g., science communication & outreach).
  • Collaboration & Teamwork
    • – Supporting a collaborative, team-based work environment that relies on mutual trust, collaboration, and understanding between lab members.
  • Mentorship
    • – Prioritizing individualized & tailored mentorship that supports career, professional, academic, and personal development.
    • – Establishing mentor-mentee pairings for each individual in the lab, regardless of career stage, that center understanding & compassion.
  • Openness, Transparency, & Communication
    • – Encouraging open communication, honesty, and transparency when challenges arise in the lab environment.
  • Scientific Excellence & Ethics
    • – Promoting scientific excellence and high-quality work through robust ethical standards and guidelines.
  • Creativity & Expression
    • – Empowering lab members to creatively express their individuality and freely incorporate self-expression into their science.
  • Sustainability & Commitment
    • – Understanding that the lab’s DEI-related goals & missions are active and continuous to maintain sustainability.
    • – Recognizing the limitations of the lab and its members and understanding that DEI practices will always be in the process of development and growth.

NPRL Mentorship Philosophy

The NRPL uses a person-centered mentoring approach that prioritizes trusting relationships and values individual differences to reach shared and distinct goals. Read more about our mentoring philosophy below.

  • Establishing a multi-level, integrated, shared mentorship model.
    • – Promoting a multi-level mentorship model where all lab members receive different types of mentorship from individuals with varying experiences that serve distinct purposes.
      • – E.g., having a “direct” mentor for day-to-day mentoring in the lab, having a “big picture” mentor for professional and career development, etc.
    • – Maintaining overlapping networks of mentorship for lab members to benefit from varying mentorship styles
      • – E.g., having shared mentors from collaborating labs mentor people within and across lab environments
    • – Ensuring a “community-feel” to mentoring, with the ability to easily reach out to multiple people in the lab for resources, help, questions, and guidance.
      • – E.g., mentorship that is cross project, cross career stage, cross disciplinary, etc.
    • Providing mentorship training to mentors and mentees.
      • – E.g., providing mentorship training for mentors, providing opportunities for mentees to mentor others, etc.
  • Valuing mentee experiences, contributions, & knowledge.
    • – Valuing input from all members of the lab equally, especially mentee experiences, contributions, and knowledge.
      • – E.g., actively and routinely incorporating mentee feedback
    • – Encouraging a “bidirectional” mentorship style and avoiding mentoring being exclusively “top-down” (from the mentor to the mentee)
      • – E.g., mentors and mentees learn from each other and mentor each other in various ways
  • Promoting a holistic mentorship experience.
    • – Utilizing a holistic mentoring approach that incorporates and takes into account all aspects of the mentee’s identity and experiences.
    • – Centering compassion and understanding as key tenets of mentorship.
  • Centering the “why” to scientific discovery.
    • – Understanding that we cannot separate the science from the scientist, in that personal identity informs and enriches the science we do.
      • – E.g., promoting the “why” to science, which provides a whole picture of research and is person-centric.
  • Understanding the evolution of mentorship relationships.
    • – Recognizing that mentorship is not stagnant, but adaptable and evolving.
      • – E.g., new cycles of mentees/mentors always leads to new ideas, directions, strategies, models, etc.
      • – E.g., a growing and evolving scientific space with new ideas and opportunities for research and mentorship directions
    • – Encouraging everyone to drive the “agenda” – everyone has a role to play in driving mentorship and how it changes over time.
  • Learning from multiple mentors.
    • – Promoting openness to dual mentorship, or having multiple mentors meet various needs.
      • – E.g.. graduate students or post-docs having faculty co-mentors
      • – E.g., collaborative mentorship for mentees among a close-knit faculty team