The PAC lab is an inclusive environment committed to mutual respect, good-faith mentorship, and honest feedback.
A message from Dr. Chris Rodgers, director of the lab:
Science does not live in some abstract world apart from the human condition. Science is done by people, our results affect people, and the way we treat each other matters.
There is a huge literature demonstrating the current inequities in academia. First, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students constitute 27% of US undergraduates interested in biology, but attrition through the educational pipeline means that they go on to receive only 12% of the doctorates in biomedical research, and 6% of tenure-track professor positions (Meyers 2018). As another example, the ongoing COVID19 pandemic has disproportionately increased the burden of domestic and childcare responsibilities borne by female early career researchers, exacerbating gender disparities in publishing and promotion (Cardel 2020). Despite recent initiatives, systemic barriers remain in academia (Singleton 2021). I invite you to simply google “antiracism academia” or “systemic bias in academia” in order to find the many well-curated collections of resources and even practical ways to do better.
Throughout my career, I personally benefited from being a white male in our society. It’s not that I didn’t have to work hard, but my hard work sometimes counted for more than other people’s did. Even when people harshly criticized my work or even me personally, no one ever doubted that I had a right to be a part of science. That is the most basic privilege in our field. But our society sometimes denies it to people who are of color (especially people who are Black, Latinx, and indigenous), women, queer, transgender, disabled, Muslim, or just plain unique.
Diverse viewpoints make people more able to contribute to science, but contributions from people from under-represented groups are also more likely to be ignored (Hofstra 2020). So making academia more inclusive advances science — but more importantly, it’s just the right thing to do, and an opportunity to liberate our own minds from racism and other forms of bias.
Well, what am I going to do about it? The good news is that mentorship is one way we can spread opportunities for success and counteract systemic inequities (Estrada 2018). Being a good mentor is really hard (Lambert 2020). But good mentorship can make a world of difference, and so I’m going to do my best to be one too.
As the head of the PAC lab, I commit to maintaining our core values of mutual respect, good-faith mentorship, and honest feedback.
Mutual respect means that we listen and try to understand each other, and educate ourselves about how to treat each other well. We commit to proactive inclusivity, which means ensuring everyone belongs and can participate in lab activities, no matter what unique challenges they have. Diversity is a part of that, but it's on us to create a safe and culturally sensitive environment, so that we can welcome those perspectives.
Good-faith mentorship means that I commit to helping lab members work toward their dream job, career, or other life goal. Those dreams and goals might change with time, and we’ll adjust to that. In exchange, lab members contribute their labor and intellectual power to ongoing projects in the lab. The exchange is mutual, because this is my dream job, and completing these projects together is my own career goal. So that we can make progress toward our shared and individual goals, we have to find an area where our interests overlap and we can each do our best work.
Honest feedback means that we're candid with each other about how we can do better. Constructive feedback needs to go in all directions, from me to the lab members, from lab members to me, and between lab members. The feedback covers work and science, such as how we can each do a better job. But this feedback also covers how we treat each other with respect, and it even extends out of the lab to the way we communicate our results and share our work with others.
It's not about being perfect. We're all going to make mistakes, probably me more than anyone, which is why we need to work together on this. But as Maya Angelou said,
"Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better."