Inclusive Lab Leaders

SPRING 2023, Join ILL-GRAD AND POST DOCS!

Inclusive Lab Leaders is back!!!

The Inclusive Lab Leaders is a program to help those in STEM and beyond develop the skills and strategies to effectively communicate with mentors, students, and peers. This program offers a justice-oriented approach to learning how to navigate issues of power and conflict, through a mix of preventive strategies and just-in-time approaches. Racism, sexism, and more are continuing challenges rather than relics of the past, and ILL is designed to give you the introductory tools to become more aware of how they show up in science, and how you can imagine and implement a more just future.

Over the course of four sessions we will lay the theoretical groundwork to help you anticipate problems in your lab as well as navigate interpersonal differences. Then, we offer concrete strategies for managing and engaging with conflict, understanding and accepting the power you do hold, and creating smaller-scale (e.g., within your collaborations, labs, or departments) change that can inspire and foment even larger-scale institutional change.

Participants who attend all four workshops will receive an Inclusive Lab Leaders certificate. Find more information and workshop dates on the registration page.

For Spring 2023, we are running sessions for graduate students and postdocs; sessions for faculty and staff will begin Fall 2023. Therefore this semester’s workshop series centers the needs of grad students and postdocs, which are to produce excellent science and work within the expectations of their department and lab group to the extent that they can, while maintaining their own boundaries, values, and career goals.

Session 1: Participating in an inclusive, productive lab. Friday, February 10th from 9-11am.
Facilitator: Kate Clancy

For the first session we will provide workshop attendees with a basic script for setting professional expectations. We will then bust myths around interpersonal skills in the sciences, ways in which culture and climate can diverge, and hold a panel of successful trainees who have navigated difficult circumstances. We will do values-engaged exercises to help workshop members contribute to brave spaces in their labs for innovation and productivity.

During this session you will learn to:

  • Identify your own values and how they show up in your work.
  • Facilitate a guidelines exercise with your research group or collaboration as a way of developing a shared understanding around issues of work/life balance, authorship, preferred feedback styles, and more.
  • Address concerns from those who naysay efforts to improve diversity, equity, and justice in science.

Session 2: Transforming conflict into collaboration. Friday, March 3rd from 9-11am.
Facilitator: Mikhail Lyubansky

This session will address how to work through conflict in the lab. Rather than avoiding or escalating conflict, this workshop will help graduate students and post docs manage and engage with conflict and have the difficult conversations that are so important to mentoring, collaboration, and scientific advancement. In this workshop you will learn to:

  • Critically examine the ways our society and its individuals respond to acts of harm and violations of norms, including common conflict styles and their relative benefits and limitations
  • Use restorative justice principles to explore alternative ways of understanding and responding to conflicts that are likely to be more congruent with personal values
  • Introduce foundational communication concepts
  • Practice several of these foundational skills, including
    • listening for universal human needs
    • translating hard-to-hear messages
  • How to create increasingly stronger containers for working through conflicts

Session 3: Recognizing and navigating power dynamics in research. Friday, April 7th from 9-11am. 

Facilitators: Katy Heath and Kate Clancy

This session will address the different types of power and how they can manifest in a research team, from positional power by way of one’s academic rank, to systemic power from one’s identity groups, gender, race, and/or ethnicity. All members of a lab need to recognize the situations where they have coercive power and protect others from it; conversely nearly everyone also experiences low power moments where they need to protect themselves or solicit help.

During this session you will learn to:

  • Own the power you do have, and take responsibility for it.
  • Practice navigating challenging conversations with people who have power over you.
  • Seek solidarity when addressing more intractable power imbalances.

Session 4: Imagining radical STEM futures. Friday, May 5th from 9-11am.

Facilitators: Jenny Davis and Kate Clancy

In this last workshop session we will reflect on the material we have learned over the previous sessions, and leverage it to build an inclusive research team that gets the best out of everybody. These sessions have helped us develop some of the interpersonal skills needed to handle problematic encounters, carve out spaces for ourselves, and build more just systems at a small scale. But what about the broader incentive structures of science, the condoned behaviors, the unwritten rules? We will turn our attention upward and outward to continue to make our small actions even more meaningful, towards, in the words of Dr. Ruha Benjamin, a more viral justice.

During this session you will learn to:

  • Reflect on the skills you have learned so far, and practice them.
  • Use imagination and intuition as key ways of knowing, and as ways to dream up better ways to do science.
  • Decide on additional ways you as a group will seek solidarity from each other.

Session 5, optional. Solidarity and support among graduate students and postdocs of color. Thursday, May 11th from 9-11am.

Facilitators: Jenny Davis and Krystal Smalls

This session will be a bit different than the others: it will be a brave space to share the particular challenges of being a person of color in science, from systemic inequities to microaggressions.

Previous Events_____________________________

FALL 2020, JOIN ILL-GRAD AND POST DOCS!

Become a more productive and effective lab member today, attend the Inclusive Lab Leaders workshops this fall 2020!

We hope you will join us for this semester’s Inclusive Lab Leaders program, trainee edition. In the fall we provide programming to graduate students and postdocs (in a similar training position not covered by these two positions, just talk to us!). This semester our pandemic version of ILL-GRAD has two goals:

  • Create a cohort version of the program to increase connection and support through the semester
  • Address the urgent needs for skill-building and support our trainees are identifying and facing right now

There will be six sessions of ILL-GRAD and the expectation is that, if you register, you will attend all of them. The sessions are as follows, all on Zoom on Wednesdays from 2-3:20pm central:

  • September 23rd
  • October 7th
  • October 21st
  • November 4th
  • November 18th
  • December 2nd

The first session will be on “Creating guidelines and boundaries in your scholarly work.” Please fill out this registration form which includes a place for you to choose or suggest topics for the subsequent sessions. Possible upcoming sessions range from “A Crash Course in Understanding the Hierarchies of Higher Education Administration,” “Ways to Engage in Mentoring Relationships,” “Advocacy, Collective Action, and Resistance: Imagining Futures in STEM.”

Registration is limited to 20 individuals in order to ensure time and space to establish supportive relationships in this cohort, so please sign up today! An email with the zoom link will be sent once registration is submitted.

Spring 2020, JOIN ILL-Faculty and Staff

The Inclusive Lab Leaders workshops are a new program by the 21st Century Scientists Initiative at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science & Technology. The goal of this program is to help PIs, new and veteran, become more effective at managing their research groups.

Did you start your job as faculty only to find that your training did not prepare you for personnel management? Are you a veteran PI who still finds aspects of managing a lab frustrating? Do you have the goal of creating a more inclusive space that develops excellent scientists, but aren’t quite sure how? The Inclusive Lab Leaders program is for you!

This workshop series centers the needs of the PI, which are to produce excellent science and work within the expectations of tenure and promotion, in order to create an atmosphere of collaboration, inclusion, openness, and listening. We will work with PIs in a small group setting through four stages of skill development.

Session 2: Transforming conflict into collaboration. Friday, March 6th from 9:30-11:30am, room 1005 Beckman.

Facilitators: Mikhail Lyubansky

The second session, “Transforming conflict into collaboration,” will address how to work through conflict in the lab. Rather than avoiding or escalating conflict, this workshop will help PIs manage and engage with conflict and have the difficult conversations that are so important to mentoring, collaboration, and scientific advancement.

Session 3: Recognizing and navigating power dynamics in research. Friday, April 10th from 9:30-11:30am, room 1005 Beckman.

Facilitators: Beth Hoag and Janice Collins

  • Registration link.

Session three, “Recognizing and navigating power dynamics in research” will help PIs define different types of power and how they can be understood in the context of a research team. We will engage in self-reflection about our own power in a research setting and past experiences with how power works in science. Finally, we will identify and develop tools to empower our research teams.

Session 4: Creating sustainable systems to support our work. Friday, May 8th from 9:30-11:30am, room 1005 Beckman.

Facilitators: to be named

  • Registration link.

The fourth session is entitled “Creating sustainable systems to support our work.” In this final session we will reflect on the material we have learned over the previous sessions, and leverage it to build an inclusive research team that gets the best out of everybody. We will go over policy structures like codes of conduct, but also restorative practices for handling conflict, training options for empowering students, and inclusion practices for building equity in science.

We recommend PIs attend all four sessions to gain the most from the program. Coffee and light refreshments will be served.

The Inclusive Lab Leaders-Grads (ILL-GRAD) workshops are a new program by the 21st Century Scientists Initiative at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science & Technology. The goal of this program is to help graduate students and postdocs develop the skills and perspective needed to succeed in their research groups, and develop materials to help them eventually lead their own laboratories.

Did you start your PhD only to find communication with your PI mystifying? Are you a veteran postdoc who still finds engaging with peers frustrating? Do you have the goal of creating a more inclusive space that develops excellent scientists, but aren’t quite sure how? The Inclusive Lab Leaders program is for you!

This workshop series centers the needs of grad students and postdocs, which are to produce excellent science and work within the expectations of their department and lab group, in order to create an atmosphere of collaboration, inclusion, openness, and listening. We will work with trainees in a small group setting through four stages of skill development.

Session 4: Creating sustainable systems to support our work. Friday, December 13th from 9:30-11:30am, room 5602 Beckman.

Facilitators: to be named

The fourth session is entitled “Creating sustainable systems to support our work.” In this final session we will reflect on the material we have learned over the previous sessions, and leverage it to build an inclusive research team that gets the best out of everybody. We will go over policy structures like codes of conduct, but also restorative practices for handling conflict, training options for empowering you and your lab members, and inclusion practices for building equity in science.

Session 3: Transforming conflict into collaboration. Friday, November 15th from 9:30-11:30am, room 4269 Beckman.

Facilitators: Mikhail Lyubansky

The third session, “Transforming conflict into collaboration,” will address how to work through conflict in the lab. Rather than avoiding or escalating conflict, this workshop will help graduate students and post docs manage and engage with conflict and have the difficult conversations that are so important to mentoring, collaboration, and scientific advancement.

Session 2: Recognizing and navigating power dynamics in research. Friday, October 11th from 9:30-11:30am, room 5602 Beckman. Intended for graduate students and post docs only. 

Facilitators: Beth Hoag and Dr. Janice Marie Collins

This is the second workshop in the Inclusive Lab Leaders series.  This session will address the different types of power and how they can manifest in a research team.  The presenters will illustrate and give examples of how to mitigate and encourage issues of power by developing effective leadership skills, encouraging self-agency, and fostering group empowerment within a collective.

Session 1: Participating in an inclusive, productive lab. Friday, September 13th from 9:30-11:30am, room 4269 Beckman.
Facilitators: Kate Clancy and Ripan Malhi

For the first session, “Participating in an inclusive, productive lab,” we will provide workshop attendees with a basic script for setting professional expectations. We will then bust myths around interpersonal skills in the sciences, ways in which culture and climate can diverge, and hold a panel of successful trainees who have navigated difficult circumstances. We will do values-engaged exercises to help workshop members contribute to brave spaces in their labs for innovation and productivity.

Facilitators of the Inclusive Lab Leaders Program:

Kathryn Clancy is the director of the 21st Century Scientists Initiative. She an Associate Professor of Anthropology and co-director of the Laboratory for Evolutionary Endocrinology. She is a co-author of the National Academies 2018 report on sexual harassment in the sciences.

Janice Collins is a multi-Emmy, Associated Press, Best of Gannett award-winning journalist with more than 20 years of experience in the journalism industry in producing, editing, videojournalism, reporting and writing. Dr. Collins’ research focuses mainly on processes of De-Marginalization through storytelling, self-empowerment, leadership development and issues of Power along the lines of race, gender, newsroom cultures and learning spaces.

C. K. Gunsalus is the director of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics. Gunsalus is the PI for the $2.7M Developing University Leaders Project with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and was the PI for the centerpiece project of NCPRE, a national online ethics resource center initiated with $1.5M from the National Science Foundation. She has been on the faculty of the colleges of Business, Law, and Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign and served as Special Counsel in the Office of University Counsel.

Beth Hoag is the Associate Director of the Illinois Leadership® Center (ILC).  She in the campus investigator for the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (MSL) and directs the ILC’s research and assessment efforts.

Mikhail Lyubansky is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois. His work is broadly focused on conflict and restorative responses to conflict in a variety of different contexts, including schools, organizations, and intentional communities. As part of Conflict 180 (co-founded with Elaine Shpungin), he supports schools, organizations, and workplaces in developing restorative strategies for engaging conflict, building conflict facilitation skills and evaluating the outcomes associated with restorative responses.

Ripan S. Malhi is a Professor of Anthropology and director of the Molecular Anthropology Laboratory. He runs the NIH-funded Summer Internship for INdigneous peoples in Genomics (SING) and is a co-investigator of the Increasing Diversity in Evolutionary Anthropological Sciences (IDEAS) program.

Ross Wantland has been the director of Diversity & Social Justice Education in the Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Relations since 2009. Prior to this, he worked for eight years with sexual assault prevention at the Women’s Resources Center. Before working at the University, Ross worked in both rape crisis and domestic violence centers, and co-founded Men Against Sexual Violence.

Calendar:

Session 1: Leading an inclusive, productive lab. Friday, February 14th from 9:30-11:30am, room 1005 Beckman. Registration link.

Session 2: Transforming conflict into collaboration. Friday, March 6th from 9:30-11:30am, room 1005 Beckman. Registration link.

Session 3: Recognizing and navigating power dynamics in research. Friday, April 10th from 9:30-11:30am, room 1005 Beckman.  Registration link.

Session 4: Creating sustainable systems to support our work. Friday, May 8th from 9:30-11:30am, room 1005 Beckman.  Registration link.

Email kclancy@illinois.edu with any questions.