Goals and Initiatives
Current Initiatives
- Continue holding Town Hall meetings to encourage ongoing dialogue within our community and identify priority diversity, equity and inclusion issues
- Increase collaboration with the Yale School of Medicine Office of Diversity Equity and Inclusion
- Establish and sustain networks with local community schools and colleges that support enriching underrepresented groups and cultivate opportunities and resources for those students
- Continue hosting a series of virtual conferences with institutions in the NIH Blueprint for Enhancing Neuroscience Diversity through Undergraduate Research Education (BP-ENDURE)
- Increase support for the Yale BBS Diversity and Inclusion Collective (YBDIC)
- Fund fellowships to support Graduate Students and Postdocs from underrepresented communities in the Neurosciences
- Support the career development of Postdocs from underrepresented communities by engaging them to speak in the SYNAPSES seminar series
Long-Term Goals
- Develop a quantifiable and implementable strategy to increase diversity at the faculty level
- Use networks created with local community colleges and BP-ENDURE institutions to recruit students from underrepresented groups to the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program (INP)
- Establish a Community Discussion Series highlighting speakers or papers on DEI topics to encourage learning and listening among our community members
- Find effective ways to provide support to our underrepresented community members to ensure that they feel a sense of belonging, to thrive, and to advance in their scientific careers
- Broadly communicate our scientific efforts by posting videos of seminars/talks with translations for non-English speakers on our website
- Support undergraduates from underrepresented groups from outside of Yale to engage in summer research within our community
- Provide an annual progress report on goals, outcomes and achievements that will be presented to the Chair and the Neuroscience Community