Lab Values

The Ibrahim Lab’s Commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging

To fulfill our mission to advance collaborative approaches to developing brain-based biomarkers of emotion regulation impairments across child mental health, the Ibrahim Lab strives to foster diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in all we do.

The Ibrahim Lab is aligned with the Yale Child Study Center’s DEIB commitment, supports and embraces diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) as core values. We strive to foster an inclusive environment that centers respect and access to ensure representation of people of all different identities within our lab and in our research. Our lab welcomes people from all backgrounds and identities, including but not limited to nationality, culture, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender expression, gender identity, ability status, education, socioeconomic status, documentation status, and training level or career stage.

In our lab, DEIB is a moral imperative, guided by the principles listed here, which we strongly believe can accelerate scientific discovery to improve the lives of youths with mental health conditions and their families.

We emphasize the following principles in our research:

• Diversity enhances and drives creativity, novel ideas and solutions. When our lab is diverse, we are able to examine issues and solutions from multiple perspectives.
• Equity emphasizes that all voices must be heard and valued, which enhances our exploration and innovation.
• Inclusion ensures a seat for everyone in the decision-making process and research in the lab. Along these lines, we also value and center the voices of community participants in our research.
• Belonging indicates that everyone feels welcomed, confident and supported in their roles in the lab.

To support and accomplish these principles, our current efforts towards fostering DEIB in the Ibrahim Lab include the following:

• Creating a lab community that is supportive and creates the conditions for people to feel safe and encouraged to express diverse perspectives across all lab activities including research, teaching, decision making, and in our work with community participants. We will also center the voices of those impacted and represented in our research via active engagement with members of the community of diverse backgrounds and identities.
• Progressively working towards being more diverse, equitable, and inclusive in our research and team members. We will recruit lab members using a holistic evaluation that prioritizes the person’s strengths, areas of training needs, interests and availability for training, and motivation (i.e., over and beyond where and who they trained with). We will also integrate considerations for DEIB and the expansion of identities, thoughts, and ideas to help us expand our lab conversations and research.
• Working to acknowledge, understand, and repair power imbalances that have historically marginalized voices and hindered communication. To accomplish this, we also commit to engaging all our lab members to co-construct an environment that invites and respects conversations that span the diversity of disciplines, career stages and personal identities. To facilitate communication, we will engage students, trainees, and lab personnel in open conversations that span disciplines and people from all career stages. We are accountable to and for each other in the lab. All students and trainees will also receive feedback on their scientific goals and career goals. We are receptive to and welcome constructive feedback from lab members across career stages as well as from community participants to continue to develop in meeting our DEIB goals
• We are committed to providing supported time for attending racial equity workshops and other DEIB related trainings to support critical self-reflection and life-long learning.
• In addition to trainings and workshops outside of the lab, we are committed to holding regular lab discussions centered on research articles or topics relevant to DEIB for our lab community and research.
• We will continue to collaborate with colleague Tara Davila, LCSW Assistant Clinical Professor of Social Work and Vice Chair for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the Yale Child Study Center, to attend trainings and engage in ongoing collaborations to benefit our lab, research, community and team members.

We aim for Ibrahim Lab staff, students, and trainees to be better poised to contribute to a more equitable world. We are committed to the following DEIB efforts in our communities and community participants:

• We aim to recruit diverse participants for our research studies to ensure representation of our findings and remove systemic barriers. We will work to enhance accessibility of participation in our studies such as assistance with transportation costs, accommodating the needs and individual learning needs of our participants during study visits, and working to optimize research benefits to participants such as providing when a summary of diagnostic assessments completed during the research visit in meaningful and accessible ways.
• We commit to engaging in a reciprocal relations with the New Haven Community via attendance at community and other local events, participating in outreach efforts and engaging with community members of diverse backgrounds and identities.
• We will disseminate our findings to communities and encourage feedback from community participants regarding our research and enhancing the ways that we can work to achieve participation that is representative of New Haven’s diverse community. Additionally, we will transparently share research findings with the community and center their expertise in identifying and disseminating relevant findings within their community.
• We will work to establish relationships with community members and organizations to learn more about the needs and interests of the community and work to align our efforts with community needs. We welcome any suggestions and/or partnerships from communities and community participants to advance our research progress and contribution to enhancing DEIB.