How to Create an Inclusive Lab Environment Where Individuals Feel Valued

A lab environment where individual members feel heard can help you to run a successful lab in diverse settings. An important part of creating this kind of inclusive environment is in fact what happens outside the day-to-day work of the lab — asking lab members about their research interests, for example, or encouraging reflection.

At the 2019 Meet-the-Experts session “Twenty Years of Fear Research and Mentoring in Puerto Rico,” Gregory Quirk, PI of the Laboratory of Fear Learning at the University of Puerto Rico, shared that Puerto Rico has been building its presence in science, and that hard work has been bringing results for science across the island—in part due to attention to the lab environment.

About the Contributor

Hugo Sánchez-Castillo, PhD

Hugo Sánchez-Castillo, PhD, is a professor and researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He has a bachelor's in psychology and a doctorate in behavioral neurosciences from the UNAM and has completed postdoctoral studies at Columbia University in New York City. He is affiliated with the psycobiology and neurosciences department at the Psychology School at UNAM and is the head of the Neuropsychopharmacology and Timing Laboratory. His research focuses are the neurobiology of stress and trauma, the dissociative disorders, and the neurobiology of timing behavior.