Our Value

What are our values?

We are committed to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in science. We are mindful that there are still barriers to participating in science based on socioeconomic status, race, gender, culture, as well as many other factors. We believe active efforts are needed to overcome these barriers and help the scientific community become truly inclusive. We believe that science is improved by diversity in the backgrounds and experiences of teams. Good science can be done by anyone.

What are we doing to advance these values?

Current lab members come from diverse geographic, socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, and participate in a variety of DEI efforts and programs. We encourage students from different backgrounds to apply to positions in the lab.

Some particularly relevant resources at MIT BCS and EECS to support DEI efforts include the MIT summer research program, and the post-bac research program. See here for more links.

To make the lab diverse and more equitable, we actively seek out candidates from underrepresented groups. To ensure that the lab is an inclusive and supportive environment, we conduct periodic anonymous surveys and group meetings to gather feedback on inclusion and help identify potential issues.

Making science more accessible

We acknowledge that people have different needs and responsibilities. Parents, for example, may need to leave work at a certain time every day to pick up their children. The lab is committed to supporting the needs of all lab members to the greatest extent possible, for instance by offering flexibility with work hours and work location.

If financial resources are impeding you from participating in research, please feel free to reach out to us, and we will try our best to help you get the resources you need.

Open-source: We have and will continue to make our code for every research project publicly available. We will also share recorded talks and tutorials freely available on the web.

How you can help us improve

As a group, we are all continuing to learn about how to best support diversity, equity, and inclusion. We will revisit and update this statement at least once a year. If you think that something important is missing in this statement, please feel free to let us know. You can write to any of our lab members, including the principal investigator, Robert Yang (yanggr@mit.edu).