Skill-Building Workshops

Fostering Advocacy to Support Culture Change

Wednesday, Nov. 17, 4 – 5:30 PM

Register here

Often unspoken rules and power dynamics act as derailers within professional settings such as labs, lab group meetings, departments, conferences, or networking events. These derailers can cause anxiety and plant the seeds of doubt within our minds that reinforce imposter syndrome. Stress inducing situations like these impact our problem-solving abilities and erode our confidence. Research has shown that toxic environments or environments that lack support impact the individual’s ability to bring their full self to their work, resulting in a lack of commitment and motivation. Faced with the persistence of these stressors and tensions in our daily life, how do we create an environment that provides psychological safety and supports a growth mindset?

In this workshop we will use case study models as scenarios to understand how you can develop tools to be an influential advocate(s) towards creating a psychological safety environment.

Objectives:

• How to create a psychological safety environment?
• How to create comfort during a conflict situation?
• Why is Advocacy necessary?
• How to cultivate skills to be effective advocates?

Come prepared with scenarios if you would like to discuss a specific challenge.

Note: This event is relevant to those in STEM, Social Sciences, and Humanities fields.

Srikant Iyer, Ph.D. is the Associate Director of Science Alliance at New York Academy of Sciences. He drives STEM growth by building strong STEM ecosystems that bring together government, business, schools, and non-profits. He leads program development to identify, promote, enhance and advocate opportunities for over 5000 graduate and post-doctoral fellows to build a diverse and inclusive community. Iyer received his PhD in Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University and was a post-doctoral fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology where he worked in the interdisciplinary field of biomedical, materials science and nanosciences which resulted in a patent and multiple scientific publications. Prior to joining the academy, Iyer was a research scientist at Johns Hopkins University. He developed metrics to quantify diversity and inclusion within academic institutions, organized and facilitated multiple workshops for top 100 STEM departments to increase diversity, inclusion and equity by engaging senior leaders and diverse stakeholders within academia. He can be reached at [email protected].

Stephen D. Albright, Ph.D. is a Program Manager for the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists at the New York Academy of Sciences. Stephen completed his Ph.D. in physics at Yale University, where he studied the synthesis of materials used in electronics. Throughout his career, Stephen has worked to build a more supportive environment for young scientists. He served as a Title IX Fellow in the Provost's Office at Yale, organizing and facilitating bystander intervention workshops to prevent and limit the harms of sexual misconduct, and he currently sits on the board of directors of Future of Research, a non-profit organization that advocates for fair and equitable treatment of early career researchers. Before joining the New York Academy of Sciences, Stephen worked for the American Geophysical Union, where he advocated for the Earth and space sciences to policymakers in the federal government. He can be reached at [email protected].