Our Ethics and Values

The well-being and health of each member of our team and of the people who participate with us in our work, whether colleagues, study participants or consumer and community partners and advisors, is our first priority.

We are committed to creating an environment for work and study that is ethical, inclusive, and supportive. All of us are responsible for upholding these cores values, constantly mindful of them, being accountable for our actions and decisions, and speaking up about any actions or decisions contrary to these values.

One concrete step we take to ensure we uphold these values is fostering transparency and open, safe, communication across all team members.

Ethics

We strive to follow the highest ethical standards in our work, research, and interactions. This includes practicing honesty, fairness, and respect for each person regardless of their status or role.

We believe in integrity and professionalism in our research. Our research ethics apply not only to ensuring the safety and well-being of everyone who participates in our research, but also that we are careful, honest, and transparent in our interpretation of results and any outputs we submit.

In addition to following standard research ethics rules and principles, as part of enacting these values, we strive towards a number of concrete research ideals:

  • Sharing data, code and materials publicly where possible. This helps ensure that the community’s contribution by volunteering to participate in research provides the most benefit and value to the world.
  • Providing people who participate in our research with their own data in a useful format and a summary of our findings. This helps ensure that people who volunteer in our research get the most direct benefit. It also helps provide transparency about how their data are used opening the possibility for open dialogue where concerns may arise.
  • Ensuring high standards for data privacy and strict data security as we often collect highly personal and large amounts of data from daily life.
  • Seeking diversity and inclusivity in all areas of people who participate in research and in our research team and collaborators.
  • Carefully considering the nature of data used to build models and algorithms, potential (mis)uses of the algorithms and tools we build, as well as careful application of any existing algorithms or tools in our research. We are particularly mindful about the diversity and inclusivity of the data on which algorithms or models were built. This is important as models/algorithms trained on biased samples can “learn” this bias and then create or perpetuate systematic bias or discrimination in the future.

Diversity and Inclusion

We are strongly committed to supporting diversity in all areas including but not limited to socioeconomic background, race/ethnicity, culture, religion, language, ability status, and the intersection of multiple, underserved identities.

We particularly encourage people who are historically underpresented in the health sciences to apply and join our group. If you are from an underpresented group and would like to join our team, please reach out to the lab head: joshua.wiley at monash dot edu. Dr. Wiley will be happy to discuss opportunities with you and to discuss any barriers or challenges you may be facing in getting research opportunities due to your background and collaboratively seek ways to resolve them.

Support

We are committed to a work environment that is supportive and collegial, and we strongly discourage competition or comparisons between team members. Each person in our team is valued and plays an important role. Achieving milestones and accomplishing tasks on time is important, however, we recognise and value the mental and physical well-being of our team more than outcomes.

We encourage self-care and regular,open discussions around self-care needs. This applies to all team members. This may mean getting someone to help cover a shift, adjusting deadlines or scaling back a project. We are committed to finding a path forward and finding additional resources where needed to make sure that everyone on our team is supported and able to maintain their well being as they work and study. These conversations can be difficult, but we believe it is more important to change goals on a project and have a happy, thriving team.

As a lab that studies physical and mental health, we recognise that everyone is impacted by their health and foster stigma free communication about staff mental and physical health.