The wellbeing 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 core values, being 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 and safe communication across all team members.
On this page
Ethical
Ethics
We strive to follow the highest ethical standards in our work, research and interactions. This includes practising 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 wellbeing of everyone who participates in our research, but also to being careful, honest and transparent in our interpretation of results and any outputs we submit.
Our research ideals
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 large amounts of highly personal data from daily life.
- Seeking diversity and inclusion among the people who take part in our research, our team and our 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 of 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.
Inclusive
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 under-represented in the health sciences to apply and join our group.
If you are from an under-represented group and would like to join our team, please reach out to the lab head: joshua.wiley@monash.edu, or see all the ways to get involved. Dr Wiley will be happy to discuss opportunities with you, including any barriers or challenges you may face in getting research opportunities because of your background, and to work with you on ways to resolve them.
Supportive
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 wellbeing 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 wellbeing as they work and study. These conversations can be difficult, but we would rather change a project’s goals than lose a happy, thriving team.
As a lab that studies physical and mental health, we recognise that everyone is impacted by their health, and we foster stigma-free communication about team members’ mental and physical health.