Our Mission

To improve the lives of those living with complex brain disorders through scientific innovation, community outreach, and training the next generation of leaders in biomedicine.

Core Values

Our core fundamental values drive our laboratory’s commitment to our mission and goals at the highest level of excellence. As a team, we work to engage and unravel the complexities of brain disorders such as chronic migraine, schizophrenia, and major depressive disorder. We are extremely motivated to produce high-impact science while working together to embrace diversity (creed, religion, national origina, ethnicity, race, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, age, ability, etc.), resilience, inclusivity, equity, creativity, and mutual respect.

Stronger Together 

We are assembling a team that is diverse and inclusive across experiences, races, abilities, genders, ethnicities and cultural differences. With a strong emphasis on teamwork, we promote unique cross-disciplinary collaborations to foster innovation. We work hard and support one another through the challenges of life and research.

  • Diversity – Diversity promotes high-impact science [1,2,3]. We are committed to embracing diversity, cultural differences, unique talents, ideas, and experiences within our laboratory and in the broader scientific community. This inclusion promotes an equitable, inclusive, and safe environment for all backgrounds.
  • Collaboration – Working together across disciplines promotes unique innovation [4]. We work hard to encourage communication, involvement, and inclusiveness to promote collaboration across diverse perspectives. 
  • Creativity - We believe in innovation through open-mindedness and welcome all ideas without judgment. We promote an environment that encourages sharing with and teaching others. We welcome unconventional ideas and “outside the box” thinking to transform new ideas into valuable research discoveries and breakthroughs.
  • Resilience through community – We strongly believe that facing the challenges of the 21st century requires a strong community that supports one another, promoting improvement through difficult situations through shared empathy, resources, and teamwork.

Leading with Integrity 

We believe that exercising integrity within our research environment is fundamental to pushing the forefront of scientific discovery. This commitment includes our treatment of one another and our colleagues, as well as promoting best research practices. 

  • Responsibility - We believe it is important to plan well-controlled experiments in advance and ensure all resources are available before moving forward. Carry out experiments with attentiveness and rigor, making sure that results are reliable and reproducible.
  • Honesty - Sharing data and ideas openly with teammates and practicing consistent high-fidelity record keeping are critical to effective science. We work to encourage an environment where people feel they can readily own up to their mistakes, learn from them, and receive support without judgement.
  • Effective Communication - We work continuously to improve written and verbal communication with our team, our collaborators, and the broader scientific community to make the best use of our human resources and work together toward common goals.
  • Stewardship - We aim to make the most of laboratory resources and work efficiently. This is done, in part, by designing creative ways of testing new ideas quickly in a manner that will provide early indication of what works and what doesn’t. We believe it is important not to be wasteful and to conduct research with high efficacy.
  • Growth mindset - We embrace challenges with enthusiasm and continually work to improve ourselves and to help each other’s growth by actively seek training and coaching. Teach and learn from one another. We embrace and celebrate failures, acknowledging them as important learning opportunities and important aspects of science “the importance of stupidity in scientific research” [5]. We promote a positive environment fueled by enthusiasm and willingness to learn and seek opportunities.

Science in Service of Society  

From the research questions that we pursue to the training environment that we create, we are motivated, goal-oriented, and driven by the greater service to society that our work provides.

  • Working toward Cures - The experiments we design, collaborations we forge, and scientific pursuits are all motivated by our big-picture overarching goal of finding cures to complex brain illnesses such as Major Depressive Disorder and Chronic Migraine.
  • Advocacy through sharing scientific knowledge – Society benefits from sharing discoveries made in the research lab by us and our colleagues. We communicate scientific knowledge and educational resources through outreach and participation in the communities around us in the hopes of promoting health, safety, and wellness. Specifically, such knowledge contributes to 1) Reducing the stigma of brain illnesses and promoting culture change, 2) Informing people about how environmental influences and decisions can impact their lived experience in order to promote healing, and 3) Informing policy and promoting justice concerning brain health.
  • Building the future - We train future healthcare professionals, advocates, and scientists in order to promote a strong workforce of biomedical experts. These trainees develop a strong grounding in science and are well-equipped to take on the biggest challenges facing neuroscience, especially with regard to neurological and psychiatric disorders.