DIBEJ Initiatives

Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging, Equity and Justice (DIBEJ)

Since its founding in 2020, the DIBEJ Committee has made important contributions to the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. 

As a committee, we set new goals each year and work in subgroups to develop recommendations that can further improve the experience of faculty, trainees, and staff within our neuroscience community. 

Below are some of the initiatives we have funded and continue to support.

  1. We recommended updates to the Institute's grantmaking process which were accepted and implemented. These changes encourage all faculty to develop goals for increasing diversity, inclusion, belonging, equity and justice in their research groups and at Stanford. 
  2. BIPOC Emerging Leaders of the Next Generation (BELONG) is a trainee-led initiative that aims to increase visibility of future BIPOC neuroscience leaders in the country. It also serves to foster community among BIPOC trainees at Stanford.
  3. The NeURO-CC program invites local community college students to conduct full-time research in a neuroscience laboratory at Stanford during the summer. This program is modeled after our successful NeURO program for Stanford undergraduates. 
  4. The Pathways to Neurosciences program aims to help neuroscience trainees succeed during important transitions in their career progression. The ideas behind this program were seeded by discussions in DIBEJ and committee members helped write the grant. Seed funding was provided by the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and the Departments of  Neurology and Neurological Sciences, Psychiatry, and Neurosurgery.  Since then, Pathways also secured a major training grant from the NIH. It is run by Drs. Miriam Goodman, Marion Buckwalter and Erin Gibson.