Values

Science is done by people, and people have values. The values that we hold affect how we conduct science, how we treat each other, and the expectations that we implicitly place on others in our community. This page is an attempt to make explicit some of our group’s internal values and how those values affect the way we do science together. We hope this helps prospective collaborators and students know what to expect from us. This is not an exhaustive list, and it will likely be revised and added to over time.

1. Science is for everyone. All people of all nations, sexual orientations, gender identities, skin colors, and religious affiliation are welcome in our community. So long as your identity does not inherently result in the oppression or purposeful alienation of other people, you are welcome here. We believe science is stronger when people of diverse backgrounds and perspectives come together and question the way the world works in community.
2. Science is a public service. We believe that science can greatly benefit society and the natural world, and therefore we focus our efforts on conducting basic and applied science that has the potential to directly or indirectly fill critical information gaps to make better policy. In the conservation space, this involves to the extent possible co-producing science with potential end-users to ensure that our work is clearly linked to real information needs.
3. We are all on the same team. In our lab group, we do not compete with one another for recognition, for ideas, or for prestige. We believe that individualism in science creates isolation, hurt, and toxicity, and we seek to support each other by asking for help when we need it, by recognizing our own weaknesses and others’ strengths, by being open with our ideas, and being fair in recognizing and rewarding intellectual contributions by our labmates and colleagues through inclusive co-authorship.
4. We respect one another. Treating each other and our collaborators with respect and basic decency is essential. What have we achieved if we do ground-breaking science but have a reputation for being disrespectful, unkind, or mean-spirited? (The answer is “nothing.”) The world can be ugly at times, and we do not wish to contribute to the ugliness. We try our best to be kind to one another and foster a community where everyone feels respected and valued.
5. We love our work but it does not define us. There is a common and damaging perception that to be successful in science, you have to give everything else up. “If you really want this career, you’ll sacrifice your personal life to make it happen.” We believe that viewpoint to be categorically false, boring, and uncreative. Happy people do good science, and having a full life outside of work is a strong source of happiness. We are deeply involved in our communities and our families and we pursue many personal interests when we’re not doing science. We view science as one way to enrich our lives, but its far from the only way.
6. We learn through failure. A central goal of science is to produce new knowledge, but new knowledge does not reveal itself easily. To learn new things about the way the world works we must poke, prod, and try things we haven’t tried before. Trying new things – asking new questions, trying out new methods, collecting new data – is intimidating and often results in failure. We embrace risk-taking and failure. Our goal is to create a community where people feel it is safe to fail.
7. Science is a human endeavor. In the age of large language models (LLMs) and other forms of generative artificial intelligence (genAI), we seek to retain humanity in all aspects of our work. We do not use LLMs or genAI in our scientific writing, because we believe scientific ideas are meant to be developed by people; moreover, most LLMs plagiarize other people’s writing without credit. We view genAI and LLMs as tools that should be used with extreme caution, skepticism, and restraint – if they are used at all.
8. Science requires moral integrity. Every year, published scientific findings are retracted because investigators fabricated data or engaged in other forms of research misconduct. To be good scientists, we must hold ourselves and others around us to the highest ethical standards. If we make a mistake, that’s okay; if we make a mistake and hide it, that’s misconduct. We work together to ensure we are always operating with the highest integrity to ensure public trust in our research.