SAFE Labs
Starting Aware Fair & Equitable Labs
Welcome to SAFE Labs!
SAFE Labs “Starting Aware Fair & Equitable Labs” is an initiative that started in 2024 by four new group leaders with a strong commitment to creating more positive lab environments. This initiative developed into an annual workshop, a community-driven SAFE Labs Handbook for group leaders, and a publication with analysis of feedback from more than 200 researchers. You can find more information about this different elements of SAFE Labs below, as well as information about becoming more involved in this initiative.
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The 1st Workshop
The first annual workshop took place in Cortona (Tuscany, Italy) in 2024 with 13 group leaders from institutions across 8 countries. The goal of the meeting was to identify common, and divergent, problems faced by new researchers trying to build successful, equitable, and fair labs with a positive research culture. During the meeting we discuss several themes (i.e. team management, supporting EDI etc.) and established actionable commitments for each of these themes.
The Handbook
This first workshop laid the foundation for the SAFE Labs Handbook: the ideas proposed during the workshop were curated to establish a list of actionable commitments that group leaders can use to help create and maintain a safe environment for doing science in their teams.
The Publication
We wanted to gather a diverse and representative feedback about the different commitments of the Handbook. We therefore designed a survey, where each participant rated the importance of each commitment and indicated whether the commitment was already established in their group. This survey gathered feedback from over 200 researchers from diverse countries and career stages. We found a high rating of importance for all proposed commitments but relatively low implementation, reinforcing the relevance of the Handbook. In line with this, most of the participating group leaders (> 95%) said they would consider implementing the handbook commitments.
2nd Workshop and the future of SAFE Labs
The second workshop took place in Barcelona (Spain) in 2025, and was organised by a new cohort of group leaders. 13 attendees from 6 European countries discussed SAFE Labs topics and identified new critical commitments for the SAFE Labs Handbook.
We hope to continue our action through new workshops, and through the establishment of SAFE Labs Label. If you are an organisation interested in supporting future SAFE Labs workshops, please get in touch!