Dear Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives Community,
Each term, HBHL provides updates on its progress, priorities and upcoming plans for equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) to ensure transparency and accountability in commitment to HBHL’s EDI Action Plan.
Actions from January to June 2025
Training
EDI One-on-One Coaching
HBHL continues to offer consulting and coaching hours with an independent Inclusion Consultant who focuses on academic and research organizations. This free service is available to McGill brain health researchers for assistance with EDI and Sex- and Gender- Based Analysis Plus (SGBA+) in research proposals. Participating researchers receive personalized written feedback on grant applications.
HBHL Symposium
The HBHL Symposium featured an IMPRESS panel with three students who shared their experiences and discussed the program’s impact on themselves and the McGill community. The discussion also focused on the future of Indigenous research in academia and how the HBHL community can better support Indigenous scholarship.
Professional Development
The EDI Trainee Committee hosted the Talking Research with Patient Partners Lunch and Learn workshop on April 24. The event aimed to improve trainees’ communication skills with patients, caregivers and others with lived experience to better include patient populations in research.
HBHL held its annual SGBA+ event, Sex Cells!, in April at the Neuro. The event featured talks by Liisa Galea (CAMH) and Robert-Paul Juster (Université de Montréal) on the importance of sex and gender considerations in neuroscience, with specific examples from their prominent work in brain health science.
HBHL supported an EDI-related training event entitled Equity in AI: Building Technologies That Work for All, held in February 2025. Forty-three people attended the workshop given by Inclusion Consultant Falisha Karpati.
Recruitment and Retention
Neurogenesis Speaker Series
The Neurogenesis Speaker Series pairs two HBHL-supported faculty recruits with complementary research areas to present their work in a short seminar, followed by an informal get-together. The Winter Term Neurogenesis events featured talks by Paul Masset, Pouya Bashivan, Dana Small and Yashar Zeighami.
Climate Survey
HBHL has conducted its third biennial Climate Survey. This anonymous survey is used to inform HBHL’s equity, diversity and inclusion strategy by evaluating the demographic profile of HBHL participants and their experiences in the academic environment. Plans are underway to expand on these findings and turn them into a resource for McGill units beyond the term of HBHL (see our upcoming priorities below).
Distribution of Funding
HBHL-IMPRESS Program
HBHL is proud to support the neuroscience stream of the Indigenous Mentorship and Paid Research Experience for Summer Students (IMPRESS) program, which places Indigenous students in the labs of McGill professors for paid summer internships. This fourth cohort supported by HBHL is comprised of eight students hosted in six labs. HBHL also continues to support the mentorship component of IMPRESS's brain health research stream, ensuring students have role models who share similar academic and cultural backgrounds.
As part of the IMPRESS program, all individuals engaging with Indigenous students are required to participate in a cultural competency workshop. This year, the event included a blanket ceremony—an interactive workshop exploring the historical and contemporary relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada.
To ensure the continued success of IMPRESS, HBHL is exploring funding and business development opportunities for the program. Discussions are ongoing with potential partners, and HBHL has partnered with students from McGill’s Desautels Faculty of Management to prepare a business plan for IMPRESS.
Research Content
Canadian Framework for Brain Health Research
A request for applications for the Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) in Neuroscience: Knowledge Exchange Grants was launched in February 2025. The objective of this grant is to support funded teams to engage in Knowledge Translation and Exchange (KTE) activities to promote uptake of their guidance on SDoH integration in neuroscience.
HBHL EDI Trainee Committee
The HBHL Trainee Committee is leading an EDI initiative that will allow students to share their research findings with the patient community through an accessible and engaging poster session, while also receiving their feedback. All posters will be designed with a strong emphasis on visual elements and limited text to ensure the information is easily understandable for patients. The posters will also highlight the real-world impact of the projects and results, and how the findings can be translated into improved patient care or clinical practice.
A survey is being conducted to identify clinically oriented research at McGill, with a focus on rare diseases affecting the nervous system. Once key research areas are determined, patient organizations will be consulted to better understand their needs and explore meaningful ways to involve them in the research process.
Priorities over the next six months
Over the next six months, HBHL will:
- Engage with the HBHL community to explore the results from the latest Climate Survey and collect stories, experiences and advice on how to improve EDI at McGill. We will then share this resource within McGill units. If you would like to be involved in this initiative, please contact Kim.reeve [at] mcgill.ca.
- Host a Knowledge Translation and Exchange (KTE) workshop in June featuring a keynote by McGill implementation science researcher Guillaume Fontaine and provide additional guidance to the SDoH KTE teams on their strategies.
- Showcase the research of the IMPRESS students at the IMPRESS Research Day, held at the Bellini Life Sciences Complex Atrium at the end of July.
- Explore partnerships and other possibilities to ensure the sustainability of IMPRESS beyond HBHL's term.
- Support the EDI Trainee Committee with plans to host additional workshops focused on building lasting relationships that enhance research, such as patient advisory boards or invited talks at patient organizations.
- Support HBHL’s Trainee Committee’s EDI Officers in creating a platform to communicate their research findings in an accessible manner to patient communities.
We welcome your feedback, questions and suggestions for how we can improve. If you would like to collaborate or get involved with HBHL’s EDI initiatives, please contact HBHL’s Project Manager, Kim Reeve (kim.reeve [at] mcgill.ca).
Sincerely,
The HBHL Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Committee
