Commitment to Equity, Diversity & Inclusion

Science, like many human endeavors, has historically excluded certain groups while advantaging others. These inequities are not only morally wrong, but also limit the advancement of knowledge. To help overcome these inequities, members of privileged groups like myself must be willing to acknowledge their privilege, educate themselves, and proceed with appropriate corrective actions. I have pledged myself as an ally in every arena in which these injustices must be combated and have committed myself to carrying this out as a human, scientist, and citizen of a diverse global community. 

In my first year of graduate school, I joined and later became a co-leader for the volunteer group  SPEAK: Scientists Promoting Equity And Knowledge. Using a journal-club like format, we regularly met to learn and discuss various gender and race inequities present in science. Our group was designed to have a flat organization structure; meetings were led by individual members who chose the topic that they wanted to learn more about and would lead the group discussion. As one of its co-leaders, my role was to facilitate the planning and execution of our meetings while supporting our meeting leader as they took charge of the actual content and discussion. In 2020, the other leaders and I wrote an article in Nature Communications: Career that shared our group’s strategies with the hopes that similar groups might be enacted at other institutions. During this time, I also helped launch the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Internship, which provided a fully paid semester-long research internship for Duke undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds to teach them basic research skills that they could take into post-baccalaureate and graduate school positions.

 I have also begun reflecting on inequitable practices in research. As an EEG researcher, I had been “taught” at an early stage of my career that it was exceedingly difficult to collect data from Black people/people of African descent. One of the largest determinants of the signal-to-noise ratio of EEG data is the size of the gap between the electrode and the participant’s scalp. Most of this gap is composed of hair, but the structure of hair can vary dramatically between different races and ethnicities. The hair follicles of Caucasian and Asian individuals generally produce straight hair, which lies flat against EEG caps and minimizes the electrode-scalp gap. In contrast, many individuals of African descent have curly hair (Franbourg et al., 2003; Roseborough & McMichael, 2009), which can resist the cap’s pressure, increasing the gap and reducing signal quality (Etienne et al., 2020). Although this issue was well-known in the EEG community, it had rarely been addressed, leading to the disproportionate exclusion of Black participants and unrepresentative data samples.

From my perspective, the issue stemmed from a design problem with the EEG cap and electrodes. In the fall of 2020, I won a grant from Duke based on my proposed new design for an EEG cap that would circumvent the usual technical errors that would arise in the typical EEG cap design. I built and tested a prototype cap where the length of each electrode could be individually adjusted to each individual’s scalp-to-cap distance for each site. This would theoretically allow one to fit a cap to anyone’s head regardless of how much hair they had. Empirical testing of this solution on participants of Black/African descent suggested that it could produce data comparable to the  current “gold standard” for EEG recording while also using less gel. We also found several other pieces of key advice that other EEG researchers could easily implement in their own setups, which will be shared in an upcoming preprint.