As the country fights for racial justice, our group is thinking constructively about how we can contribute to the movement within science. The Black Lives Matter movement extends beyond police violence and the prison industrial complex, and black researchers have continuously been underrepresented and unsupported in science.

This past Wednesday, our group participated in #ShutDownSTEM (https://www.shutdownstem.com/). We suspended research-related activities for the day to educate ourselves and reflect on how we can advocate for racial justice within the photonics community and the broader scientific community at Harvard. Our group discussion later in the week focused on how we can uplift black researchers in our field and be less complicit in the historical and persistent barriers hindering black scientists.

At the high school and undergraduate level, we would like to devote more time as mentors to interns from a wide range of backgrounds by allocating more resources to mentor-mentee relationships and starting each internship with an open conversation about how best we can support each individual student. 

At the postgraduate level, we are thinking critically about how postdoctoral research positions are often rewarded based on previous connections, making it more challenging for scientists from less privileged backgrounds to continue successfully in academia, and brainstorming ways to remedy this in the future. 

We hope to use our position as a research group at Harvard to provide a platform for more black professors and researchers to showcase their work at our department colloquia, making a concerted effort to uplift the impressive work done by our colleagues.

This is an ongoing issue, and our group hopes that with continued reflection we can refine our ideas further. We are currently devoting weekly meetings to continue our discussions and share ideas and lived experiences within our group.