Have you ever refused a fascinating project because its results could not be so promising? Do you feel comfortable discussing your results with your labmates and collaborators? How would you describe your department’s culture?

After our last event in June with Psychology and Neuroscience experts, we are more aware of the emotional dynamics and how they affect our motivation, health, communication, and decision taking in our job.

Now, we would like to start the new academic course discussing how these emotional dynamics affect academic research particularly.

For this event, we will count with Dr. Jennifer M. Heemstra, a researcher at the Emory University and social media communicator of the mental health at the laboratory; and, with the Dr. Ellen Wehrens, a researcher at the Princes Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology and leader of the “Happy Laboratory” project in the Dr. Anne Ríos’ researching group.

From their experience, we will argue about:

● Learning from errors is advice commonly heard; in contrast, those errors are used to be hidden in academia as they can be considered as failure. However, those errors are key elements to continue growing and improving. How can we normalize exposing those failures as a positive component of progress?

● After the last year, worldwide researchers have realized that they were under stressing conditions and suffering anxiety without being aware. How a “happy laboratory” can be applied to detect and solve those problems? Is the cost-benefit risk positive?

● Among the researching community, we can find more and more communicators visualizing the academic researching associated problems, as the previous ones, who promote new ways to improve the researching routine. What changes are being took to get a Science with personal quality? How these changes can be extended to ease the scientific community’s growth?