“Emilia helped me find my voice and communicate my expectations, nurturing my abilities as a researcher, an individual and a lifelong learner. She was always supportive of my goals and recognized potential in me even before I did.”
— Adwoa Sefah
“Emilia has helped me so much in my personal growth and her dedication to research has set the best example for me.”
— Yuqing Cao
“Biomedical science is an incredibly rewarding experience, especially with a mentor as enthusiastic about her work and students’ success as Emilia.”
— Alex Joseph
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
The Favuzzi Lab does not only embrace but builds on diversity. We actively recruit lab members with different backgrounds, races, gender identities, ethnicities, nationalities, etc. and we ensure that this includes people from underrepresented minorities. We believe that the longer the distance you traveled to get here, the higher your merit, not the opposite.
Several aspects of our personal history have shaped this mindset and made various lab members particularly sensitive to the topic of diversity, equity, and inclusion. As a scientist who is also a woman, queer, and an immigrant coming from a family with no academic background, Emilia has had first-hand experiences with sexism, discrimination, the scarcity of role models, lack of belonging, and the need for a scientific community to which she could relate. For these reasons, she makes it part of her mission to foster a supportive and equitable lab environment where everyone is valued, included, and happy.
However, we also recognize that to effectively promote diversity, we need to become cognizant and aware of the implicit biases that we all have. Prioritizing equity and inclusion starts with identifying racism, sexism, transphobia, and other forms of discrimination and continues with unlearning our implicit biases and engaging in anti-discrimination solutions through education, advocacy, outreach, and resource allocation.
Image credit: Andy Brunning/Compound Interest
Mentorship
We strongly value mentorship and part of our mission is to foster a supportive, diverse, and inclusive lab environment where trainees can thrive. We actively promote a lab culture based on respect, participation, and feedback, where everyone feels that it is safe to express thoughts and ideas.
The Favuzzi lab is founded on the following core values: honesty, inclusion, motivation, reliability, and creativity. We run on enthusiasm, science conversations, and… birthday cakes.
In the lab, trainees are supervised in a way that fosters their thinking and preserves their intellectual ownership. When faced with unavoidable roadblocks, we will try to guide you toward a solution rather than providing it.
Emilia prioritizes mentorship and dedicates a lot of time and effort to mentoring each lab member. She strives to transmit enthusiasm to mentees, foster their intellectual growth and empower them to reach their full potential. Her goal is to enable you to do transformative experiments that will make the maximum impact on the scientific community. Scientific integrity and hard work are essential to reach this goal, but Emilia’s ultimate goal as a mentor is to create an environment where all lab members enjoy the day-to-day process of research and feel included, motivated, and accomplished both personally and as scientists.
In addition to scientific and technical training, we are truly committed to the success of any and all lab members and will support them in their next career step, whatever that may be.
Image credit: scienceichooseyou.wordpress.com
Outreach
Past
During her postdoc at Harvard Medical School, in addition to direct mentoring in the laboratory, Emilia was involved in educational and outreach programs. Among these is COSSDAC (College of Science Student Diversity Advisory Council) at Northeastern University. COSSDAC offers mentorship, resources, and advice to diverse undergraduates who identify as underrepresented in science. Emilia also volunteered as a mentor for the Action Potential Advising Program by Simply Neuroscience, an educational program for high school and undergraduate students.
Present — From 2024
The Favuzzi lab as a whole is involved in several outreach programs, most notably Yale Pathways and BP-Endure. These programs offer paid summer internship opportunities to students from diverse backgrounds, including (but not limited to) local public schools in the New Haven area.
Land Acknowledgement Statement
The Favuzzi Lab acknowledges that indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian-speaking peoples, have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut. We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land.
What formerly mentored students say
Yuqing (Bonnie) Cao
“I would consider Emilia not just as my lab supervisor, but as my mentor. Emilia has helped me so much in my personal growth and her dedication to research has set the best example for me. As an undergraduate student, I joined the lab with a passion for neuroscience but not enough skills and knowledge. She was very patient with me and answered every question with details. -No such thing as a stupid question-. That’s what she told me. She also taught me to be persistent and motivated, not afraid of setbacks and problems that might arise. Moreover, she encouraged me to explore different topics and new research techniques in neuroscience through literature and seminars. Then we would have a discussion of what can be applied to our experiments. With her guidance, I was able to conduct an independent research project and present it at a local neuroscience symposium. After graduating from college, I reach out to Emilia constantly in regard to career development. She has provided a lot of guidance on which direction I could explore. Now, I am happily continuing my studies in graduate school.”
Yuqing (Bonnie) Cao obtained a bachelor degree in behavioral neuroscience from Northeastern University and she is currently pursuing a master in biotechnology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Feel free to reach out to her with questions!
Adwoa Sefah
“Emilia served as my mentor during my 6-month co-op in the Fishell lab at Harvard Medical School. I went in with previous experience but not nearly as much as what I left with. Emilia was very honest and open about expectations. She allowed me to work independently on different projects and formulate conclusions and hypothesis on my own. Her amazing mentorship is what led me to my first research publication as an undergrad. As a medical student now, I am still using a lot of the skills she taught me and helped me develop, in my various classes (especially histology). Emilia helped me find my voice and communicate my expectations as well, nurturing my abilities as a researcher, an individual and a lifelong learner. She was always supportive of my goals and recognized potential in me even before I did. Every mistake I made was seen as a learning opportunity and a chance to grow for myself. At the end of my 6-month co-op, even with the Covid-19 pandemic, I left feeling like I had grown a lot as a scientist and gained a lifelong mentor and friend in the process.”
Adwoa Sefah received a BS in Cell and Molecular Biology from Northeastern University in 2022 and is currently a medical student at the University of Illinois College of Medicine.
Alexander Joseph
“Getting the opportunity to work with Emilia was one of the most important milestones in my professional career. Emilia introduced me to a variety of new biological techniques and helped me to refine skills that I had already developed. She was equally willing to sit with me for hours on end to develop a new skill as she was to trust me to complete tasks independently after mastering them. I had initially worried about balancing classes and my research obligations, but Emilia was always willing to be flexible to support my academic commitments. We would frequently talk about what our results could mean for our project and how to interpret and modify experiments moving forward to account for new information. The resulting skills in scientific thinking from these conversations have helped me in all walks of life, from job interviews to taking the MCAT. Ultimately though, the biggest takeaway from my time working with Emilia is that biomedical science is an incredibly rewarding experience, especially with a mentor as enthusiastic about her work and students’ success as Emilia. To this day, she is always just an email away anytime I need advice. I largely credit my time working with her as a big part of the reason I decided to take a gap year to do even more research before applying for medical school.”
Alex is finishing up his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry at Northeastern University. Upon graduation, he will be working as a research assistant in the Jain Laboratory at MIT’s Whitehead Institute.