How to enter:
Email your single submission (one per person or team) to Linda Hamilton at lhamil17@utk.edu
Why Groupspace Matters for Safety
Safety isn’t only about managing physical hazards like equipment, chemicals, or tools. It also depends on how people relate to one another while the work is being done.
Groupspace is the social environment of a lab, the unwritten rules, power dynamics, shared norms, and group habits that shape whether someone raises a concern or stays silent. Most labs don’t choose their Groupspace. It develops gradually through pressure, tradition, and dynamics that were never explicitly discussed.
When Groupspace goes unexamined, it can quietly undermine safety:
- People who see something wrong may not feel it’s their place to speak up
- Power gradients between PIs, postdocs, and students can make silence feel safer than honesty
- Production pressure can become a shared, unspoken expectation that overrides caution
- A culture of “production at all costs” can take hold without anyone ever saying it out loud
By intentionally designing how a lab group relates to one another, we can make speaking up expected and encouraged and make safety something the group owns together.
Submission Prompts
This quarter’s award asks for a hypothetical scenario, your vision of what a deliberately designed, safety-supportive Groupspace would look like. You are not describing a lab that currently exists. You are imagining one built from scratch with full intention.
If you’re not sure where to start, consider:
- What would a new lab member learn, in their first two weeks, about whether it’s safe to speak up?
- What norms, rituals, or habits would the group practice to keep communication honest and low stakes?
- How would the lab handle the first time a junior member raised a safety concern about something a senior member did?
- What would make silence an exception rather than the norm when someone notices a risk?
- How would the group balance deadline pressure with the shared expectation of slowing down when something doesn’t feel right?
Your submission doesn’t need to be a complete blueprint, just a thoughtful, specific picture of one aspect of Groupspace done well.
Our Goal
The Lab Safety Culture Awards are about learning from one another. By imagining what intentional Groupspace looks like, we surface the ideas, norms, and practices that can make research environments genuinely safer, not just better equipped.
The best submissions will give someone a concrete, usable idea they can bring back to their own lab.