Each year, in celebration of International Women’s Day, the Wellcome Genome Campus – home of EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) – celebrates some of its diversity champions during the Best Practice Awards for Supporting Equality and Diversity in Science. These awards allow staff across the campus to nominate colleagues who have contributed to a more inclusive working environment or who are demonstrating exemplary contributions to promoting diversity. 

As an international organisation, EMBL is committed to creating and sustaining a culture in which diversity is celebrated and where all staff are included and treated equally. To find out more about what our staff are doing to ensure these best practices, we spoke to those nominated for this year’s Best Practice Awards. 

Rodica Petrusevschi, Digital Strategy Officer 

“I work with our amazing web development and UX teams to improve the user experience of the EMBL-EBI website. Pushing for a user-centric approach and inclusive web practices can be time consuming and requires buy-in from many people, but once in place the results speak for themselves. When people come to our website it’s important that they immediately see that this is a diverse and inclusive place to work. Ensuring representation in the photos we are using across the website and maintaining the accessibility standards of our website will have a huge impact on the range of people using the site and applying for jobs here.”

Andy Yates, Team Leader, Genomics Technology Infrastructure

“Improving EDI requires like minded people to come together to push things forward. Myself and other members of Genomes, Analysis, and Annotation (GAA) are developing best practice measures within EMBL-EBI, working closely with Wellcome to improve our efforts. Getting this diversity of input about effective EDI strategies is hugely beneficial to improving the way we work. When a workforce has a diverse range of backgrounds and life experience it has a huge impact on what we can achieve and we are better because of this.”

Rebecca Nicholl, Marketing and Communications Manager 

“It’s an honour to be nominated for my work in supporting and improving EDI measures across campus at this year’s awards. Representation truly matters and holds great power. I endeavour to represent the full spectrum of scientists through the materials I produce on behalf of EMBL-EBI Training. Small ways I do this include using inclusive language, a diverse set of images, and alt text consistently in all communication, marketing, and social media messages I create.”

Bethany Flint, Ensembl Applications Project Leader

“I’m co-chair of the GAA EDI working group. As part of this I help find ways we can improve our processes and ensure that our work supports the EDI policies put in place by EMBL. Specifically I’m looking at what we can do to help increase and maintain diversity within the Ensembl project. One way we are working towards this is through adjustments to the types of information we include in our job adverts and thinking about where we are posting these to attract a more diverse range of applicants. The more diverse a workforce, the more diversity there is in their ideas which helps us provide a better service to our users.” 

Find out more about EDI at EMBL-EBI. 

Portraits by Petra Korlevic, Wellcome Sanger Institute.

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