The focus of the RAD lab is to understand and alleviate the suffering of adolescents who are distressed, depressed, or despairing. While these mental health challenges cut across our society as a whole, we want to bring light to adolescents in our community and across this region that  carry additional burden due to marginalization, discrimination and other systemic injustices.

Our research team faculty, staff, and students are unified in condemning the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, acknowledging the ongoing systemic racism in our society,  and expressing our renewed commitment to take action to help ease this burden. Actions to take in our lab will start with:

1. We will initiate new relationships with community organizations that serve marginalized adolescents and directly aid those organizations through volunteer assistance to help them carry out their missions.

2. We commit to understanding and rectifying barriers to research participation for marginalized youth so that knowledge generated by the RAD lab reflects, represents, and ultimately serves all young people equally. 

3. We will begin to incorporate assessment measures that better assess the impact of racism, discrimination, and marginalization on mental health and developing neurobiology in adolescents.

whit2581