Strategies to Create Equity-Focused Psychologically Safe Climates

This Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) examines strategies to create equity-focused psychologically safe climates within post-secondary institutions. Organizational environments that are marked by high stress, professional hierarchies, and pressure to provide high-quality service, such as those within post-secondary institutions, benefit the most from strategic psychological safety interventions. Yet, many organizations are unsuccessful in creating psychologically safe environments because they have not applied an equity lens (Foley at al., 2002; Singh et al., 2013). A one-size-fits-all approach to psychological safety often exacerbates systemic inequities and barriers which have disproportionate negative impacts on marginalized students and employees (Singh et al., 2013). This OIP aims to apply an equity lens to psychological safety and deconstruct ways of advancing equity-focused psychological safety via leadership development. An inclusive leadership lens is used to identify possible solutions to the problem, framing equity and psychological safety as a core leadership function in pursuit of social justice. Kotter’s Eight Step Change Model and Bridges’ Transition Model are used to frame change implementation and change activities. Gaventa’s (2006) power cube framework is used to explore, understand, and position how spaces for engagement and communication are impacted by power

Pathway level subtyping identifies a slow-cycling biological phenotype associated with poor clinical outcomes in colorectal cancer

Molecular stratification using gene-level transcriptional data has identified subtypes with distinctive genotypic and phenotypic traits, as exemplified by the consensus molecular subtypes (CMS) in colorectal cancer (CRC). Here, rather than gene-level data, we make use of gene ontology and biological activation state information for initial molecular class discovery. In doing so, we defined three pathway-derived subtypes (PDS) in CRC: PDS1 tumors, which are canonical/LGR5+ stem-rich, highly proliferative and display good prognosis; PDS2 tumors, which are regenerative/ANXA1+ stem-rich, with elevated stromal and immune tumor microenvironmental lineages; and PDS3 tumors, which represent a previously overlooked slow-cycling subset of tumors within CMS2 with reduced stem populations and increased differentiated lineages, particularly enterocytes and enteroendocrine cells, yet display the worst prognosis in locally advanced disease. These PDS3 phenotypic traits are evident across numerous bulk and single-cell datasets, and demark a series of subtle biological states that are currently under-represented in pre-clinical models and are not identified using existing subtyping classifiers