Pola Research Lab · POLAB
Research into burnout, culture and technology.
POLAB studies mental health and wellbeing, with a focus on practitioner burnout, culturally responsive care and the role of emerging technology. We work with others to turn that learning into better services and practical resources.
What POLAB does
Evidence shaped with the people it serves.
Our work connects inquiry with service design and practical learning. These are the ways a project can move from a question to something people can use.
Ask better questions
Explore the experiences and systems affecting mental health, wellbeing and access to care.
Our burnout study examines exhaustion, racism and the conditions shaping practitioners’ work.
Explore the findings ↗Shape work together
Develop questions, programs and resources with the people and communities they are intended to serve, attending to culture, intersecting identities and power.
Pola co-designed culturally responsive training and supervision for CAREinMIND clinicians, alongside work on culturally responsive intake and referral.
Understand what changes
Learn from programs and services, including the perspectives of the communities involved.
A program report documents learning from Pola’s creative group program.
Read the program report ↗Put learning to work
Turn ideas and findings into useful resources, training and conversations for practitioners and organisations.
A framework for considering culture, identity and systems in practice.
A report shares the thinking behind Pola’s Burnout Prevention & Intersectionality workshop.
Read the workshop report ↗People behind the work
Research shaped by practice and lived context.
Our research team includes Nasalifya Namwinga, Samerawit Molla, Thandie Mketwa Mulenga, Umal Abdi, Toya Ricci and Ashanti Kulasekera. Three team members are also completing PhDs on distinct questions.
Nasalifya Namwinga
PhD · University of Melbourne
Burnout, culture & emerging technology
Nasalifya studies burnout among mental health practitioners, especially those navigating marginalisation, and how emerging tools such as AI scribes can be evaluated for cultural sensitivity and clinical nuance. Her PhD supervisors are Professor Vassilis Kostakos, Associate Professor Róisín McNaney and Professor Karen Farquharson.
Ask Nasalifya about her research ↗Ashanti Kulasekera
PhD · RMIT University
Family violence support for South Asian communities
Ashanti’s research centres South Asian migrant and refugee victim-survivors in Victoria, exploring disclosure, help-seeking and experiences of culturally responsive, trauma-informed support.
Ask Ashanti about her research ↗Toya Ricci
PhD · Victoria University
Decolonising histories of pleasure
Toya explores sexual pleasure histories through Indigenous and marginalised perspectives, questioning colonial narratives about sexuality and the knowledge they leave out.
Ask Toya about her research ↗Work with POLAB
Work with us on a question that matters.
Commission culturally responsive co-design or evaluation, collaborate on research, or discuss support for a defined project. Tell us what you are working toward and we can shape an appropriate next step together.
Commission co-design or evaluation
Work with Pola to develop a service, training or resource with the communities it serves, or learn from an existing program.
Discuss a project ↗Collaborate on research
Explore a shared research question, complementary expertise and a useful path from evidence into practice.
Discuss research ↗Support a defined project
Talk with us about the purpose, people involved, planned outputs and learning goals of a project aligned with your priorities.
Discuss funding ↗Partners & support
People and organisations behind the work.
Ongoing projects
Work still taking shape.
Current work spans body image, ways of knowing, digital learning and wellbeing at work. We’ll share more as findings are ready.
Body image among diaspora women
This ethnographic project explores how diaspora women make sense of their bodies in Western contexts, particularly when dominant beauty ideals leave little room for their appearances, histories and ways of seeing themselves.
More than one way of knowing
This project explores how practitioners bring the Western clinical knowledge they are trained in into conversation with ancestral, cultural and other ways of knowing. It asks how these forms of knowledge shape care, and what it takes to make room for them responsibly in practice.
Burnout & Intersectionality workshop
We are co-designing a digital version of Pola’s workshop so more people can explore burnout in the context of identity, workplace culture and systems. The work considers how reflection and practical learning can carry into a self-paced format.
Funded by the Scanlon Foundation
Explore Pola’s digital training ↗Burnout, marginalisation & AI at work
We are examining how marginalised professionals experience burnout and how emerging AI tools are entering their working lives. The project asks what technology might help with, and what it may overlook when workplace inequities remain unaddressed.
Start a conversation