An environmental therapeutics lab.
Providence, RI · Est. 2025
Our Research
Each field has a diagnostic instrument and a therapeutic environment. We build both.
Why does what communities produce almost never reach the people it was made for?
Can the right environment make people genuinely open up, and does watching that change how we connect with each other?
When a hospital's AI system knows the right diagnosis, what stops it from telling the doctor?
What does the music someone loves, and how they talk about it, reveal about who they actually are?
Support the Work
Start with $10 and get your name on something real. Reach out if you want deeper involvement.
Give where most needed
Back the lab, not just one project. Your contribution goes where the lab determines it is needed most. Think of it as investing in the portfolio, not a single stock.
Film Therapeutics
The Ghana national football team is coming to Rhode Island ahead of the World Cup. The lab has the access to film it. What it needs is the gear. Fund a specific item and get credited in the episode.
Cognitive Profiling
A music discovery platform that learns who you are through what you love. Back the research and the product at the same time.
AI Honesty
Clinical AI suppresses its own correct diagnoses under adversarial pressure. The validation study tests this at scale across 1,000 chest radiographs. That study produces the manuscript and the path to regulatory consideration.
$10–$999 contributions are gifts in exchange for perks. No financial return. Full terms →
Join the Lab
Most projects only have one. Polarity Lab builds the other. If what you do fits the environmental therapeutics thesis and you have something real to show, we want to hear from you.
Bring your project to the lab →The Lab
Brown University · MetroWest Medical Center · St. Vincent's Hospital
Theodore is a fourth-year medical student at Brown University, completing a transitional year at MetroWest Medical Center before beginning a residency in diagnostic radiology at St. Vincent's Hospital. His research examines how environments shape what the mind suppresses, from the sensory inputs that govern social behavior in the brain to the training incentives that cause clinical AI systems to override their own correct reasoning. He was an undergraduate researcher in the MIT Synthetic Neurobiology Group under Dr. Ed Boyden, studying zebrafish social behavior as a whole-brain model of sensory input to behavioral action, and trained at UMBC under Dr. Rachel Brewster as a Meyerhoff, HHMI, and MARC/URISE Scholar. He has co-authored work in Molecular Cell, a bioengineering simulation study presented at SMFM 2026, and patents in brain-modeled knowledge graphs and cognitive biometric authentication. He founded Polarity Lab in 2025.
Brown University · Sociotechnical Systems and Wellbeing Lab
Shadrack is a student of Computer Science and Religious Studies at Brown University ('27) and a Research Assistant in the Sociotechnical Systems and Wellbeing Lab under Dr. Diana Freed. He previously conducted survey research on conditions in which youth thrive at the Character Lab. At Polarity Lab, he leads technical infrastructure, product design, and creative direction across all three research programs. He is the producer of A Very Distant Perspective, co-founder of Blueno, and founder of WAXFEED. He co-authored patents in brain-modeled knowledge graphs and cognitive biometric authentication.
Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa · BIPOC Business Society
Nathan is studying Finance and Business Technology Management at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, where he serves as VP Finance of the BIPOC Business Society and conducted undergraduate research in AI trend forecasting and computational modelling. He spent a year as a business and technical solutions analyst at HOIST. He co-authored a brain-modeled knowledge graphs patent. At Polarity Lab, he leads the work of making the lab's research and products legible across every audience it touches, from internal team building to investor partnerships and brand strategy.
Innovation Investigator in Residence
MUSEOFRI · Providence, RI
J'Juan is the founder and CEO of The MUSE Foundation of Rhode Island, the state's first philanthropic foundation built to cultivate creativity and innovation in communities of color. A Providence community leader for thirty years, his work spans workforce development, youth empowerment, cultural equity, and philanthropic investment. He led the campaign that made Juneteenth a Rhode Island paid state holiday in 2024 and established the Rhode Island Black Philanthropy Month Legacy Fund, with partnerships across United Way RI, Brown University, and the RI Foundation. In parallel, he has built a career as an independent branding and business consultant to clients including Atlantic Records, Universal Music Group, SONY Records, and the City of Providence. His field research on professional development barriers across the nonprofit sector and resource discovery failures in Rhode Island organizations formed the problem foundation for the Community Discovery lab. At Polarity Lab, he contributes community research and field knowledge to the Proximity Index and PolarityGPS.
Brown University · Fountainhead
Chris is a student of Computer Science at Brown University and the founder of Fountainhead, a platform for connecting collaborators across the creative and technical space. He came to AVDP having immediately understood the research framing of the podcast, proposed extending it into shortform content, assembled his own production team to execute the first shortform episode, and co-developed the conceptual framing of the series with the lab. He has conducted research at Rutgers University in quantum circuit optimization under Dr. Zheng Zhang. At Polarity Lab, he contributes to the AVDP program as a producer and creative collaborator on AVDP.
About the Lab
The environments people move through shape what they think, feel, and know. Most of them were not designed with that in mind. Platforms optimized for engagement over attention. Clinical AI trained to agree over accuracy. Resource infrastructure that serves the organizations already visible, not the ones that need it most. We study the mechanism. We build the antidote.
A diagnostic instrument gives you a number for something that doesn't have one yet. A blood pressure cuff doesn't ask how you feel. It gives a reading that means the same thing in any clinic in the world. We build that for things medicine hasn't gotten to yet: how disconnected someone has become from real relationships, how much an AI is steering their thinking without them knowing it.
A therapeutic environment is a place or experience designed so that going through it produces a real, specific change in you. The environment does the work. You leave less isolated, thinking more clearly, trusting yourself more. Not because you tried. Because of what it put you through.
Where We Work
Get in Touch
Research & Collaboration
Institutions, practitioners, and researchers interested in working alongside the lab on active programs.
Funding & Investment
Funders, health systems, and foundations interested in supporting specific programs or the lab overall.
Join the Lab
The lab is built on people doing what they already do well. If your work touches what we're building and you want to be part of it, reach out.
Money and time are not the only ways to help. If you know someone this work should reach, an introduction or a share is worth more than most people think.