Lab Vision
We strive to create a space where independent scientists at different stages of their careers come together to do diverse, cutting-edge, collaborative research and launch meaningful and fulfilling careers.
Lab as a safe space:
The lab must be a safe space. This means that one should feel safe to express one’s views, ask questions, engage with others, and share their work without fear of being diminished, disrespected, ignored, or dismissed.
This does not mean that you will never have negative feelings. We are surrounded by brilliant people and science is objectively hard. We all at times feel intimidated and lost and might have feelings of being an impostor. The work itself will stall at times. Or your favorite argument will just be proven wrong. Or the way you plan to present your work just does not strike people as convincing. We are not safe from these negative emotions, nor do I believe we would want to be - doing cutting-edge work comes with a certain amount of emotional danger. But the lab should feel safe to work through these emotions and to come on the other side. This should be a place where it is safe to take creative risks that can lead to failure and then try again, where you and your work are always respected and taken seriously. I will do my utmost best to create such a space and it is on all of the people in the lab to lift each other up and help build such a safe and nurturing space.
We believe strongly that people from diverse backgrounds bring diverse perspectives and enrich us all and the science that we do. We recognize that people of color have faced and continue to face structural racism both outside and inside academic life. Likewise, people of nontraditional and other minority backgrounds (including first-generation, LGBTQ+, and scientists with disabilities) face unique challenges. We strive to be aware of these challenges and to build a welcoming and supportive lab environment for all current and prospective lab members, to meet people where they are, and to provide mentorship and assistance in an individual way.
Careers:
I make no assumptions about which career you would like to have and will ask you about your goals and dreams throughout your tenure in the lab. I generally advise people not to settle on anything too specific at the outset and instead try to build a work and skill portfolio that would allow them to compete for many different jobs. The better your research, mentorship, collaboration, and teaching credentials are the better it is for all possible jobs. As the time to leave the lab approaches, it will become important to be more specific. I will do my best to help you define your plan and to give you opportunities to see for yourself what it is that you like. For instance, graduate students who are interested in biotech should think about doing an internship at a biotech company at some point during their tenure in the lab. I will do my best to help you find such opportunities.
Research:
It is crucial that you feel full ownership of your research. Of course, much of the time you do not do it alone, and as you won’t be the only author, the others would also feel a sense of ownership over the final product. That is ok. But to the extent it is your work, you should not be alienated from it by me or by others. One of my commitments is to give you as much freedom as possible to pursue your own ideas and to be in charge of your own work. You are a scientist with your unique interests and tastes and ambitions and not a cog in the machine. This is key.
I believe that my main role is to help you do risk assessment about your projects. We aim to have a set of projects that range from very risky but high impact to less risky but maybe more laborious or less high impact and depend on different possibly less risky technology. We also want to make sure that you will learn the essential skills while doing your research and position yourself well for the future. We also will try to make sure that the success of the risky projects can be assessed quickly. We want to avoid a situation where you work on a hard project for 3 years to the exclusion of everything else only to discover at the very end that there is a technical problem that prevents the project from being completed. Pilots are key and we will think together about how to structure them.
Research support:
My key role is that of supporting your work. This includes providing you with the financial resources to buy the appropriate reagents and gain access to the right equipment. Because people in the lab have a lot of freedom, the range of the projects is very large, and it is often the case that neither I nor anyone in the lab have the appropriate expertise. In such cases, my role is to help you gain appropriate skills and to help strike up the appropriate collaborations.
It is also essential that you have an opportunity to present your work to the broader community and my job is to provide you with the resources to go to the right conferences. There is no hard and fast rule but roughly people should expect to go to one conference a year at least and more around the transition times after the graduate school or the postdoctoral phase.
Classes:
I fully support you taking classes and acquiring skills. Please discuss these with me and others to make sure that the class is appropriate for your goals. At some point it is important to focus fully on research but learning in a structured way is important.
Collaboration and mentorship:
Much work in science in general and in our lab, in particular, is done in collaboration with other people in the lab and also outside. I expect that you all will do some collaborative work during your tenure. In some projects, you will take the leading role and will be a presumptive first author (often co-first with someone else on the collaborative team) and in others, you will provide support and will be a presumptive middle author. The conversations about the roles and responsibilities need to be explicit and I will do my best to make sure that everyone understands where things stand. If things are not clear, please do not hesitate to ask.
Note that it is important to have projects where you are both a first and a middle author both for the sake of the lab and your lab members but also for your own sake.
Many of the projects in the lab are done in collaboration with other labs and my role is to help make sure these run smoothly and that you are protected. It is important that you let me know when you initiate these collaborations and CC me on the key correspondence. My job here is not to control you but to protect your interests.
In some situations, we might have a case where a senior postdoc takes more of a supervising and mentoring position on a project and in such a case the postdoc would be a presumptive senior (last) co-author on the project. This comes with extra responsibility to provide mentorship to the first author and everyone else on the project. Again these situations need to be discussed individually.