Expectations
Table of contents
Your Role
It is expected that you will take responsibility for your research project and career development. Lab members have no core work hours, and are expected to manage their time to achieve goals established in weekly meetings. Lab members will be expected to meet deadlines for major projects, and comply with tracking progress in project management software such as Monday.com, Todoist, Slack, etc as established for their project. Lab members must post papers that are of interest to the team on #references, and are also encouraged to present interesting papers as journal clubs or provide a brief summary/commentary about a paper they found of particular interest on Fridays.
Research is hard, and mentees are expected to face challenges, disprove hypotheses, develop expertise in new techniques, and even make mistakes in the process of discovery. Elana will serve as a primary resource to discuss and review this process. Lab members are also encouraged to seek independent resources or one another to overcome any research challenges. Any challenges that will delay research goals or daily tasks should be communicated to Elana or appropriate team members immediately to facilitate progress.
As a member of the lab, you are expected to participate fully in the team, both intellectually and operationally. The lab members are expected to participate in lab events and monitor lab slack in order to facilitate interactions with the group during the established work day. Communication in outside hours is not expected. By default, lab members have hybrid work designation with common in person days recommended to promote group camaraderie and brainstorming. All group members are encouraged to take regular vacation according to the policies in their contract and communicated with Elana.
We share all raw and processed data upon publication. Unpublished lab materials, including but not limited to data, manuscript drafts, and grants are lab property. While it is Elana’s personal philosophy to be very generous in collaboratively sharing these items, sharing these materials must be discussed with and approved by her first.
Lab members come from diverse personal and academic backgrounds. Respect must be shown for these differences to learn from one another (see Code of conduct). We all bring our strengths and our successes are shared as a team. Together, we exceed the sum of our parts.
Elana’s Role
Elana’s role is to facilitate your growth and success, as well as that of your project. She will support these efforts with weekly one-on-one meetings. Meetings will be held in person, or rescheduled to online/phone pending Elana’s travel schedule.
Within your project, Elana will serve as a sounding board for ideas, help you plan and troubleshoot, and help design experiments or algorithms to test your hypotheses. To facilitate your success, she will work with you to plan your training and design a career plan that will take you where you want to go.
As a reflection of the equality and collegiality that is central to our group, Elana prefers being on a first-name basis with lab members and it is not necessary to refer to her as Dr. Fertig. She also actively participates in lab procedures, such as providing references on #references, discussing research projects and helping troubleshoot code, and daily logging on #slack_tasks.
Co-Mentored Trainee Expectations
Elana will be responsible for computational training for co-mentored trainees, with an expectation of biological or clinical expertise provided by the partner co-mentor. The default expectation is that any co-mentoring PIs will be authors on papers by the trainee and put on patents for any work developed by that trainee, unless otherwise agreed to. Co-senior authorship will be expected if the amount of work completed justifies the distinction, and should be discussed by the trainee and all co-mentors prior to manuscript preparation. The Fertig lab expects the ability to use any datasets analyzed in this collaborative research for methods papers in the lab, with the understanding the first release of the dataset may be reserved for a biological paper and that anyone involved in the data generation will be included as a co-author of that methods paper. Regular joint meetings should be established between co-mentors to balance expectations and deliverables between the labs.