This is a living document and all lab members are encouraged to propose changes as they see fit. It is the entire labs’ responsibility to hold me accountable to what is written here and I always invite criticism should I fail to comply.

Overview

My main function is to provide a safe, productive, supportive, and, hopefully, fun environment for you to carry out and publish high-quality research. Academia can be full of highs and lows and I will dedicate myself to amplify the highs and buffer the lows as much as possible.

It is my responsibility to provide you with the resources and support you need in executing your research and achieving your career goals. I am here to support you.

It is your responsibility to be passionate about your work and advance your career by doing the best, most reproducible science possible.

Every person and every project has different needs that change over time. Please keep me updated on your scientific and personal aspirations. If you need anything (a piece of equipment, more time with me, collaborators, etc.), ask and I’ll do my best to provide.

Lab culture

Please help me create and maintain a vibrant research environment that is intellectually stimulating, productive, collaborative, fun, emotionally supportive, and conducive to learning and personal growth.

In addition to the above:

• Be generous and kind (most other points follow from this one)
• Maintain the highest level of scientific integrity (it’s OK to make mistakes – honesty will always be rewared)
• Be willing and available to assist other members in the lab in both formal and informal ways and solicit help from me or other lab members if you are stuck
• Actively participate in lab meetings
• Give lab members ample credit when it comes to acknowledgements or authorships on papers (always err on the side of generosity)
• Work from lab/office at least 3 days of a normal work week, but feel free to work remotely 1-2 days a week (try to prioritize coming in on days when others tend to be here as well, so we overlap with one another). Certain individuals may need flexibility on this point, which you can discuss on a case-by-case basis with Christian.
• Be responsive on email and/or Discord during core work hours (except when on vacation, maternity/paternity leave, or sick leave)
• Don’t overwork. Look out for your mental health and take time to cultivate your life outside of work. Academic life can be stressful. Arrange vacation time. Keep me in the loop if you feel burnt out.

Commitment to excellence

Hold yourself to the highest standards in terms of reproducibility, innovation, and clarity. With gentleness and compassion, hold other lab members to these standards as well. Let’s work together to produce high quality science that our colleagues can look up to.

Our lab makes no moral distinction between positive and negative results. We recognize that negative results are valuable and I always encourage you to communicate them honestly and promise that you will never be judged for doing so. Our lab will refrain from participating, enabling, or condoning an environment where lab members feel pressured to misrepresent or withold negative results to uphold a preconceived hypothesis.

Our lab does not tolerate any form of scientific misconduct or fraud, whether it be in our lab or in collaborations.

Meetings

For at least the first two months, I’d like to meet with you once per week. After two months, meetings will likely be as needed. If you’d like a formal meeting schedule beyond this period of time, we can arrange that. My goal is not to burden you with meetings, but if you would like to meet more frequently, let me know.

We will meet formally once a year to touch base on your progress and plans. My objective with these meetings is to make sure you are effectively working towards your career goals. When the time comes for you to start looking for another position, we can discuss how to put together your application and how to best highight your strengths. We will take notes during those meeting to keep me accountable.

Timelines and productivity

Postdocs: It is perfectly fine if you need to spend some time in lab finishing up papers from your previous position. It is also expected that you will spend a significant amount of your time applying for your next position. I expect that you have at least one full year where research in this lab is your primary focus (>80-90% effort). I expect that you will have at least one first-author manuscript submitted before moving on to your next position.

Most postdocs should submit abstracts for at least one conference per year, contingent on funding. I recommend to always apply for talk with a poster as backup option. Presenting to national and international audiences will help to build up a network for your future career.

If you are interested in gaining grant writing experience, please let me know and we can discuss proposal opportunities.

PhD students: I expect that you have at least 2-3 full years when research in this lab is your primary focus. I plan that you will have at least 1 first-author manuscripts submitted before moving on to your next position (this may vary somewhat depending on whether your work is experimental or computational). We should meet 1 year before your estimated graduation date to discuss your next career stage so that we can secure an optimal situation for you after you graduate.

Graduate students should take full advantage of this time to learn new skills, take courses, and go to seminars. It will be rare in the future to have so much protected time to learn. That being said, try not to overcommit yourself – your research and dissertation work are your first priorities.

Senior graduate students, if you are interested in gaining grant writing experience, please let me know and we can discuss proposal opportunities.

Informal and formal mentorship and collaboration

Senior graduate students and postdocs play an important role in the education of more junior trainees. You should be willing to help other members of the lab and informally advise them on their work (e.g. show them how you organize and strategize, give them advice on methods, chat with them about science, etc.). I hope that you will be heavily involved in at least one project beyond your main project in collaboration with another person from our lab or our local collaborators. Experience in mentorship and collaboration will be useful to you when moving forward in your career. If you see a student/postdoc struggling, please bring this to my attention right away (but respect their privacy).

More formal mentorship experiences can also be arranged. Undergraduate or high school students often may out asking for formal internships with our group. You are welcome to mentor an intern (depending on your workload) and design projects for them. Internships can take many forms. The only requirement is that they must present their projects at least once at lab meeting.

The main communication platform for the lab is our Discord followed by E-mail as a backup. Please be responsive there within the core working hours. Everybody is allowed to post messages outside of working hours but no expectations should be made to have those answered immediately.

Working with collaborators

Please let me know before you reach out to a potential collaborator and CC me on key emails. When contacting collaborators, you are representing the lab, so please be courteous and professional.

Conferences

I aim to provide financial assistance for you to attend about 1 big conference per year and multiple small, local ones – we should strategize together about which meetings make the most sense. Try to apply for travel awards. I expect you to practice talks in front of a group at least once before presenting for wider audiences and encourage you to seek formal training on how to deliver a research talk.

Documentation and Reproducibility

Be sure to document your wet-lab and dry-lab work so that another scientist is able to reproduce your experiments/analyses. I prefer that this documentation be digital, rather than analogue.

Our lab encourages the use of preprints to communicate our research as efficiently as possible. Our preferred preprint servers are bioRxiv and MedRxiv.

Keeping a physical lab notebook is great, but please transfer relevant information into a digital format that can be easily shared with others. Our public or internal lab wikis are the primary locations for this.

Sharing data and code

Writing code that is useable by others is hard, but I hope we can work together to minimize duplication. Take the time to write basic documentation and highlight potential pitfalls. The first attempt should be to use, improve, and extend existing pipelines in the lab rather than to create new pipelines. Barring any major legal hurdles, all code and data involved in a peer-reviewed publication should be made freely available to the research community and be directly referenced in the publication itself (regardless of journal policies). Unpublished data and code can be made available to lab members and collaborators, as needed.

All computational work in our lab will be tracked in a Github repository within the lab organization. Unless otherwise agreed this will always start in a private repository which will become public as soon as a license has been applied, a preprint has been posted, or the manuscript is under review (whichever comes first). The only exemption are projects subject to a patenting process. The default licenses in our lab are the Apache License 2.0 for software and code and CC-BY-SA 4.0 for content and artwork. Our lab strives to maintain repositories on Github and lab members are encouraged to reply to issues and discussions on repositories they manage.

Communicating your science to the public

I encourage people to write blog posts and popular science articles to highlight your work to a broader audience. I would prefer that you share these summaries with myself and other lab members for feedback and edits prior to publication (always best to have another pair of eyes take a look). Blog posts can be published on our lab website, and we can also look for opportunities to publish posts on other platforms. You should feel free to talk with journalists about your work, but try to let me know beforehand. Always be mindful that you are representing the lab. Be engaging, but try not to over-hype your results.

Project ownership when leaving lab

If you embark on a project of your own design when in the lab and want to extend in this direction for your own academic career, please bring this up with me in the early stages so that we can plan accordingly. I will be as flexible as possible to ensure your onging success.

Our general policy is that software that you developed is yours and may be taken with you to a new lab as long as the following conditions are met:

1. we can keep a snapshot of its state (and license) by the time you leave
2. you commit yourself to maintaining your software in the future
3. its transfer is not limited by regulations of the MedUni Graz

Large language models and generative AI

This is an ongoing discussion and I have not made up my mind on this. For now institutional policies apply here but I invite any proposals to create a lab policy.

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This document is adapted from documents in the lab of Sean Gibbons. Many thanks Sean!

Overview

We value and honor the uniqueness of each individual and embrace diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. We aim to prepare students, postdocs, and visiting scholars for their future as scientists and citizens in an equitable, inclusive, multicultural society.

Values

Our lab holds diversity, equity, and inclusion as core values and is committed to upholding them. Dimensions of diversity include, but are not limited to, race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, socioeconomic background, national or cultural origins, religion, political beliefs, different abilities, neurodiversity, and lifestyle. We will not tolerate any type of discrimination or bigotry.

We believe that supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion is an active processes that requires continuous, intentional commitment to promote a healthy work environment and to enable success of our team members and of our collective scientific mission.

We believe that our differences provide an opportunity to accelerate advances and innovations in science by bringing diverse perspectives, talents, approaches, and dialogue to solving key problems. Individual scientists have biases (scientific, cultural, political, economic, esthetic, etc.), and these biases infiltrate our work. Only by supporting a diverse set of perspectives can we hope to overcome these individual biases, together. Our research is empowered and strengthened by our diversity.

Actions

We pledge to support diversity, equity, and inclusion through the following set of actions:

• We think deeply about the people around us and and actively cultivate a sense of empathy by considering the world through their points-of-view. We promote a culture of open-mindedness, compassion, and inclusiveness among all team members.
• We engage in inclusive, active, and individualized learning and mentoring. Just as the Medical University of Graz strives to integrate personalized approaches into our healthcare, we strive to build adaptive/personalized approaches to training.
• We understand that when individuals come from different backgrounds, they bring different ideas and perspectives. We will be considerate of and supportive of those perspectives while also sharing our own culture and values.
• We promote cultural, personal, and individual expressions that contribute to meaningful interaction and dialogue, which help to build a welcoming, educational, and understanding community that is culturally informed.
• We engage in outreach and community involvement, including citizen science projects, and open-access software and teaching materials.
• We acknowledge the existence of our unconscious biases and strive to identify and overcome them. Check out this resource, designed to help you understand your own unconscious biases.
• As stated in our orientation document, we will always do our best to be kind and generous, and to acknowledge that we are fallible beings who will make mistakes that we will try to correct and learn from.
• We have an open-door policy – Christian is happy to discuss any feedback or concerns regarding our diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

Resources

Below are some key resources and information:

• Medical University of Graz Diversity & Accessibility Portal
• Medical University of Graz Gender Equality Plan
• Uni Graz Inclusive Education

Reading List

feel free to add suggestions or request a lab copy

Rita Colwell and Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

A Lab of One’s Own: One Woman’s Personal Journey Through Sexism in Science

Ibrahim Kendi

How to be an an antiracist

Meredith Broussard

More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech

Alice Wong

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

Mark Aaron Polger and Scott Scheidlower

Engaging Diverse Learners: Teaching Strategies for Academic Librarians

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This is a living document, to be collectively reviewed and improved upon by the members of the group over time. The initial draft of this document was inspired by similar documents written by Ashley Shade and Sean Gibbons.

A lot of the know-how and ins-and-outs of the lab are kept on our lab wiki which all group members can contribute to.