Policies and Guidelines

Accommodations for students with disabilities

For students with disabilities or specific medical needs, we will meet to discuss what accommodations should be made to your work schedule or lab responsibilities to facilitate your productivity in the lab without compromising on your physical or mental health. Before we talk, you should have already made contact with the UW Disability Resources for Students (DRS) Unit. If changes in your needs occur over time, we will meet again to revise this accommodation. My aim is to prioritize your health for the good of the lab community.

Meetings

Lab meetings will occur weekly, unless interrupted by a research meting or a holiday. Attendance is required and it is important that you come prepared when it is your turn to share. I will notify you of changes to the schedule at least a day in advance. In addition, I will meet individually with graduate students on a weekly basis to discuss progress and help when needed. The timing of these meetings may change depending on projects, pending publications, and your graduate defense. We will address this as needed.

Lab documents

It is your responsibility to maintain a detailed, organized, and accurate record of your research. Lab notebooks are lab property and therefore must be maintained to a standard where they can be interpreted by others. Any computer code that you generate must be properly documented and archived to ensure its reproducibility not only by others, but also by yourself when time passes.

Research compendia

To the best of our ability, we practice open science; the default is set to ‘open’. All raw data, metadata, analyzed data, figures, and code developed in the lab to accompany published papers are required to be organised into a research compendium, and freely available online according to best practices. Minimally, these materials must be accompanied by a ‘README’ file that gives details about what is in the compendium, and how to use it. We use the Open Science Framework for public materials and lab-only materials. Here are some of my favourite short guides to writing reproducible research papers: The British Ecological Society’s Guides to Better Science: Reproducible Code, the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe’s Reproducible Paper Guidelines and The Alan Turing Institute’s ‘The Turing Way’

Presentations

Under my guidance, you are expected to be able to present your work in department seminars and external meetings as soon as you begin generating data. You will engage fully in the scientific program of the conferences that you attend. You should aim to present at program and departmental seminars 1-2 times per year in addition to attending one scientific conference per year. We also encourage blogging, writing for public audiences, and open, professional discussion of research on social media. When preparing your abstract for a presentation, please follow this ‘how to’ by Nature, and circulate it to me for feedbacks at least one week before the submission deadline.

When designing your slides, please use sentence headlines and visual evidence. A rough rule-of-thumb for planning that seems to work for many types of presentations is to have approximately one slide for each minute that you have to present. This works best when your slides are mostly graphics and visuals, with sign-post slides to divide up major sections of the presentation, and a few progressive builds (a build is when you present only a portion of the slide then click to reveal remaining portions). Here are some of my favourite pieces of advice on preparing and giving presentations, please take a look before you begin your preparations: Ten Simple Rules for Making Good Oral Presentations, Successful vs. effective research presentations, How to give a great scientific talk, Scientific presentations: A cheat sheet, Ways to give an effective seminar about your research project

Manuscripts

Depending on your experience and level of comfort with writing a scientific manuscript, my level of engagement related to writing will change. It is often the case that the first manuscript is written largely by the PI and/or by any other more senior author who had contributed to the study, with lots of input from you, the trainee and first author of the manuscript. You will, for instance, be asked to make figures, help outline the flow, and edit the text. However, I expect you to be largely responsible for the writing of a second manuscript. Aim to write with style, the simplest way to do this is use short sentences. I have many resources to help with writing that I love to share, here’s an inspiring video and a folder of PDFs that I often refer to myself.

Manuscripts should include a paragraph at the end of the methods section with the heading “Reproducibility and Open Materials” that gives the DOI to where the reader can find the code and data used to produce the figures, tables, and statistical results presented in the paper. It should also give the licenses used for those materials (e.g. MIT for code, CC-BY for figures, CC-0 for data). Always show a manuscript (or revision) to all authors before submitting it, giving them the opportunity to comment and approve. Go over page proofs carefully, including the references. There is almost always a mistake (ours, or introduced by the publisher).

Authorship will be discussed prior to the beginning of a new project, so that expectations are clearly defined (see my ethics statement elswhere here for more details on this). However, changes to authorship may occur over the course of a project if a new person becomes involved or if someone is not fulfilling their planned role. In general, I expect that graduate students and postdocs will be first authors on publications on which they are the primary lead, and I will be the last author. I encourage the posting of pre-prints on non-profit pre-print services such as https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/ and https://arxiv.org/.

Time Off

I expect you to be productive in your research and the other elements of your graduate program (teaching etc.). How you achieve this is ultimately up to you and should be customized to fit your working style. If you or I feel like you are not progressing adequately, you or I should discuss the situation and work together to find a more suitable and productive working schedule. Vacations and work-life balance are important for creative thinking and good health. However, please consult with me before making plans, and understand that some activities are time-sensitive (e.g., sampling, preparing for grants, manuscripts, exams, or conferences). I am also certainly willing to accommodate sick and/or parental leave as required, and will determined this on a case-by-case basis. Before I take a vacation, I will provide the lab with at least one week notice so that we can all work around my absence without loss of productivity. When I am on vacation, I prefer to be contacted via email in the case of lab-based emergencies.

Career development

A very worthwhile use of your time as a graduate student is to actively cultivate your professional development in non-research contexts. Becoming a successful scientist requires more than just academic research. You are expected to continually develop as a teacher, as a scientific ambassador to the general public, and your scientific network. This may include taking advantage of professional programs offered through the university, active participation in external seminars, attending classes without direct applications to your research, conferences, workshops, and membership in professional societies. If your participation in a career-building course, program, or event requires you to reduce your time spent in the lab, we will discuss it on a case-by-case basis.

Flexible working hours

While I sometimes send emails outside my normal office hours, I have no expectation to receive a reply from you outside of normal business hours. Please don’t feel you have to reply to me instantly, instead use your professional judgment to determine when your reply should be sent, and take time to ensure your reply is an effective communication. The hours that members of the lab choose to work is up to them. We are each welcome to send work-related emails or communications over the weekend or late at night, but no lab members are required to reply to them outside of their typical work hours. Lab members are welcome to work flexibly for any reason. Ideally, all lab members will have at least a few hours each week to overlap with Ben in order to stay in touch on any challenges or successes, but it is the policy of the Lab that every member is already self-motivated and doesn’t need to work a traditional 9 to 5 day in order to meet their goals. If you experience any challenges related to flexible working within the lab please contact Ben Marwick. All communication will be treated as confidential.

Recommendation letters

It is part of my job (and, thankfully, quite often a pleasure) to write letters of recommendation for students. Please give me as much notice as possible, and make sure I know the deadline, format (electronic? printed?), official name of the organization, what you are applying for, and so on. Please study the excellent guidance on getting letters here which tells you how to prepare to request a letter from me. If you are asking for a letter to support your application to graduate programs, do follow the guidance on preparing your statement of purpose here, and share your statement with me. If you are an undergraduate, please remind me what class you took with me, and in what year and quarter, and I will write your letters on my own. For more senior lab members, I will also write your letters on my own, but please send me some bullet points to focus my letter on. The first few times you do this it will probably feel awkward. However, keep in mind that your goal is to make it as easy as possible for a letter writer (in this case, me) to complete the task by the deadline and without error. This is extremely helpful in jogging my memory and will give me more time to focus on saying good things about you. Don’t worry about being too ‘braggy’; I have no problem toning things down if need be. Like everything else, communication is key, and when in doubt, ask!

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