How lab handbooks can help shape research culture in your team
Session details
Date: 27 January 2025
A session on lab handbooks led by the University of York, covering the value of lab handbooks and their potential impacts on research culture - featuring guest academics talking about their own lab handbooks, and signposting useful insights and resources for creating your own.
Speakers
- Ines Hahn, University of York
- Michael Plevin, University of York
- Stuart Higgins, University of York
- Noémie Hamilton, University of York
- Benjamin Tendler, University of Oxford
- Karla Miller, University of Oxford
- Leonardo Uieda, University of São Paulo
Session overview
Lab handbooks are becoming an increasingly popular resource that outline expectations to group members. They help onboard new team members, outline responsibilities around working culture and practice, and set a general theme that all in the group can follow.
The session addressed how to prepare a lab handbook. The invited speakers have written their own lab handbooks, and talked about how these resources were developed, adapted and implemented. The session also includes advice on preparing your own lab handbooks.
Topics covered
- The value of lab handbooks and their potential impacts on research culture
- Ideas for how to go about creating your own lab handbook
- Where to find useful resources and examples for lab handbook creation
Session resources
0:05
together today’s session um and we’re really excited to see how this goes so over to you thank you so much Carrie um
0:13
yeah no thank you for for letting us run the session so basically um uh I’ll will
0:18
be hosting the session today together with my colleague Michael Keven um he will meet in in a little bit
0:25
as well uh we’re both basically we are both uh group leaders in the biology department at the University of York and
0:31
basically just give you a little bit of share my screen uh a little bit of
0:37
background um before we get started what today will be about so
0:46
um I hope you can see my screen so basically Michael and I uh we just to give you a bit of background why we
0:52
wanted to run the session we’re part of a team here in York uh which runs enhancing research culture workshops
0:59
across various topics uh um across different departments here in York um
1:04
you know on topics like shaping policy interacting with industry public
1:09
engagement making research open carrying responsibilities and research and so on
1:14
and uh basically one day we we we ran a session here for uh all staff groups on
1:22
uh lab handbooks one day where we basically blatantly stole the title from one of our speakers later on from the
1:27
eive article article which is B see why every lab needs a handbook and uh this was actually Al was
1:34
our most popular session was really really well attended and um yeah there
1:40
seems to be quite a need across especially across uh research staff for lab handbooks and they really you know
1:46
there’s actually there’s like a little bit of a local momentum we have here now of people creating those lab handbooks I
1:51
give you a quick disclaimer because that’s an that’s a discussion that’s that’s something that came up when we
1:57
had our sessions here a lot of times because the term let handbook might actually be slightly
2:03
misleading um and that’s why people came up with other words terms for this so
2:09
the lab with lab handbook we don’t mean you’re uh you’re you’re nicely neatly uh
2:15
uh collected collections of laboratory protocols and procedures basically what
2:20
we mean with lab handbook rather is um basically a flex document um that
2:28
basically can talk about your group ethos culture expectation and opportunities of your lab so basically
2:34
how a lab is run how you imagine the um atmosphere and the culture in the lab
2:40
how uh roles and expectations where there exist for different people in the lab um how how different people are
2:47
supported in the lab and what the bigger vision of the lab could be um so I just wanted to throw this out
2:53
there um we noticed that this is actually something that is needed for example in one of our um sessions we had
3:01
in November where we invited PhD students in post talks and asked them what the challenges are they facing currently and just to highlight a few
3:09
things that they’ve said there was a lot around communication issues around Communications between groups and
3:15
between in the lab but also outside the lab there was a lot about you know belonging like they you know en urged
3:21
that they wanted to feel like they’re part of the team and there was there was some things around uh balancing work Los
3:28
demands what I expectations you know technicians saying that they’re not sure what their role is or research
3:34
associates also around what their expectations are PhD students have felt there’s a challenge of feeling maybe
3:41
that whether they’re part part of the team or not and basically I feel like yeah la handbooks are something that
3:46
that could kind of address that point um so today’s session because that’s enough for me uh the structure of
3:53
today’s session is the following so after my introduction um we first hear um I see we Michael and I invited uh
4:02
five speakers uh from people that basically inspired us that I think have some different examples how this lab
4:10
handbook idea could be uh brought into reality and basically they they are very
4:15
thankful that they’re willing to share their Journey because it’s always I think it’s something you know they I think they truly care about and um it’s
4:22
quite precious to share that so thanks we’ll hear from those speakers they each give a short overview what they’ve
4:27
created and the thoughts that went to into to it if you have any immediate questions you could answer you could ask
4:33
them in like 2 minutes afterwards but basically we want to in a second half of
4:38
the of the session we want to have like a more General discussion about handbooks Creations things that come up
4:45
Pro potentially during this during the the first half um so will be like a panel discussions where you can ask
4:51
either the presenters something or we could just have a a discussion so you’re also invited to participate in that and Michael will lead that in a second part
4:58
before we get started with the first speaker um and I will introduce to them all one by one when we come to them um I
5:05
want I want you to you have to get yeah you have to work a little bit too uh so I want you to briefly maybe join the
5:12
mentee and and basic those are four questions and if you could answer those four questions briefly I give you like a
5:17
minute to do that I’ll do the same
5:28
thing
5:58
e e
6:44
right so I see those those trickling in keep uh keep uh keep answering answering
6:52
those questions if you’re in the middle of it ah my mouse disappeared Dam I
6:58
tried to stop Shar my screen because I want to introduce our first
7:04
speaker okay um so yeah let’s get started with a session so it’s a massive
7:10
pleasure to introduce the first Speaker which is Stuart Higgins um who’s a who’s
7:16
a lecturer um here at the at the University of York in biomedical engineering and a Future Leaders fellow
7:24
um do has researches around um yeah bio electricity and actually stud is also
7:31
really true research culture Champion um running various initiatives and also an
7:36
award wining post podcast host and um yeah thank you so much for um speaking
7:43
and yeah being the first to present thoughts that went into your uh La
7:48
handbooks do it take it away thank you very much is can you hear
7:54
me yes excellent um so good afternoon everyone um thank you so much for uh
8:00
joining so um I’m uh started as a pi in 2023 so I’m quite new I only started
8:07
supervising my first PhD student um back in September last year but I’ve actually
8:13
been thinking about this kind of lab handbook business for a bit longer than that so uh I’m going to very briefly tell you about my kind of past and
8:20
history with it um and kind of where I see um it going and how I’ve kind of
8:26
worked out how to so I’m just fiddling with my zoom at the same time you can probably tell um there we go it’s not playing very
8:34
nicely with me yeah that’s better
8:39
um and how I’ve kind of got where I’ve got to with this kind of uh journey and kind of where I feel my handbook is to
8:45
be at the moment so let’s go to the next one so um I looked into it I didn’t
8:51
realize this I actually wrote my first hand book back in uh my PhD which was back in 2010 2014 um and then I kind of
8:58
uh did a little bit of work around different forms of Technologies around handbooks uh in my post and then I’ll tell you again what I’ve got to uh most
9:05
recently uh when I’ve now finally um you know got control to do this myself so uh
9:12
I found this I had to go dig in in the archive um I called it a cookbook I I for some reason I’ve always not lik the
9:18
phrase handbook I don’t know why I it’s some I’ve always called them cookbooks or or you’ll see that I’ve called it an ethos later um and this very much was
9:25
exactly what en was saying that that classic list of protocols um and really trying to bring together uh just
9:32
information about the lab itself but what was interesting is that I can see at that time I was already um thinking
9:38
about trying to incorporate different aspects around you know what the team is trying to do and asking people to bring
9:44
contribute uh different ideas in uh and the idea that this was kind of iterative and some of the purpose was trying to
9:50
avoid kind of Reinventing the whe um and this was complete and utter failure this this just did not work in the slightest
9:56
um and I know it didn’t work because I wrote this short after before leaving my research team and I had an email a year
10:03
later um from someone who I hadn’t met they just started working uh and they were asking certain questions about
10:09
certain things and I said oh have you seen it’s in you know page seven of the handbook I went what handbook I went uh
10:15
okay so again I I’ll kind of talk about this bit later on but you know this idea of creating a static document uh can can
10:22
be challenging depending on the circumstances now during my post I got obsessed with electronic laboratory
10:28
notebooks um now the these are primarily for capturing kind of research data and protocols but I wanted to share it
10:33
because actually in terms of the technologies that are available to you there are some really good options out there for creating um online web-based
10:40
tools that allow you to share different aspects of your of your lab’s processes
10:45
now that can just be protocols but it can also be the things we’re talking about kind of ethos and the different processes behind
10:51
it and really what it’s all kind of happen is it’s going all kind of merge together into where I am today
10:57
so um I don’t use the phrase lab handbook and I don’t actually have a specific single document that is a lab
11:04
handbook um what I have is three different locations um I have a public
11:10
facing uh Team ethos and that sets out the values and the way work they kind of
11:15
big picture stuff of our integrity and what kind of different Frameworks wehar to um I have uh some internal facing
11:22
documentation which is Google Drive kept it simple um and that contains all the
11:28
kind of non-technical nuances um and ways of working within the group so the
11:34
induction material is in there the kind of onboarding material um when someone arrives what do we do what processes do
11:39
we go through there’s a map in there for example that shows where all the important bits are around campus um and
11:46
it also includes things like kind of academic resources so as we kind of um
11:51
especially you know develop different things together so we have a certain way of uh writing or a certain way of um you know conducting our research there
11:58
there’s some bits around kind of do literates reviews and things and rather than me kind of like saying that lots of
12:03
times I try and capture that information and try and bring it into our kind of handbook so to speak that there’s a kind of common resource that can get revised
12:10
that we can iterate on but kind of shares that knowledge that’s um being developed and that has the advantage
12:15
then that it can roll over to different team members they can kind of come in and see what’s already there and take advantage of it and then the technical
12:22
knowhow and the stuff that would be classically kind of the protocols and things goes in our electronic lab notebook which is also internal facing
12:28
um I found that I’m trying to work out where to split that information and where to see it it’s quite important so
12:34
probably I don’t want my electronic lab notebook to have too much about um ethos in it because that doesn’t it’s hard to
12:39
find you wouldn’t see it there it’s the wrong wrong domain actually kind of the public facing area is the best place for
12:46
it so um I did try before I did all that I actually tried writing the full
12:51
handbook and I just started writing a big document and um what I found was that it got very very long very very
12:57
quickly um and um I showed it to my partner and I said you what what do you
13:03
think about this um and she’s not an academic at all nothing to do with universities um and her feedback was it
13:09
did look made me look like a massive micromanager um and it did also make it look like something had gone terribly
13:15
wrong in the past that I’d had to kind of write this extremely large policy document that has all this incredible
13:21
detail about exactly how we do things and so that’s part of my journey has been actually understanding um what
13:27
level to go to and actually you can prescribe um and kind of going backwards a little bit and thinking actually what are the values we’re trying to get to
13:33
what’s the actual intent of the purpose of this document or this kind of set of documents so I’m going to keep it quite
13:40
brief and I’m just going to summarize a few thoughts so far about how you would go about potentially constructing a lab
13:46
handbook and I think the most critical thing is to really like every piece of writing work out what the intent is
13:51
first what is it you’re trying to do with your team are you actually trying to write a protocols document fine write
13:57
a protocols document are you you trying to solve a particular problem around uh
14:02
induction or are you trying to solve an inconsistency problem across Team Management you’re try and work out what
14:08
the intent is there um or is it just purely a values document where you actually you’re trying to set out your stool and say this is how we operate as
14:15
a team this is our values that what what means to us context already matters um
14:20
I’m a pi with one PhD student at the moment that is a different context to a team of you know 20 or 30 and um you
14:28
know as the team grow and changes that those different things will change the context will change as well um for me I
14:33
try to build it in a kind of scalable manner um which is very enthusiastic and fingers crossed that things will scale
14:40
but you know try and set things get the foundations there to begin with but I’m also really aware that I there is only
14:45
you know another PhD student and I can overwhelm them by throwing all at them uh straight away all of these things
14:51
need Buy in so why didn’t my PhD attempts at a PhD handbook work it didn’t really have top down buying um
14:58
and uh you know didn’t have buying from my colleagues either and so you know over the years I’ve tried various different things and wikis and so on it it really
15:05
needs a combination of the both and that means it needs leadership to kind of champion it but it also needs kind of understanding of what what’s needed from
15:11
users that fundamental level um don’t overdo it um it’s if you a person who is
15:18
quite fose and quite Technical and spends a lot of time writing really long papers with lots of method methods
15:23
details in them um just make sure that that doesn’t translate into the Hut writing like it did with me that
15:28
actually it’s a concise document and it and it hitss the point of what you’re trying to say and then also to really stress that there’s so many great
15:35
existing Community efforts so um I don’t try and go into things that have already covered by for example Dora or from
15:42
credit or all the other technicians commitment all these other Frameworks that set out a set of values that I
15:47
agree to I can say I agree to them and I we can link to them um and we can use that as a kind of starting point and it
15:52
helps keep that document a bit concisor and focused on the local
15:57
context some other things that may or may not affect you um be careful of bringing your past into the present um
16:04
this is not just do lab handbooks it’s to do a lot of aspects of Academia often if you’re engaged the research culture
16:09
and you care about these things usually it’s a response to something that wasn’t great in your past um so when you’re
16:15
going forward and working out the kind of documents and setting out what it is you’re trying to do thinking about your
16:21
Framing and doing that in a positive sense and what you’re trying to achieve and not just things are bad so we should
16:26
fix them um just think about it care how it frames and how it influences the language um consider the onboarding the
16:34
uh the induction how you going to bring people into your your team that it might be part of your handbook but how are they going to know it exists and how are
16:39
we going to kind of do that ongoing support doesn’t have to be called a handbook and I would argue you can use the technologies that work for your team
16:46
in our case it’s three different Technologies I’m going to end with saying to do this things I don’t know
16:51
and hopefully maybe some of our speakers today can share with us as well um how to not forget that the handbook exists
16:57
very easy to come up with something from the beginning and and create something and then completely forget about it um
17:03
how to effectively co-develop that handbook as the team grows it’s going to have to be an iterative process to be valuable I always wonder if I can make
17:09
more content external facing um you know at the moment I’ve just got my kind of values thing which is on the website
17:15
maybe actually some of our internal policies could be more public and I know some groups do that and then also how to
17:21
deal with things like embedded inequity so you know it’s quite easy to come with this idealistic framework but in reality
17:26
you know different students will have different access to different funds and some team members depending on which Grant they’re on will have different
17:32
resources than others so if you start setting out everyone gets to do this this and this you might find uh the finance team say you can’t do that and
17:38
actually you might actually have some structural inequity in terms of what the teams can access and I haven’t quite got my head around how to to encapsulate
17:45
that into a framework if you’re interested um you can see the public facing bit on my website it’s there um and I look forward
17:53
to hearing what the rest of the other speakers say I think it’s a very interesting and dynamic topic and I’m always learning more about it as well
17:59
thank you very much thanks so much steart um those are
18:04
those are really good points for a discussion already earlier I can I can see see uh you know from from from what
18:11
you raised um cool if there no immediate questions
18:16
then I’ll hand over to a second speaker who is noi Hamilton who’s electr bi
18:22
medical Sciences here in in the department of biology um and she’s
18:28
the founder of lcaps who basically an incred incredible uh connection between
18:33
researchers and uh clinicians and Charities to battle um white metal
18:40
diseases and she has a a quite different but I found really uh really also
18:45
another a different really cool approach um that I’m very excited that she’s willing to share with us no me take it
18:51
away
19:06
always unmute yourself before sharing that’s uh let’s do it again wow
19:13
yeah hello everyone I found you back so I’m going to put that in presentation
19:19
mode thank you for having me and thank you for coming um I’ve just realized how different the story is from Stuart so
19:27
I’m I’m also a junior and um but I never thought about having
19:32
a handbook um until the research culture team at York organized that session that
19:39
inis talked to us about about why is it is important to have a handbook in the lab and then and then as I was listening
19:46
through all these ideas and how what you should include and what you should not include and I realized actually I have a
19:53
handbook but it’s not it’s not a book it’s um it’s more of a talk it’s more
19:58
more of a it’s more of a poster type thing um so so that was a bit weird so I
20:06
thought I’ll just I’ll just give it to you like I give it to my team because
20:11
it’s uh there there isn’t really a a protocol or recipe how to do it um I I
20:18
should say that I I did a few um leadership courses where we really had
20:24
to think about the division of our research and and um and then and then
20:31
obviously under the vision we have the mission so you know how we do how we do want to achieve and reach that Vision so
20:39
I always start with this to try to I guess uh bring
20:45
the people passion and try to share the passion I have for for our research and uh so this is what I start with so um
20:52
I’ll show you our first slide if this is moving no why is it not moving
20:59
there we go so this is why I start with everyone who starts in a lab we usually
21:05
dedicate maybe 20 minutes half an hour of our lab meeting whenever there’s someone new in the lab starting and and
21:13
I think this is really good for me as well because it just reminds me uh it try it keeps me in what what we really
21:19
want to do and sometimes you’re tempted to maybe partner up to do a PhD project
21:26
doing something completely different just for a change or and I think I think it really keeps you focused and it’s
21:32
like that strategy of this is what we want to achieve let’s stay in that zone so um so we talk about the vision and we
21:40
talk about the mission I also have the the animal model on here the zebra fish that we use and the fact that we are
21:46
very focused on rare diseases and then obviously the goal of
21:52
the lab is to have an impact uh impact in our research but I think a lot of people are very confused how you
21:59
reach um that research impact so I so I I discussed this um as well that it’s
22:07
kind of like um it takes it takes it takes a while and then you need to go through all those different um processes
22:13
so first of all we we discover and this is probably what most of us do uh on
22:19
this call today is we are doing Discovery research we’re in the lab uh we are performing science and uh we try
22:26
to get funding trying to have a team we have those amazing facilities that
22:32
EnV so all of this I put into the Discover box uh but this is not research impact not yet anyway um then we need to
22:40
connect um create network collaborate with the public with um different
22:46
stakeholders and then we need to start applying what we found um this is what you all hear from clinical trials trying
22:53
to optimize build confidence in your project and then you Advocate and this is when you reach that point that you
22:59
can start having an impact on on people or on crops or on climate or whatever it
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is that your research is looking at um so obviously this is this is my lab this
23:12
is my very private personal uh presentation I did not change it for the
23:18
sake of today I thought I’ll just give it to you raw as it is but so there is my logo here which uh you know here you
23:24
can see the mara which we uh do a lot of studies on and then we use the zebra fish zebra fish is also here
23:32
uh um and then this is what we have as funding sources at the moment sometimes there is nothing in that box sometimes
23:38
there’s more it’s just what it’s just what comes in um and then obviously we got our publication list uh conferences
23:46
Outreach Network and all of this I kind of put it into what I can offer um to my
23:53
team and then on top of that I also tell them that we are making quite a lot lot
23:58
of work in the discovery box but I’ve also starting to work on the connect box to start building this Pipeline and then
24:05
I talk about the lcod distrophy research Network that we created um well nearly
24:12
five years ago now so um so anything that we create in the lab well you can
24:17
actually talk about it with clinicians you can talk about it with patient groups you can talk about it with the
24:23
pharmaceutical industry we have all those links and we’ve really started to build that connect box uh we haven’t
24:30
done any apply yet we haven’t done any Advocate yet we’re we’re little but we we’ll get there um and then I want to
24:38
show I want to show my team where they belong and what where they help and what they
24:44
do so um this is a snapshot of um um I stole this um I admit it uh I I I took a
24:52
picture of uh the board our leadership course uh they wanted us to really work on our goals again the dream the wish
24:59
the vision the mission and then and I think the team and their project it’s under the goal and then within their
25:06
project they’ll create their sub goal their task and their action down to their daily daily task in the lab or or
25:13
wherever they do their research so here I have again I’m giving you everything we do in the lab all my secrets um here
25:20
you have the the different uh goal of the lab and then um
25:26
what what we want to do but most of all everyone’s in everyone who’s in the lab is within this kind of diagram they know
25:34
exactly where they sit and why they do and where they belong and I think that’s quite I think that’s quite powerful
25:40
because everyone can see where everyone is and maybe they overlap with other people um and uh and I also form
25:48
subclusters in the lab which is also important um so obviously the I the
25:54
people are really important to me and the the well-being of the team and the experience and I think you’re all here
26:00
today because you also care probably so I want to tell them that to have
26:05
research impact there is this dimension of work but there is all the the dimension of the team experience and
26:12
this is as important to me as um as the top bit because I believe that if that
26:17
bottom bit is not achieved we’re not going to do anything in the top one so
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again I’ve I’ve divided this in four four different
26:28
um cheese pieces whatever you call them uh but there could be more they could be less um I think this is where you can
26:34
really go crazy if uh you want to um so
26:39
there is the Evolve box where obviously you’re going to be learning a lot in the lab um we do feedback sessions and very
26:48
long Handover sessions so um I don’t lose out on people expertise and skill
26:54
um and people can learn quickly from the person who was actually doing those experiment for example um so this is
27:02
hopefully personal development as much as Career Development and then enjoy we try to do team event Retreats uh day out
27:11
um and then there is the belong box so this is more on EDI uh you I want people to belong in a
27:18
group and feel like they have their own space so um this is also mainly for dietry
27:25
requirements so everyone can have a piece of cake that we make every week during that meeting um but you know it
27:31
could be anything it could be very big it could be very small so these are some um uh using your pronoun and your
27:38
religion cultural differences and uh anything that people want to disclose it’s in that box um and then and then
27:46
Thrive so and this is uh me being very very hard on personal well-being and
27:52
managing work life balance uh I’m a mom I have three children um I just came
27:57
back from maternity leave and every time I go on mat leave I just it just reminds me how uh very fragile uh this balance
28:05
is and uh we need to really work on it uh every day to make it to make it happen and just to have joy so this is
28:13
something that I really try to push through in the team is for them to um to
28:18
look at this and then very nicely I think after that
28:24
comes the expectations which I think like Stuart said they it needs to be in
28:30
a handbook I think it needs to be there people need to know um you know what’s going to happen and so I have a
28:37
slide which um changes um but this is what I expect from people and again I’m
28:44
very honest uh you know these are very realistic expectations things change not
28:50
everything works out uh research takes time uh so there is a list here um and
28:55
this is something that we came up together so day we did an activity what do you expect from me what do I expect
29:01
from you um and then everything changes and I think the most important one is
29:07
what did they expect from me so um someone said one day that feedback is the Breakfast of Champions so that page
29:15
is always open and uh whenever we have someone new in the lab we do that we do we do that
29:22
page and what do they want from me um so this is the list of things that are come
29:28
back and often it’s the same thing so I I keep the same slide but there was something that always came up and it was
29:33
kind of like training helping with our career being
29:39
open and then um making sure that our ambition so checking in with our ambition there’s there was always this
29:45
kind of like a very personal but also career advice that people wanted from me
29:51
and I thought I didn’t really know how to give that to them so um I’ve given
29:57
them a set of worksheets for them to work through it and we can do it together if they want to or they can
30:03
just carrying it doing it on their own and it’s completely optional but everyone has opted in so far and is this
30:10
career planning um spreadsheet which we you can set this up in different columns
30:17
if you want but everyone is very keen on their health so they can here I’ve just
30:22
deleted what people wrote and obviously put um uh
30:28
um examples but you know three healthy meals during the day for example no like you know make sure you eat aunch uh
30:34
personal professional development uh what courses would you like to do so we’re going to this beautiful data
30:40
visualization Workshop in London in April the whole team and uh so I brought this in um organization skills
30:47
conferences Outreach what would you like to do this year what would you like to to to to present scientific writing
30:55
that’s something that I try to embed into the lab a lot and then uh project progress of course um and this is just
31:01
for them this is just to learn how realistic they can be with their planning
31:08
um so that’s it really and then we’ve got some meeting set up this is just so
31:13
everyone understand that our lb meetings is to be a little bit more open is to
31:19
look at the dream the wish the vision the mission uh to catch up and just you
31:24
know being together and the onetoone meetings is more to talk about about the NR the goal subg goal the Tas the action
31:31
so those meetings don’t overlap uh too much and then when you know whenever I see someone we can talk about different
31:38
things um there’s no more not too much redundancy between our meetings so I
31:44
you’ll have questions I’ll be happy to answer them and um but that’s um that’s
31:49
it those slides can be done into a poster um and uh and like I say whenever
31:55
someone new starts we go through them again and they change every time um so it’s a
32:02
it is an evolving document I
32:08
guess thank you so much no for sharing this with us um I think yeah there’s some clapping
32:16
hands there so I agree thank you um well no I don’t say questions so we’ll move
32:22
on to our next speakers which is uh uh Ben tendler uh so Henry welcome
32:28
postdoctoral fellow and Cara Miller Professor for biomedical engineering both from the Welcome Center for
32:33
integrative neuroimaging uh or the wi team at the University of Oxford and uh
32:39
thanks thanks guys for for joining us today because um your your El life paper basic kickstarted a whole uh set session
32:47
INB Hamburg session in York uh and as you can see it already you know created some some results so thank you thanks
32:55
very much to Ben and kala for agreeing to speak and take it away
33:00
great thanks very much um I guess I’ll lead off and then Ben is going to do most of the heavy lifting here thank you
33:05
so much um first of all for having this session it’s really exciting to see um
33:11
uh people um embracing this concept we certainly didn’t invent it but we’ve put a lot of effort into trying to think
33:17
through um you know what this looks like for us what it would look like for other people um uh in other places and it’s
33:24
and it’s great to see the different takes people have on it so um uh as um as Ena said uh I’m a professor
33:31
of biomedical engineering um I lead um so our Center is called win um The
33:36
Welcome Center for integrative neurom Imaging um and I help lead the physics group I will say help lead um because
33:43
it’s a it’s basically an umbrella group so we’re actually about eight different piis uh and the group has about 35
33:48
people so we’re a big group um but we have decided because we meet um as a
33:54
group and we’re very integrated uh we have a single lab handbook that’s across all of us and so bear that in mind when
33:59
we’re talking through what we’ve done because I think that you know that that context probably means that we’re going to be a bit different than other labs so
34:07
um what what we thought we would do is for me to start off yes please Ben sorry Ben’s driving the slides and he’s he’s
34:13
he’s he’s gonna be doing some predictive modeling of exactly where I am my
34:19
thinking um which is is is is a skill Ben has honed over about the last eight
34:24
years um right so um I think what I wanted to start with is just how a lab
34:31
handbook makes me a better Pi so this was a huge group effort but I did start it um and uh there’s a number of reasons
34:38
why I wanted to create a lab handbook one of the first things that I realized
34:44
is I’m a bit further along in my career than many of you I’m guessing um certainly than the last two speakers one
34:50
thing that I have realized uh is that as my I get busier as my group gets bigger
34:56
I’m not necessarily consistent in my communications of my expectations despite my absolute best intentions that
35:02
I should be and that’s that’s not good it’s not good that people hear different things for example when they’re inducted into the
35:08
lab um similarly um I when you don’t
35:13
have consistent Communications and certainly when you don’t have things written down that results in a lack of
35:18
transparency about the ways that we’re going to work together and so the document that we envisioned was very
35:24
much about communicating expectations about communicating here’s how we want to be working
35:31
together um in addition uh it creates something that’s very important to me um yep please go
35:39
ahead Ben which is accountability and feedback um so those of you who have
35:45
been um uh running groups doing management will realize that one of the things um that you don’t get a lot of
35:53
when you’re leading a group is feedback it’s not necessarily that easy for people to come forward and say hey Carla
35:58
I think you got this thing wrong but by explicitly laying out here is what we
36:04
want to be held accountable to and we want you to hold us accountable it creates an opportunity for people to
36:10
feedback and that feedback as we said earlier it’s it is the Breakfast of Champions it’s absolutely crucial to
36:16
knowing whether you’re getting things right because there’s what you intend to be the case and then there’s what the reality is and as a leader you don’t
36:23
always know whether those two things are marrying up or not um next it provides a
36:29
real opportunity for me to learn what my group members value and how to articulate those values and in all of
36:37
this a theme that you’ll see is is it’s really about communication so um I’ll
36:42
give one very quick example um of how that communication has gone wrong in the past um I used to say to people I really
36:49
don’t mind about the hours that you work I just want you to be productive now half of my group heard the message that
36:55
I wanted which is I want you to have work life balance and I’m not interested in you working long hours for the sake of it the other
37:02
half of my group heard completely the opposite message which is I don’t care how long your hours have to be you
37:08
better be productive and I hadn’t realized that I was inadvertently sending to half of the people the wrong
37:14
message but as soon as we put it down in the handbook that came out immediately and it was incredibly valuable for me to
37:19
hear that okay so the next bit is how does a lab handbook help my group uh so
37:26
there’s a number of ways that it does one thing is that improves their understanding of the demands of my role
37:32
one of the reasons why I wanted to write this lab handbook is I re suddenly realized I was starting to do some of the behaviors that I had seen other
37:39
senior people do things like writing extremely short emails being very slow and responding to things and I suddenly
37:47
understood why that happens to most people when they come become quite senior but if I can explain the demands
37:54
of my role if I can explain what my inbox looks like throughout the day then I can communicate to people here’s
38:00
why I communicate in this slightly odd way and importantly I can do it if it’s in a handbook I’m doing it outside of a
38:06
situation having gone badly wrong and me having to work with somebody who is now
38:12
unhappy with things if they already understand this is how Carla is going to communicate and it’s not about you it’s
38:19
just about my job then it really helps for Mutual
38:24
understanding um next for my group members it increases the resilience in a in a
38:31
really important way we talk about resilience we can talk about whether we should be talking about resilience but I
38:36
think in terms of enabling people to channel their resilience you really need to reduce anxiety and avoid
38:42
misunderstandings and so having things written down really helps with that particularly where people may be coming
38:48
from another lab where people think about things differently right you need to be very clear about why things are
38:54
done in a given way and what your expectations are next um it facilitates Communications on
39:01
sensitive topics that people may find challenging there are some things that people are very willing to read about
39:07
that they might be uncomfortable talking about face Toof face and so it provides a way for people to engage with things
39:13
that might challenge their worldview might challenge their cultural uh context um in such a way that they are
39:20
able to think about it comfortably um and then finally it empowers everyone to have open
39:26
discussions about our research culture and this again gets back to this qu uh the question of um uh um having
39:34
accountability so final bit that I wanted to say um is just about how a lab handbook helps our science so our
39:41
handbook is very much a cultural document but it does impact on our science it helps to improve productivity
39:46
of individuals in the group in particular by encouraging work life balance and well-being I fully agree
39:51
with um previous speaker that this is actually one of the best things that you can do is make sure people actually get
39:57
down time they will be more productive um next it increases the lab productivity so by helping to create
40:04
group cohesion having us have a common shared understanding of what our ethos is means that we are more cohesive as a
40:11
group and it enables us as a lab to collaborate better um speaking of collaboration um
40:18
we explicitly encourage sharing of knowledge and expertise not every lab has that kind of an ethos and we want to
40:23
be very explicit we expect people to be um colleagues that share and help each
40:28
other and then finally um it encourages Independence specifically in the form of
40:35
um I we tried to lay out what are the situations in which people should be feel empowered to make decisions um how
40:42
can they help me by expressing the right kind of Independence and this is really
40:48
critical particularly for me as a senior Pi due to my my um work balance and the
40:54
sort of profile of my work is it helps for me not to be a bottleneck which I often times am and so having people
41:00
understand how to avoid me being the bottleneck is incredibly helpful okay so at this stage I’ll pass
41:07
on to Ben thanks H thanks Klo for that overview um so what I’m going to do is
41:13
give a brief description of how we implemented writing our lab handbook and some of the feedback that we’ve had to
41:18
date so as Carla mentioned we’re quite a large research group um with about 30 over 30 people with multiple pis and
41:26
people at different uh academ stages and we first started by uh write by having a
41:31
call for volunteers within our lab who would be interested in contributing to the document of our group about half the
41:37
people um agreed that they’d be interested in contributing and so we started with some group brainstorming sessions in these sessions what we did
41:44
is we brought everybody together and we asked uh what they would like to see included in the handbook this was
41:49
motivated by online resources which we found in addition to example lab handbooks from other groups following
41:55
this uh once we decided our topics we split these topics up between uh the individual volunteers who then set about
42:01
writing their first drafts once these first drafts are written we then shared them with the other volunteers provided
42:06
some feedback and subsequent edits were made now at this point we had uh the final version of the text and what I
42:14
essentially did with some other um people is we curated the document we edited the text for consistency um of of
42:21
language we made the lab handbook itself more look more visually appealing and we also s sought extern advice on certain
42:28
topics which were more closely linked to HR and EDI initiatives now at this point we had a completed lab hook and we
42:34
subsequently organized some read through and feedback sessions with the entire group to make sure that everybody will be willing to uh commit to the values
42:40
which our lab handook contained and at that stage our lab Hook was written now our timelines for running this were a
42:46
bit skewed because we read it during the co pandemic meaning that it was quite stop start but broadly I would say that
42:51
for a large group such as oursel writing this from scratch could be easily achieved within a single term and it
42:56
could be much less I believe using some of the resources which we’ve established which I’ll highlight at the end of this
43:02
so what does our lab handbook contain we’ll broadly split up into three main themes the first is a roles and expectations theme in this we Define the
43:09
responsibilities of different researchers within our group at different career stages in the research group Culture theme we essentially talk
43:16
about how we expect people to conduct themselves in the workplace how to find a healthy work life balance our work with EDI initiatives in addition to how
43:22
to be a good citizen and then our developing his researchers theme we talk about our commitment to the the career
43:27
development of of individual group members how to go about performing science in the best way how to get the
43:33
most out of collaborations and conferences in addition to our work with public engagement now one of the
43:38
important things about a lab Hook is that we consider it an evolving document what this means is that by writing down
43:43
how how your lab is supposed to operate it provides an opportunity to identify where improvements can be made and so we
43:49
originally wrote our lab hook in 2021 and last year we sat down again with some group Ry sessions bringing the
43:55
entire research group together to Iden places uh where where we all read the lab handbook and try to identify places
44:01
where our thinking has changed and where improvements can be made and this year we are in the process of making those
44:06
updates to the final document itself so within our group I can broadly say that writing the lab handbook has
44:12
helped address misconceptions by expectations has made members feel supported and welcomed and more broadly
44:17
provided a set of guiding principles of what it means to be within our research group now this is something which we
44:23
found very beneficial we wanted to spread this more broadly to um other um to help them develop their own lab
44:28
handbook and so what we’ve done is we’ve established a series of open source of open resources one of these being a
44:34
article which we published motivating the benefits of a lab handbook for a research group in addition we have an open source lab handbook template which
44:41
other research groups can fill out that help on the structure of the handbook in addition to an example lab handbook written by um our research group as well
44:49
um to give you a sense of the impact which lab hambers can have more generally we um we we um asked for some
44:55
we we put out a survey and we got Fe back from 18 research groups within our department who have written a lab handbook and broadly what we found is
45:01
that the lab handbooks have had a meaningful impact on these different research groups and broadly looking at the feedback we can say that W in their
45:07
lab hambur has help promote inclusivity prompting important important discussions about the culture that the
45:12
group aims to create in addition to identifying lab practices that needs Improvement and to finish I’m just going
45:18
to provide a quote from somebody uh within our department who uh wrote who developed a lab handbook for their group
45:24
they said that writing a lab handbook for them reminded them of writing the methods to a scientific paper until you describe in detail how you do things and
45:30
put it into words it is easy to for yourself that you’re doing things sensibly but it can often be vague or open to interpretation when you write it
45:37
down it clarifies any ambiguities with this we thank you for your time please feel free to scan this QR code to get
45:42
access to information about our initiative in addition to those open source resources alternatively search lab handbooks win thank
45:53
you thanks so much uh Cara Ben that’s that’s been Fab um
46:00
really really really I’ve already heard really inspiring things or read things that that um get me thinking in in about
46:08
how to develop my own handbook last but yeah before we come to the Q&A last but not least we have uh uh Leo y here who
46:17
zoned in who who who who Zoomed In from a different time zone I think um who’s
46:22
he’s a he was in Liverpool before but he’s a professor of geop physics at the University sa Paulo in Brazil and he’ll give us a a
46:31
tour um through his uh beautiful beautiful web page and his thoughts on
46:37
on his La P book take it away
46:47
you right and I did not listen to I think it was no Amy who said that we should unmute before sharing and I did
46:53
the opposite so yeah unmute before sharing is good yeah so thank you for the invitation in
47:00
and Carrie and Michael um so um hi uh good morning or good afternoon if you’re
47:07
in the UK good morning if you’re in my side of the pond um so as in said I’m
47:12
Leo yeda I’m a professor of geophysics at the University of s Paulo um and that’s where I’m leading
47:20
the computer oriented geoscience lab uh where we our research mostly focuses on
47:27
um using very small disturbances that we can measure on the Earth’s gravity and magnetic fields to try to work out what
47:34
the inner structure of the earth is um and that involves a lot of computing and
47:40
so we do a lot of software development as well so there’s a very heavy dose of Open Source scientific software uh that
47:46
revolves around all of our research um so this group started uh in
47:52
2019 when I joined the University of Liverpool as a lecturer in in the geophysics department Department um and
47:58
while I was there U I had a possibility of recruiting some more PhD students so
48:03
I was already co-supervising a PhD student that was far along in his studies but there were some new students
48:10
that might be coming in and one thing I learned from my involvement in open
48:15
source uh is the need to have very well written and and um well uh established
48:23
norms and uh and the the the culture of
48:28
the community and have all of that very well written down uh because in open
48:33
source um so a lot of Open Source scientific software is developed by a
48:39
few researchers from across the world who come together to work on this one
48:45
particular problem that they have and to me that always felt like what a research group does um and so one of the things
48:53
that comes up repeatedly in open source software is the the need to nurture a healthy
49:00
community of contributors to Any Given project and so this was something that
49:06
that I’d studied and paid attention to for quite a long time since my time as a master student um and what came up
49:13
repeatedly was in terms of issues that communities faced was lack of
49:18
transparency with regards to leadership and who makes decisions and uh how
49:24
people are attributed credit and how things are done in a community so what are the Norms what are the things that
49:31
we accept what are the things that we don’t accept um and as part of my work
49:36
in open source I had already written quite a few of these documents and read even more of them so um I have an
49:42
example one here from one of my projects uh so this is an Open document that lays
49:48
out the the governance structure of one of the projects that I work on and so
49:53
who’s responsible for doing what and how can you rise through the ranks and how do you get credit for participating in
50:00
this project um and so we when for starting
50:05
this group I decided to write things down as well for how the group would operate and what I wanted out of a
50:11
research group um and to set clear expectations for what students could expect from me and what I expect of them
50:19
U so that ended up turning into this website uh which I made um and then that
50:25
website includes what we call lab manual um and to kick this off I started
50:32
looking at what other people had done and I found two really good resources from people who already knew from
50:38
working in open source so one is a professor C Titus Brown from UC Davis
50:45
who leads the data intensive biology lab and also uh Matthew Turk from the University of linois from the data
50:51
exploration lab and they are both people who I looked for inspiration on open
50:57
source work and so when I saw what their Labs were like they had these uh these
51:02
guide books or manuals for for um laying out the expectations of the lab and the
51:08
LA lab ethos around openness and software development uh so I took some
51:13
of their structure as inspiration but then the rest I kind of wrote as it went along so our lab manual is a a page on
51:21
our website and so this is a living document it’s been through many iterations and basic basically every
51:27
time a new student either comes in or asks for a place in the lab uh we tend
51:33
to kind of revise the the manual and make little tweaks here and there um and I do encourage the students themselves
51:39
to contribute to the manual because the the way that this is all built is using
51:44
uh GitHub uh which is what we use for both developing software and also doing
51:50
all of our research projects so contributing to the lab uh to the lab handbook and the the website is um like
51:57
a mini introduction to how they’re going to be working on their research project and all the software that we develop as
52:03
well uh so it’s uh been serving that purpose as well so the main things that
52:09
we decided to include in the manual would be what’s our stance on open science uh because this is something
52:15
that I’ve often found is a deal breaker for some people when they want to collaborate uh so we make it very clear
52:21
that that our stance is open by default and uh so everything we do including the
52:26
lab manual all the papers all the code and everything we develop is uh open by
52:32
default and we only keep things private if there’s a very good reason for it so for example if there’s a personable
52:39
personal identifiable information that we need to uh up to skate or if it’s uh
52:44
someone’s project that um hasn’t seen the light of day yet so we might keep that back just to protect that one
52:50
student but once papers are submitted to a journal then everything should be open
52:55
so we want make that very clear um to not only prospective students but also
53:01
to any collaborators that we might have so if we’re collaborating on a paper um usually if someone asks me to
53:07
collaborate on a paper I’ll send them our open science page and say hey this is what I expect and if you’re on board
53:14
with that then then we can work together if that doesn’t work for you then you know maybe we should uh maybe you should talk to
53:20
someone else because then it’s not for not for me um and we also try to have um
53:27
are on boarding here as well so how to join the lab how to get started once you’ve joined the lab uh what are the
53:33
expectations that that I have of students and what are the expectations that they can have of me um how we
53:39
communicate within the labs so the different chats the when to send an email when to send something in the chat
53:45
uh meetings and group meetings and individual meetings and all of that um
53:50
we also have a health and well-being page which tries to list a bunch of resources um
53:56
of around health and well-being both in s Paulo and in Liverpool because I still have some students in Liverpool um and
54:04
we’re adding to this website now that the the students just gave me the feedback of um adding in uh also nice
54:12
things to do in s Paulo so what are different things that you can do around the city and uh things to do in your
54:17
time off uh we have a code of conduct which is one of the first things that I send to new students uh the first thing
54:23
I have them read it’s very brief and was not written by me this was adapted from
54:29
a website called code of uh codes of conduct. comom uh which there’s a link
54:35
there and I’ll share that in the in the meeting room so the only thing I added is which is very important for codes of
54:41
conduct is how to report violations right so uh people can contact me and if I’m the problem this is where you go to
54:49
uh to report uh a violation if it’s from me um and so we also try to curate a
54:56
list of uh interesting reading resources and things for them to u to do on on
55:02
their spare time or to help them with research right so my approach to writing
55:08
these is often um if a student has asked me the same question or collaborator has asked me the same question once or twice
55:15
I’ll write it down somewhere in the open so that the next time I’m ask that question I can send the link instead of
55:21
having to rewrite everything um but overall it’s very simil ilar to what all the others have
55:27
shared uh it’s been very beneficial for me to have this in particular the students always found it uh also said
55:33
that they they found it very nice to have clearly written expectations um and one of the first
55:40
things that I write in the expectations is that uh they are not expected to sacrifice personal time or Leisure Time
55:47
in service of a project and all those things that that have been talked about already right so that that was something
55:53
that that every single student came back saying that that it was very positive about having the the handbook and for me
56:00
as well I I like having this because uh it’s resources for myself that I consult
56:06
very often I’m probably the person who most viewed this document and who most sends links to it uh to other people so
56:13
I I use it very often it’s very good resource for you to have so I highly recommend working on that and I’m
56:19
guessing uh for people who are here that means that they’re probably interested in doing this right so I’ll I’ll end
56:24
there thank you so much Leo and uh yeah thank
56:32
thank you very much for for all the speakers for for sharing your approaches with you as you see it’s really great I
56:38
I really think it’s great to see the different approaches different raes and a lot of common themes that just go
56:45
through all of those um I’ll hand over to uh Michael now who basically need Q&A
56:53
stick around um we could have a basically a bit of a discussion about La handbooks but in case you have to run
57:00
because we’re all busy before you leave I post uh I post a Mente link again so
57:05
before you leave maybe just log on to the n and complete that as well but please stick around for the discussion
57:11
basically um Michael great it’s your yes thank you
57:17
and thank you everyone else um just I guess my I I don’t know very much about lab handbook so a great way I thought to
57:23
learn more was to help in put together this session where people who clearly have know different experiences have
57:31
have basically showed me a whole lot of really interesting things I want to take forward for for my own research group
57:36
today so hopefully that’s Inspire other people out there as well we’re going to hopefully get some
57:42
questions coming through on the on the on the chat so if you do have some please um please put them in there we’ll
57:47
we’ll ask away um I wanted to start off by asking uh asking some of our speakers
57:54
some questions about the how much of this stuff do you put on outward facing
57:59
um websites because you had different examples here and so I was just wondering you know people who do put
58:05
this um stuff outwardly facing um what kind of feedback do you get from people
58:10
do you see this and changing who um who you collaborate with or how you maybe
58:16
recruit undergraduate postgraduate postdoctoral researchers like could you just give us an idea of of you’re
58:21
putting this information out there what information do you get back about how it’s being received so I thought maybe I will start with I’m going to start with
58:29
um either Carla or Ben on on this um yeah I mean I can I can speak to
58:36
that so um we have we actually have two versions of our handbook um and I believe Ben will correct me if I’m wrong
58:42
because he’s always on top of the details more than I am um but I believe the one that we have available publicly
58:47
is an a bridged version um because the idea being that um people who are uh
58:53
maybe more casually engaging with us are more likely read a shorter document um the full um Ben remind me I think the a
59:00
bridged version is maybe like eight to 10 pages and the the full document is closer to 20 is that right something
59:06
like that yeah I think the full one’s closer to 30 the shorter ones about 10 15 we have both versions online uh we
59:12
but we highlight one of them it depends on the circumstances where we are yeah so so I have started including it um so
59:19
it’s on the the website so people can see it but I actually include it in all my job ads now uh and I send it to
59:25
students um uh every time a student expresses an interest in potentially joining the lab I send it to them and I can tell you um
59:31
so I’ve gone through through several rounds of recruitment since I began doing that and for postto specifically
59:38
and the posts are always really positive about it I think it’s a great recruitment tool um and I think it you
59:44
know it’s it’s both gives people confidence in the kind of lab that they’re joining but also you know it may be it may be that somebody looks at the
59:51
the lab handbook and says this lab is not for me um you that’s that’s a that’s a possibility that I think hopefully
59:57
doesn’t happen very often but if it did honestly I think you know everybody’s everybody’s dodging a bullet if that’s
1:00:03
the case if we say here’s who we are this is the ethos we want and people are not on board for that great you know I
1:00:10
think it it’s it’s only going to be problematic for everyone involved if that was the case but yes absolutely put
1:00:15
them on online and and use them as a recruitment tool yes so so that resonates quite nicely with what Leo was
1:00:21
saying about his lab’s like fundamental upholding of
1:00:26
in science and if you don’t like science then you go to look for another um another lab to work in let’s say Leo is
1:00:32
so generally you’ve been getting good feed I I guess we contacted you so we know about your um lab handbook um but
1:00:37
yeah could you give us any examples from yourself um yeah so I haven’t really had
1:00:45
um any feedback in terms of like someone contacting me explicitly talking about this but um I’ve had a few students who
1:00:52
are coming up um and one of the first things I did was send them I think one of them is here as well in the the
1:00:58
session uh so one of the first things I did when they expressed interest was send them that and they said that it was
1:01:04
very um to particularly the bits about
1:01:09
expectations and that I don’t expect them to you know sacrifice themselves I don’t expect them to be there working
1:01:16
weekends uh and some of them actually said that that was sort of the research culture that they were in before comeing
1:01:22
to me um and they found it very refreshing that that that wasn’t the culture that I was
1:01:28
expecting and so that kind of confirmed to them that they wanted to come and work with me um so I haven’t had the
1:01:35
opposite of someone saying yeah no this is not for me so I’m not going to go there but I completely agree with Carla
1:01:41
on this that yeah it’s if someone doesn’t want to work like that then yeah it really is best that that they don’t
1:01:48
come work with me because we wouldn’t be a good match and I think that’s the most important thing uh when mentoring
1:01:55
students is that there’s a good match between the supervisor and the student
1:02:00
uh the the topic is secondary to me honestly like um the the main thing is
1:02:05
that that there’s a good match and I think the having the handbook written will help ensure that I think KLA maybe
1:02:11
said this quite nicely that that if you have this in the document it also actually
1:02:17
saves you quite a bit of work doing this every time because you’ll have that consistent thing that you can send out
1:02:22
to people and you don’t have to have reinvent the same words time because you’ve got it nicely written and and
1:02:29
through a group process in most cases um I wanted to ask a question from the chat here um about um about buyin which I I
1:02:36
know Stuart used as an example where at the early stages where there wasn’t much buyin because people would weren’t even
1:02:42
aware that there was a lab notebook and I certainly think buin something that I I get concerned about in the documents
1:02:49
that I maybe tried to draft in the past so do any of our speakers want to talk about ways in which they have encouraged
1:02:55
SP in and also encourage like the longevity of the documents know me first put you on the
1:03:06
spot not really this has never been mentioned
1:03:11
before um maybe some I don’t know in terms you don’t think I could I
1:03:21
offer so I I think one of the things that should we really keen on with our lab hamb to write as a group um and so
1:03:27
by writing it as a group it’s a collaborative effort to create the the lab the vision uh which you want for
1:03:32
your lab and I think this is a really valuable um way to achieve buying is you’re not telling people what you
1:03:38
you’re not telling people how things are going to be you’re actually bringing them along the journey in defining how things are going to be and that can be
1:03:45
really helpful not only for make for for creating that buying but also as something which Carla mentioned in her
1:03:52
presentation is addressing ambiguity it’s making sure that when you actually communicate something it is as uh people
1:03:58
you are trying to people are interpreting what you are communicating as you expect it to be communicated and
1:04:04
I think that can really help as well with respect to to bind yeah I think the only thing I’d add
1:04:10
to what Ben said is 100% that’s exactly the thought that I had in terms of Buy in is you do it together um you know we
1:04:17
have so I do a lot of work um in research culture and EDI in Oxford um uh
1:04:23
and in fact I I line managed EDI professionals um so one of the people
1:04:28
we’ve worked with a lot who’s the the third author on our e paper um one thing she says and I’ve had to tell her I said
1:04:34
you don’t keep saying this but one of the things that she says is actually write the document together and then
1:04:39
tear it up and write it again the next year now I don’t actually Advocate doing that we don’t have time we’re too busy
1:04:45
to do that but the point that she’s getting at is that writing the document itself is quite can be quite a cathartic
1:04:51
experience you learn a lot about each other and you hash out your common values and I think where people where I
1:04:57
think where we’ve had maybe not necessarily a lack of buyin but where um
1:05:02
maybe people haven’t completely agreed on things oftentimes it comes down to
1:05:07
things like I say something and you hear something slightly different um because
1:05:12
you know although we’re a big group we have evolved to having a reasonably common uh a shared understanding of of
1:05:20
our ethos and our culture and yet talking about that is not always always so easy so I think maybe what happens is
1:05:26
if there’s not buyin what that tells you is people have different ideas or different understandings of what you’re
1:05:32
doing and that’s something that you really need to explore as a group it’s St you wanted to come in
1:05:38
there yeah and I agree totly with that and I just wanted in case there were kind of newer pis who uh you know don’t
1:05:44
have a group around them and there is no infrastructure to begin with just to say that it’s you if that isn’t there and
1:05:50
you don’t have people around with you it can be quite challenging because you are writing from scratch and um I found in
1:05:56
my approach it was keeping it shorter to begin with and planning to develop it as I get big try and not do everything at
1:06:02
once essentially and accept that actually there are limitations and I found to be honest there was just so much going on trying to set or is so
1:06:08
much going on trying to set a research lab that this is one part of it and it’s balanced with it and so setting up the
1:06:14
scaffolding and taking inspiration from all the great examples out there and borrowing from those examples uh you
1:06:20
know and then also being aware that as it goes on there’s going to have to be some kind of iterative process um so
1:06:25
that that’s been my approach to doing it where I’ve kind of had that absence of people around me and also talking to
1:06:30
other colleagues so you know the team here at York and colleagues on this call um and getting other people involved
1:06:36
just have a look over it and just see if it makes sense okay I wanted
1:06:42
to ask a slightly different question here so when we started running these sessions that in was talking about earlier we we sort of pulled our um our
1:06:49
early career piis about what they wanted to gain some information and training
1:06:55
one of the things that came back from that session was that they were concerned about lots of these things that we do around basic
1:07:03
t-sh te basic teaching and research and how that’s um appreciated
1:07:09
by uh high-ups and when you’re going for promotion and how that effort that you
1:07:15
go into creating um the lab environment that you want is actually appreciated by um the senior people in your in your
1:07:21
department or university and I was just wondering um particularly for people who are starting out in their Labs who might
1:07:26
be on the call if if we could hear something from our our speakers today about how they’ve um how they’ve found
1:07:34
those uh interactions between what they want to set out in their documents versus um and how they want their labs to run versus what’s appreciated by um
1:07:41
by their departments and institutes um I guess maybe we could start with Stuart thing as he’s talked a
1:07:47
bit about trying this in several different places I’m pausing before I respond um I
1:07:56
don’t know if there’s that much interaction I find the whole process of being an academic quite isolating and
1:08:02
this isn’t one of the things we talk about so I would say I am filling space
1:08:08
with things that I am making up based on what I think is a good way of doing it um I’m trying to be very candid there
1:08:14
and very honest because actually I think if again if you’re a new Pi it’s incredibly daunting and I I have
1:08:20
absolute full confidence that I would you know I could take the documents I’m working with and go to our SLT of seen
1:08:25
team and work with and I’m sure there you know I know that culturally there is a support for this work within our within our school within our department
1:08:31
but it’s not like it’s an ongoing conversation and that’s you know that’s it’s not an active conversation in that
1:08:37
sense at least here and I think that’s probably quite a consistent experience for lots of new Pi depending on where
1:08:42
they work has has a handr yeah I mean I’m not I’m not um
1:08:48
100% sure if this is if this is the kind of thing you’re thinking but so I do um I I do sit on for example a lot of
1:08:55
promotion um committees so for example the Committees that um that award academic titles um as well as a lot of like
1:09:03
Fellowship panels and things like that and increasingly there is this expectation that one um is contributing
1:09:11
to positive research culture and trying to find ways of evidencing it now I think people should do lad handbooks
1:09:16
because they’re the right thing and they will make your group better they will make your life better they’ll make you happier and your group happier but I
1:09:24
also think um if that’s not enough if you need a bit of motivation to get going with it because we all probably do
1:09:30
um it is a great thing to be able to point to if you’re putting in a funding application if you’re putting in an
1:09:36
application for a professorial title you know the spirit of the age is that we are expected to demonstrate what we are
1:09:43
doing and I can tell you I read a lot of statements that people make about how are you contributing to positive research culture and most people say you
1:09:49
know I run research you know I run my my lab meetings I make sure you try to make sure people are comfortable um you know
1:09:56
I I meet with people weekly if you can say I wrote a lab handbook and here it
1:10:01
is right I think that really shows a commitment beyond the kind of to be
1:10:06
completely Frank fluff that most people write in those sections which is just maybe it’s true maybe they have a great
1:10:12
culture but there’s no evidence for it and having something like this really it you know it serves you well but honestly
1:10:18
there’s also the slightly cynical reason why you might want to do it is it gives you something you can point to when you
1:10:24
need to and you will need to at some point if you’re going to carry on running a lab great thank you
1:10:33
Leo U yeah I absolutely agree with with Carla and I wanted to add as well that
1:10:39
just beyond hiring progressions when when hiring a lot of times uh at least from the few panels
1:10:46
I’ve sat in some of the problems that we see is there will be some candidates who
1:10:51
want to start a lecturership a professorship um and and from the entire
1:10:57
interview their entire presentation feels like they are postto doesn’t feel
1:11:02
like they’re thinking about a research group they’re not thinking about these things that that a lecturer needs to
1:11:09
start thinking about uh so if you if you’re thinking about this now and you
1:11:15
start laying out so what what would my group look like like trying to sketch uh as brief as it can be a lab handbook and
1:11:23
you can point to that during interviews and dur during uh selection the the selection process it helps show that yes
1:11:30
you are thinking about these things it helps show maturity and helps show that you’re already at the stage of being a
1:11:37
lecturer being a professor depending you know if you’re in the UK or not um so I think yeah it can be a useful thing to
1:11:44
have public that you can demonstrate yeah yeah thank you and there just a comments in the chat that I
1:11:50
wanted to share with everybody just saying that in part of um certainly in the UK If you write a ukri funding app a
1:11:55
they have this thing called the resume for research and Innovation or R4 RI and
1:12:00
that this is the kind of place where you can you can start to say some of these things that you’re you’re you’re doing
1:12:06
in terms of supporting lab groups and putting lab handbooks in place um there was a question earlier on in the chat
1:12:11
about about how long it takes to put a first draft together and we heard that a little bit from uh from Ben in that
1:12:17
timeline I was wondering if some of the other um speakers could talk about that first draft because I’m guessing you
1:12:22
know once if this is a new pi and you’re St in a new lab there’s lots of things that um uh that need to get done at the
1:12:29
beginning this is obviously an important one um but how much time rly speaking
1:12:34
should we should we allocate to achieving this Nami you’ve just gone through this
1:12:42
no Amy yeah well I mean because mine is not really a book it was um I think I
1:12:49
tried to I tried to make it look pretty you know and attractive and and uh and
1:12:54
accessible to everyone um but I am doing my lab website right now and I’m going
1:13:00
to have to think about a way to transform this presentation into something a little bit more static and
1:13:07
so you know maybe a poster and you know and every time that takes time but my original presentation it was a couple of
1:13:14
hours um what I also wanted to say about the previous point is um it also helps
1:13:20
for those um teaching accreditation um you know having a lab
1:13:26
handbook is not just about a research and your resume for your UK um funding
1:13:32
but it’s also you know the student support aspect of it it can also really helps with people doing their Fellowship
1:13:39
of the higher education or the PG caps you know the equivalent so that’s something else to think about that it’s
1:13:45
a good evidence to uh to use for
1:13:52
good yeah I think it took a very long time for me but I think it’s because it wasn’t it wasn’t really the handbook it
1:13:58
was actually that that process you go through at the start of trying to work out who you are and what you do so a lot
1:14:04
of soul searching and a lot of setting out of an identity and I knew that part
1:14:09
of my academic identity I wanted at the call was a focus on Research culture and specifically how we how we work well in
1:14:15
science and so for me the lab handbook component of it came from that so it
1:14:21
it’s not as simple as to say it was a session where I sat down and wrote a document I mean it was eventually but it was the synthesis over a good year of
1:14:28
thinking bringing in years of Prior thinking during post talk and so on uh and slowly kind of iteratively
1:14:33
developing an identity and then working out what does that mean in terms of a ethos and then specifically what’s that mean in terms of like policies and
1:14:39
induction procedures and then also iterated them so it’s an ongoing process um it it takes as long as you give it
1:14:45
time to take probably great and then just the last point on this question please so the
1:14:52
first thing is that running a having a lab handbook it doesn’t have to be long to be useful and the length of your
1:14:58
handbook often can relate to the size of the group that you have so if you’re a group with just say a couple of people having you know a 30 plus page document
1:15:04
may not necessarily be what is best for your lab so you can get out something much quicker um you know a handful of
1:15:10
pages in a quite short period of time um I also just want to promote and I’ve just provided a link in the chat that
1:15:16
based on you know our development of Bon lab hook we developed a template uh which can help people form that
1:15:21
structure and accelerate uh the writing process um in addition on the link we have a lot of example lab handbooks um
1:15:28
the win physics lab handbook uh which we put together you are welcome if you like what we write you are welcome to take it
1:15:33
and modify it for your own lab uh that can you know help move things forward thank you um yes there was a
1:15:40
question earlier on in the chat about um how and I think at least one or not two of you discussed this um but how many of
1:15:46
you um embed information about the research concordat or 10 professional days for post dos and do you think
1:15:53
that’s actually something that that you teams are are are actually taking those
1:15:58
days to do that professional development um maybe who should I start
1:16:05
with um I might start with car or Ben because you seem to have like a your your lab handbook covers a larger group of people um so do do you is that
1:16:12
something you promote and and is it taken up by um by staff I mean we yeah so we we do refer to the concordat
1:16:19
explicitly I think it’s a good idea to do it I think um I I think what is very clear
1:16:25
um so in a role that I have in medical Sciences helping to lead um uh research
1:16:31
culture it’s very clear that that awareness of the concordat is not as good as it should be it’s clear that
1:16:37
people don’t really understand what those 10 days are for um I think this is one good place to try to um to address
1:16:44
that we also everyone has a annual professional development review you probably have some where that is a
1:16:50
question you probably have something similar there I think to be honest um communicating the fact that these 10
1:16:57
days exist um is probably not the thing that we’re all not quite getting right I
1:17:04
think the thing is to get people to think hard about how to use that time I
1:17:09
also think um I mean in our lab we try to make very clear we we really want people to take that time um but um I
1:17:16
think it is certainly not universally true that all Pi despite the fact that it’s you know when you once your
1:17:22
institution signed up to it you are expected to do it I think it is not the case um that that all pis actually
1:17:29
really want their people to take that time and I think that’s the other big problem okay I wanted to finish with one
1:17:36
last question which is um so certainly in the UK and I guess elsewhere as well we’re we’re seeing bigger movements to
1:17:42
try try and inbuild um uh environmental sustainability in our research and I was
1:17:48
wondering whether this is anything people have started to put into lab handbooks about um ways in which we can
1:17:55
improve the environmental sustainability of our of our research activities um who shall I start with Leo
1:18:02
is that something you’ve um yeah that that’s something
1:18:08
that uh it’s not in our handbook now because we just started writing this last week um so after some vacation time
1:18:17
that kind of stuck in the the back of my mind then I figured that we should write this uh this is something I’ve been
1:18:23
grappling with for quite a while now because um geophysics is highly tied to
1:18:28
the oil and gas industry particularly since that’s the biggest job market for our graduate students for our
1:18:35
graduates um and so adding things like that can be a bit tough because uh
1:18:43
there’s expectation of taking funding from oil and gas industry and working on
1:18:48
that field particularly here in Brazil where it’s a very dominant industry um so having a stance on that
1:18:55
has been um has been difficult but I’m writing that down now um one thing that
1:19:02
comes to mind as well is the new trend with large language models and and AI
1:19:08
which a lot of the times like a lot of the research I see in geophysics from that is just a waste of energy to be
1:19:15
honest um it’s using thousands and thousands of machines to do the job that
1:19:20
you could do on the laptop um and so so I’m I’m trying to add something in about
1:19:26
that as well about since we use a lot of computing of trying to be cautious that yeah
1:19:32
Computing it might seem free especially if you’re running things in the cloud
1:19:37
but it’s not right it costs energy it costs water and so you shouldn’t be wasting that just the same as you
1:19:43
wouldn’t leave the tap open in your house right um so I’m try I’m trying to come up with a document uh a new page
1:19:51
right for our manual that revolves around that and this is something I’m writing together with my students because I I really want their input on
1:19:58
this great I think that brings us up to the to the close of the Q&A session um
1:20:03
so thank you very much everybody for contributing and also apologies if we didn’t get your question in the chat
1:20:09
although there does look to be lots of good back and forth between both panel members and everybody else here so
1:20:16
please do take a look at that I’m going to hand back to in who’s going to close the
1:20:21
session hi or someone from a Prosper team sorry you know what this can I can I be a pain
1:20:28
can I go just so I can launch our very quick po um it’s literally two questions
1:20:35
um which we’d be delighted if you could complete for um you all pop off um so
1:20:42
that is launched and on screen now um and yeah I just want to say a big
1:20:49
thank you to to you and Michael for coordinating this massively useful and
1:20:55
relevant discussion as well um there’s been a lot of questions around where the
1:21:01
if the session’s been recorded and if it will be made available so the link is in the chat um and we will send it out to
1:21:07
all of you VI EV right as well um but iness I will hand back to you for the final words I just wanted to launch that
1:21:14
poll so thank you very much why the pressure of final words um no I just want to say B again thanks
1:21:21
thanks to the pro thanks very much for the Prosper team for uh you they’re basically responsible that this is
1:21:27
happening and thanks for organizing it thanks for our amazing speakers for sharing and discussing uh and thanks to
1:21:35
all of you for staying and coming and sticking around uh
Shared learnings
- Lab handbooks allow a consistent and transparent way to foster an inclusive, supportive and productive group culture, and greatly help when onboarding new team members
- A live document that is co-written by all group members and revisited regularly helps everyone buy-in and use it
- A lab handbook helps to set out the lab's ethos around research culture and, if the handbook (or an abridged version) is publicly available, can really aid recruitment of students and post-docs, and when starting new collaborations
- A lab handbook allows candidates preparing applications for academic jobs or fellowship applications to demonstrate their leadership plans and aspirations.
- Lots of resources are already available online, e.g. the templates that the Karla Miller and Benjamin Tendler have put together: https://www.win.ox.ac.uk/about/training/lab-handbooks