Lab Expectations

Expectations of Lab Members

Be Safe:

Stay up to date on laboratory and radiation safety training, and be familiar with the Munger Lab Safety Manual. When working with any hazards, follow appropriate safety guidelines. If you have any questions on laboratory safety, please ask.

Be a Professional and Act with Integrity:

Be respectful of others, including their person, their time, their reagents, as well as shared laboratory equipment and spaces. Be on time; keep the commitments that you make; participate in group meetings; and, assist with shared lab chores. Perform your experiments and data analysis with honesty. Maintain a detailed lab notebook of your experiments and results. Make sure your data and subsequent analysis are transparent. Contribute to a lab environment that is emotionally supportive, safe, and free of harassment. Give scholarly credit where it is due, recognize the contributions of your colleagues.

Strive Towards Scientific Independence:

Engage your research as a full-time commitment. Commit to learning; ask everybody lots of questions and take notes on the answers; this is the quickest way to learn how and why things are done. Read the literature that is essential to your research project. With respect to the literature: What are the key questions and assumptions of your field? How might you experimentally test these assumptions or answer these questions? With respect to experimental planning: Do you have all the reagents necessary? Have you planned controls that are important for potential conclusions or troubleshooting? If the experiment is successful, what would you do next?After your experiments, make explicit conclusions: Were there problems or missing controls that limit your interpretation? Identify potential solutions, and consider alternative explanations. Do the data suggest novel hypotheses? Persevere through the challenges and be productive; there will be challenges.

Intentionally Develop your Career:

Make deliberate decisions on how you spend your time and develop your career based on your priorities. In addition to being scientifically productive, take advantage of the career resources here at the medical center and seek out multiple mentors as everyone has different experiences and perspectives.

Mentor Others:

Part of being a professional scientist is sharing knowledge with others. Further, teaching others is an extremely effective way of cementing knowledge. At some point, all laboratory personnel will mentor a junior researcher.

Principal Investigator Expectations

• You can expect Josh to treat everyone with respect, and provide a professional environment that is supportive, safe, and free of harassment
• You can expect Josh to work with you and others honestly and ethically, and give you appropriate scholarly credit for your contributions
• You can expect Josh to be committed to your education and training as a student or post-doc, and a future member of a professional community
• You can expect Josh to meet with you weekly or bi-weekly depending on the state of your project
• You can expect Josh to inquire for your feedback on your project, the lab environment, your academic/research experience, and Josh’s mentorship. You can expect Josh to listen to your concerns and attempt to work through any issues
• You can expect Josh to give you honest feedback about your research progress, as well as feedback on your talks, posters, and manuscripts
• You can expect Josh to support your personal career decisions, and work with you to find an appropriate position upon graduation or transitioning from our lab to a new position