Fall 2022 schedule
Standing Weekly Commitments
Attendance at weekly lab meetings, Skop Lab Journal Clubs, Wednesday Genetics seminars (3:30pm), and RNA Maxi Group (Tuesday Nights)/Cell Bio Study Group (Friday at 3pm) are expected. If you are presenting a paper or manuscript in lab meeting, you must email the group one week in advance of the presentation date.
Lab Meetings
We have several types of lab meetings and the frequency and scheduling of these are based on the current needs of the lab. We don’t do all of these in any given semester. These meetings are mandatory unless we’ve discussed in advance otherwise.
Meetings
Meetings will be listed on the Skop Lab calendar in Outlook. Meetings won’t take place over holidays or when they clash with holidays, holy days for all religious, and other events, like conferences that multiple people in the lab are involved in. We sometimes skip lab meetings, to give everyone a much-needed break or when Ahna is traveling.
Lab meetings for everyone
Lab meetings are the regular opportunity for the whole group to come together to talk about science, and about important logistics. Lab meetings are a mutually respectful and supportive environment.
Lab meetings can take various formats:
Whatever the format, the goal of lab meeting is for everyone in the room, including the presenter, to learn things that are useful to their work.
Lab Meeting Agendas:
Lab meetings generally are like this:
Giving a Research update lab meeting
The purpose of these lab meetings is to communicate and to exchange useful ideas, not to simply “update”, nor to impress. This will usually be a talk with slides, with sub-goals:
The key point is that the presentation must be accessible to everyone in the lab. There is always a new student who hasn’t heard about your project before. There are also people who have heard you talk before, however, they are unlikely to remember those talks clearly, because they are human and also focused on their own project. The presentation must be accessible to all of them, which requires thoughtful prioritization of what you choose to present.
Research presentations should usually:
Lab members working on a new project will usually present a more in-depth introduction and plans for future work, not any new data. Similarly, it can be important to present incomplete or inconclusive data in lab meetings; sometimes this leads to the most helpful discussions. A well-thought-out lab meeting will strengthen your future work, by enabling a productive conversation with the group about your ideas and plans.
Aim for a 30-minute talk with at most one slide per minute, to allow time for discussion; a shorter talk is fine. It is a good idea to discuss your plan for lab meeting with the PI at least a week in advance.
Conversely, it is the responsibility of everyone else in the lab meeting to engage with the presenter and the presentation. Everyone is welcome - indeed, encouraged - to ask questions. We all bring value to lab meetings, and for each of us there are very many things we don’t know; if one person has a question, it’s likely other people have the same question.
Some resources on giving good presentations and lab meetings:
Journal club meetings
Roughly they work like:
1-1 meetings
Most lab members have 1-1 meetings with the PI that last 30minute to an hour. These guidelines are intended to be “as simple as possible” to make these meetings most pleasant and productive.
Lab socials (whenever we feel like it)
Guidelines:
Attendance at weekly lab meetings, Skop Lab Journal Clubs, Wednesday Genetics seminars (3:30pm), and RNA Maxi Group (Tuesday Nights)/Cell Bio Study Group (Friday at 3pm) are expected. If you are presenting a paper or manuscript in lab meeting, you must email the group one week in advance of the presentation date.
Lab Meetings
We have several types of lab meetings and the frequency and scheduling of these are based on the current needs of the lab. We don’t do all of these in any given semester. These meetings are mandatory unless we’ve discussed in advance otherwise.
- Lab Meeting: One person presents a detailed update on their work including background, data, interpretations, and future directions.
- Journal Club: One person presents a paper of their choice or one of outstanding interest to the entire lab. More time should be spent on critical analysis of than on simple review of the paper. Here’s a format we have used in the past.
Sometimes we don’t have a running journal club and instead do a weekly chat in the on our lab Slack. Each person posts a list of major points of critique for one paper they read during the week in this channel. - Individual Meetings: This is your protected time with Ahna to discuss data and anything else of concern. Meetings are ~30 minutes long and the frequency depends on your needs. You are required to schedule these weekly with Ahna.
- Round robin/Data Meeting: These are meetings with the entire lab in which everyone brings their raw data for the group to view and analyze. Bring your laptop with raw data and all your analysis to this meeting.
- Non-regular meetings: Send a Slack message, or set up a virtual meeting at any time if you need to talk for any reason.
- Departmental Seminars: These are on Wednesday afternoons at 3:30pm during the year. Please make every attempt to attend them.
- Cell Biology Study Group: Bill Bement Organizes these on Fridays at 3pm
- Mitosis Group: Once a Month Group, TBD
- RNA Maxi Group: Aaron Hoskins (Biochem) organizes them on Tuesdays at 5:30pm
Meetings
Meetings will be listed on the Skop Lab calendar in Outlook. Meetings won’t take place over holidays or when they clash with holidays, holy days for all religious, and other events, like conferences that multiple people in the lab are involved in. We sometimes skip lab meetings, to give everyone a much-needed break or when Ahna is traveling.
Lab meetings for everyone
Lab meetings are the regular opportunity for the whole group to come together to talk about science, and about important logistics. Lab meetings are a mutually respectful and supportive environment.
Lab meetings can take various formats:
- Research update - led by a single lab member
- Data meeting/Round Robin Style - everyone presents one slide on their recent work
- Research update (30min) + data update (15min)—most common
- Guest presentation from someone outside the lab: Postdoc interview, etc
- Journal clubs - one or more lab members lead discussion of a relevant paper
Whatever the format, the goal of lab meeting is for everyone in the room, including the presenter, to learn things that are useful to their work.
Lab Meeting Agendas:
Lab meetings generally are like this:
- Start time: meeting opens, drift in with coffee/tea/food, chat and discuss lab business
- 15 past the hour: prompt, presentation starts
- 30 minute later latest, show the last slide
- 15 minutes for the Data update presentation
- Last 5-10 min: Discuss any other lab business
- Ahna stays after to speak to people one-on-one
Giving a Research update lab meeting
The purpose of these lab meetings is to communicate and to exchange useful ideas, not to simply “update”, nor to impress. This will usually be a talk with slides, with sub-goals:
- Introduction/Background
- What is the gap in knowledge? What problem are you solving?
- Results/Data Analysis
- Articulate what you are thinking about your work’s status and future.
- Solicit feedback and ideas from other lab members, to improve your project(s).
- Practice for talks outside the lab, in a friendly environment.
The key point is that the presentation must be accessible to everyone in the lab. There is always a new student who hasn’t heard about your project before. There are also people who have heard you talk before, however, they are unlikely to remember those talks clearly, because they are human and also focused on their own project. The presentation must be accessible to all of them, which requires thoughtful prioritization of what you choose to present.
Research presentations should usually:
- Give an introduction to your project, highlighting important ideas and objects (e.g. proteins/genes).
- Give each slide a helpful title, ideally a sentence that asks a questions.
- Explain how to interpret each kind of data that you present, concisely and clearly. All data and axes need readable labels.
- Include a small number of crucial ideas/results from elsewhere, appropriately referenced.
- Make it clear when the talk shifts to your results; present selected primary data.
- Address problems, uncertainties, and obstacles.
- End with some kind of conclusion and plan for future work.
Lab members working on a new project will usually present a more in-depth introduction and plans for future work, not any new data. Similarly, it can be important to present incomplete or inconclusive data in lab meetings; sometimes this leads to the most helpful discussions. A well-thought-out lab meeting will strengthen your future work, by enabling a productive conversation with the group about your ideas and plans.
Aim for a 30-minute talk with at most one slide per minute, to allow time for discussion; a shorter talk is fine. It is a good idea to discuss your plan for lab meeting with the PI at least a week in advance.
Conversely, it is the responsibility of everyone else in the lab meeting to engage with the presenter and the presentation. Everyone is welcome - indeed, encouraged - to ask questions. We all bring value to lab meetings, and for each of us there are very many things we don’t know; if one person has a question, it’s likely other people have the same question.
Some resources on giving good presentations and lab meetings:
- Ask Ahna to help you craft slides using her Slide Evolution Method
- Presentation Zen/Presentation Zen Design by Garr Reynolds
- How to survive your first lab meeting
- How to survive and excel in lab meetings
Journal club meetings
Roughly they work like:
- Ahna or you can choose a relevant paper, that everyone should read before the meeting. Come prepared to talk about what you learned from the paper and any questions you have.
- The paper can be old, new, or a Biorxiv preprint. The big criteria for choice is that it has to be valuable for us to discuss as a group. Maybe it’s the ideas, maybe the methods, maybe the subject matter.
- Discussion is usually led by one person, and/or can be shared around the group. We don’t need perfect presentations, just some structure for a good discussion.
- It is usually helpful to start with some context about why the paper was written and why you chose the paper / why it’s relevant to us.
- The leader is encouraged to showcase their own data/project or other related information in the light of the main journal club paper. These have been some of the most useful journal club moments.
- Everyone suggests papers for next subgroup meeting, and we decide on one of them. It is ok to suggest a paper that you have already read. Please do so on SLACK
- PI aims to attend all journal clubs, however it’s fine for them to continue even if PI can’t attend.
1-1 meetings
Most lab members have 1-1 meetings with the PI that last 30minute to an hour. These guidelines are intended to be “as simple as possible” to make these meetings most pleasant and productive.
- The lab member takes notes and sends a summary to PI later on the day of the 1-1 meeting. Notes should begin “1-1 meeting notes [date]”. (By email or slack? To discuss). Post on Slack in the DM area between you and Ahna.
- Meeting starts by discussing progress on agreed priorities and action points from previous meeting.
- Meeting includes reviewing lab notebook, or other data/analysis/writing/slides, as appropriate.
- Your lab notebook (LabArchives) should be updated before the 1-1 meeting.
- Meeting ends by agreeing priorities for the lab member for their next meeting. Realistically, there will be between 1 and 3 priorities for the next two-week period, because larger numbers of things cannot all be prioritized.
- Notes should include action points for PI (with deadlines), and any questions arising from the meeting that we don’t yet have answers to.
- Notes can be brief; whatever can be written up in 15 minutes is good enough.
- Please post these on TRELLO in your project.
Lab socials (whenever we feel like it)
Guidelines:
- Organize a lab social when you feel like it.
- Be inclusive.