Every member in Duan Lab should follow these general expectations.
Health and Safety First
- Prioritize your own health (both physical and mental) and wellness.
- Balance your life, school work and research, seek for help if you need.
- If your health status changes (including pregnancy), please inform me in private so we can discuss the best way to accommodate your needs.
- Familiarize yourself with the lab chemical hygiene plan.
- Follow all lab safety rules and guidelines (If you see an unsafe behavior, simply remind them the right way they should be doing).
- Laboratory Safety Manual; Environmental Health and Safety
- Cornell Health Service; Mental Health Care
- Fitness Center; Student & Campus life
- International Service; English Language Support
Attitude
- Be self-motivated, be curious and enthusiastic to science and new discoveries. Be self-managed on your time, schedule, workflow and communication.
- Uphold high research integrity. Never manipulate or selectively exclude/expand data for an expected result.
- We have zero tolerance policy towards plagiarism and data fabrication.
- Maintain a positive, solution-oriented attitude towards your research.
- Need help? Steps in dealing with research challenges: think about solution yourself (don’t ask someone by default); Google it (or post questions on some active communities); looking into literatures; discuss with lab mates; seek advice of the PI; If we are still struggling, we will seek for help outside the lab.
- Be honest (to yourself and to each other). Identifying your strength and expertise and be passionate about your research, own your project.
- Made a mistake? Everyone will make mistakes in lab, own your mistake and apologize. Learn from it.
- Be self-improvement without feeling the need to compete against your colleagues.
- Feel competitive? Success from others does not prevent yours, the success of each member contributes to everyone else’s success. Own these feelings and improve yourself.
Lab citizenship
- Be supportive and generous. Provide support to your peers by being a positive influence, engaging in discussions and sharing information about scholarship/career development opportunities.
- Be kind, treat each other with respect and care. Everyone in the lab should feel welcomed and appreciated for their contribution.
- Maintain an open-minded, inclusive, productive lab environment to support learning and research.
- Any inappropriate comments or behavior such as racism, sexism, discrimination and stereotyping will not be tolerated.
- We respect each other’s cultural, religious and political differences, gender identity and sexual orientation.
- Please take the training at: Advancing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Cornell
- Lab harmony: maintain a clean and tide working bench and don’t take other’s supplies (pipettes, tips, tubes etc.) without their permission.
- Make sure to sign up for the shared equipments so others can plan for their own experiment accordingly.
- Treat all lab equipments with care and keep the chemical inventory updated.
Participation and Working Schedules
- Actively participate in all laboratory activities, such as lab meetings (research update rotate with journal club, weekly or bi-weekly during summer), lab duties (gas refills, equipment maintenance, order supplies), and graduate seminars (every Thursday).
- Respond to all communications via email or lab Slack Channel in a timely manner during working hours. Monitor communications regularly in case of emergencies (freezer outages).
- Be self-driven: you are working for yourself (your passion, degree, career goals and next life chapters) instead of working for anyone else.
- Working schedules: develop a self-managed working style that optimizes your motivation and creativity.
- Night owl? Working and studying based on your own rhythms and habits in sleep, eat and exercise. Your physical and mental health and life-work balance is the most important.
- Don’t worry about comparing your schedule to your peers’ schedules, every person goes through more or less intense work based on their own deadlines and commitments.
- Productive is more important than working long hours. However, your self-managed schedule should always allow you to interact with other team members and participate in lab meetings and discussions. [Cornell working alone policy]
- Block your time to write
Vacations and Absences
- Vacations: Please find the guidelines for your vacations in both the winter and summer breaks:
- Graduate research assistant time-off policy
- Postdoctoral research associate leave policy
- Please discuss your vacation plans with me in advance and we can plan round the absence.
- You will be responsible for tracking of your needs and available vacation days.
- Max of 20 days can be carry over to the next year. This will be very useful for international students who will spend 5-week for a visa renewal.
- Absences: make sure to clear any anticipated whole day absence during working weeks with me in advance.
Working together
- We promote the intellectual exchange and free discussion environment in the lab. However, everyone has their own individual project and individual goals.
- Please do not ask others in the lab to perform tasks or any experiments on your project (nor should you agree to requests to do so) unless we have explicitly discussed a collaboration between you.
- We also strongly discourage any hierarchical thinking in the lab.
- Every person in the lab is working for themselves and their own scientific/professional goals.
- Regardless of their level of education or experience, junior members of the lab are not the employees of any other lab member and should not be asked to perform experiments on anyone else’s project.
Lab Notebook and Data Backup
- Your lab notebook belongs to the University and please do not take away with you.
- Maintain an organized and transcribed copy of wet lab and computational notebook in Evernote online. The additional information can be upload as photos [examples].
- Data backup: sync all computer with shared Google Drive backup. Genomic data and pipeline script will need to be backed up on BioHPC (not automatically).
- Data reproducibility: Make all protocols, data, and pipeline scripts freely and publicly available upon publication on lab GitHub and/or Protocols.io repositories.
Conference
- Everyone is encouraged to present and attend research conference at least once a year. Our lab will support you one conference/yr if you present a poster or talk.
- You should also make a good effort to obtain partial/full student scholarship for travel grant. This include the travel scholarship offered by Department, Grad school and the Conference, volunteering at the Conference and sharing rooms.
- Please discuss with me in advance about the conference you are interested in. We will then work on the abstract (3-week prior to the submission deadline) and help you practice the presentation (3-week prior to the conference).
Authorship
- We follow the ICMJE recommendations for authorship criteria:
- Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
- Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
- Final approval of the version to be published; AND
- Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
- As projects develop overtime, the author inclusion and the author order will be re-evaluated accordingly. Co-authorship will be offered to people involved in the actual work (including lab staff and undergraduates) in consultation with the lead-author. Helping lab mates on learning new skills or chatting over problems will not necessitate in an authorship.
- Co-first author happens when both author contribute equally to the work, such as one collected sample and performed the experiments, the other conducted the bioinformatics analysis and interpreted the data. Both author actively wrote the manuscript together.