Lab Policies

So you are here, now what…

Welcome to the Greathouse lab at Baylor University. In this memo I set out to describe my expectations of myself as a mentor and you as a part of the project and lab. Some elements are simply practical ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ but many touches on the issue of collaboration and team science.

My goal as a mentor is to support and empower each team member to articulate and achieve his/her goals within the team’s vision. As a mentor, I am committed to helping you to develop scientific skills and learn the nuances of microbial genomics. I strive to help you achieve success along your chosen career path through assisting with networking, identifying opportunities and tackling complex scientific question. Most often I can do this by assembling the resources and sharing the formative successes and failures I (and others) have faced along the way. I may or may not be the right mentor to you at every stage (due to my own professional and academic limitations), but I will try to be a resource for identifying others who can help guide you in that role.

  1. Lab meetings

A Greathouse lab meeting is every week (varies from semester depending on teaching schedule) for approximately 1 – 1.5 hours. This is an informal meeting in which people ‘open up their notebooks’ and talk about what they’ve worked on since the last meeting. It’s also a great time to bring analyzed data and discuss how to interpret or visualize the central findings. Admittedly, most people use powerpoint slides at this point to guide the discussion. The lab meeting schedule is posted on the OneNote along with upcoming meetings and my travel dates. At lab meeting, I will discuss hiring decisions that are in progress; e.g. potential post-docs, students, staff. I will also let you know about my upcoming deadlines – proposals, talks. This is a private meeting and everything discussed here is considered in confidence. Attendance is mandatory – if you are running over or have a conflict on a particular day, let me know.

  1. Outside meetings
  • Attendance at one outside meeting a year is typically supported and encouraged. There are myriad of larger and smaller meetings. Think about what you want to learn, whom you want to meet, etc.
  • You should receive pre-approval before registering for a meeting. I try to balance how many people from the lab attend the various meetings and who is going to submit what lab projects.
  • A student can attend more than one meeting a year if for example s/he is presenting a talk, looking for a job.
  • You can present your own unpublished work, recognizing the balance between the benefit of interacting with colleagues and possible competition to publish. However, you are not allowed to present or discuss other lab members’ unpublished data or even the experiments that are underway without specific permission from the lab member and myself. Similarly, if you give me pictures or slides of your unpublished work, I will not present it without specifically discussing this with you.
  1. Travel
  • Send me an email with the BU TAF travel form filled out and include your preferred departure time and date, hotel, and return. If there is a meeting rate for hotels, there is some flexibility about you booking your own hotel room. Remember everything needs to be booked about a month in advance for domestic, non-sponsored travel. Please ask me for details before you consider foreign or sponsored travel.
  1. Money and property.
  • Do not pay for things personally and expect to be paid back. There is no ‘petty cash’ for me to reimburse you.
  • Please let me know when reagents or equipment needs to be ordered WELL IN ADVANCE
  • You cannot take a computer or other device (projector) off campus without a property pass.
  1. My work habits
  • My core hours at work are 8:30 AM to 6 PM. My teaching schedule is usually on Tuesdays and Thursday, but varies by semester, but is posted on my door.
  • Usually e-mail is the best way to reach me. I usually read and respond to emails in the morning before 8 AM and throughout the day.
  • If I have not responded to an email in 2 days, feel free to bug me. Sometimes I don’t know the answer and need to find out.
  • If I’m travelling, I will try to tell people this in advance at lab meeting.
  • If I’m on vacation and do not plan to respond to e-mails, I will turn on my ‘out of office’ automatic response.
  • If you really need to contact me immediately, my cell phone number is 443-676-4776. I probably have the ringer turned off. Email, text, phone the number above.
  1. My expectations of your work habits
  • Maintain core hours that are allowed by your student work schedule, and for which we have agreed upon. I do understand that people value a flexible work schedule. It will not always be possible to accommodate this when you are running an experiment with other lab members or collaborators.
  • On occasion, I may need you to work over the weekend if I have a grant or manuscript deadline.
  • Respond to emails, even just to give me an estimate of when you will have an answer for me, within 2 days.
  • Turn on your out of office automatic response if you are sick/on vacation and do not plan to respond to e-mail.
  1. Notebook, record keeping
  • All molecular biology experiments should be stored in notebooks, real-time data on OneNote and data archived on a https://github.com/GreathouseLab when submitted and finally published. All primary data for a manuscript should also be stored on the lab OneNote archive for wet (bench) work or on https://github.com/GreathouseLab for data analysis.
  • Electronic notebooks should be kept on https://github.com/GreathouseLab – of course I expect that you will be keeping a hard copy of any data and analysis in a notebook as well.
  • Primary sequencing data are stored by Baylor College of Medicine and/or on the Kodiak servers under the Greathouse user group – if you need access contact Mike Hutchinson. I require documentation of all coding scripts (Stata or R code) to repeat the analysis if needed at a later date. This means that if you write any analysis code, you will need the data file and Stata .do or R Markdown file that can run this analysis to generate the results.
  • For all publications that use primary data and statistical analysis, I require for publication either a Stata .do code file or R markdown file that can generate the entire analysis with one data file (with notes so that it can be adequately reproduced).
  1. Authorship, publication
  • By no means are you allowed to submit a manuscript by yourself (this will constitute automatic dismissal) having to do with any data produced or review of literature we have conducted. This is a task I take very seriously and have to make sure all co-authors and collaborators are given ample time to approve before submission.
  • If you are submitting an abstract for a meeting, please send it to me at least 2 days in advance for approval. If it’s an abstract that you’ve submitted previously, please still let me know. Sometimes there is authorship or other considerations based on who else is attending the meeting. If collaborators are authors, please send 5 days in advance so that we can give others a reasonable amount of time to read and decide if they want to be included.
  • When you make a significant intellectual or experimental contribution to a project, then you will typically be an author on the manuscript.
  • However, there have often been considerable resources devoted to a project before you ever receive the samples/data to analyze (e.g.; development of an IRB approved protocol, recruitment of patients). Even if others do not contribute a figure to a paper, they may also deserve authorship.
  • Authorship (including order of authors) is always discussed before a manuscript is submitted from the lab.
  • Within one month of final acceptance it the responsibility of every author (and particularly the first author) to ensure that all data and scripts are archived with me on the shared drive. I may get requests for data or data used to generate a figure months and years after publication.
  1. Collaboration
  • Do not send or give reagents to someone who asks you for them. Send them on to me. We may have received the reagent from another lab and not be allowed to share it. Or we may not be able to freely distribute reagents (especially clinical samples) without paperwork and justification. Or the person requesting the reagent may be a direct competitor of an existing collaborator.
  • Please do not initiate a new collaborations, copy me on initial email interaction. I ultimately assume responsibility for all transactions (sequencing, cell lines, clinical samples).
  • If there is a misunderstanding or a conflict with a collaborator – talk to me. Hopefully this won’t happen because you will consult with me first if you feel uneasy about an email or interaction. Remember that the lab may have multiple interactions with this lab or individuals that could be impacted. We might also have a history with this individual that helps to explain what you perceive to be an odd response.
  1. Media Contacts
  • If you are contacted by an outside news or media person/entity about your work that was published, congratulations! But please let me know first BEFORE you agree to talk them. I will need to vet the source and give my approval.
  • If want to blog, vlog, or podcast your published work that’s great, I support your scientific endeavors. However, please do NOT write or speak about any unpublished data, especially critical for patents or industry partnerships
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Last updated on Apr 2, 2020