Welcome to our department!
Please take note of the following for working with us:
- Everyone in our department should show respect and consideration for everyone else, including their time and working space
- I will tolerate absolutely no discrimination, bullying, ridicule or inappropriate behaviour on the basis of differences in gender, sex, ethnicity, religion, cultural identity, sexual orientation or other individual differences. This should be a safe space for everyone to do research.
- If someone else in the lab is behaving inappropriately towards you or others please report this to me immediately (also please tell me if I say or do anything inappropriate or that makes you uncomfortable). If you have any suggestions to improve our working culture or to make it more inclusive please let me know.
Collecting and recording data
- It is very important that you always accurately and honestly report all results and record all data.
- Don’t make up data, fudge results or adjust your findings to fit better with your prior expectations. This is considered academic misconduct and will also make our results useless! Negative data and failed experiments are also part of doing science.
- If you aren’t sure about the quality of the data you are collecting then write this down: in many cases we may have to make a “best guess”, but in this case please record also how confident you are in these results. Often, no data is better than poor quality data.
- Observations are also very important in the case of biological outliers and in interpreting experimental results later, so make sure to keep a good record of your work. Take photos if appropriate for later reference!
Writing (if relevant)
Never copy text from other sources, including your own previous work, for your writing. This applies also even if you reference the sentence you copied. Again, this is plagiarism and considered academic misconduct, and will also definitely get caught sooner or later due to the plentiful number of free software programs that check this now. Rewording is generally okay, but try to write in your own words from the start.
General expectations
- We have lab meeting (currently at 9:15 am Monday mornings via Zoom), everyone is expected to attend
- Check your email every day
- Always show up on time for meetings
- If you are sick or absent please inform the secretary and anyone else in the group who this will affect
- Clean up after yourself, particularly in shared spaces
Organisational stuff
- We have a group mailing list, a Slack workspace (phase-lab.slack.com), a group TimeTree calendar, and a shared server.
- Emails will be sent about important updates or information (in German and English), please also use email as a default to send me documents or requests that require more than a quick response
- Slack is for contacting other people in the lab with short questions etc. (to replace needing to use Whatsapp or texting)
- The server is for accessing and storing documents, data and information for our research projects
- TimeTree is for putting in when you have holidays, sickleave etc. to let other people in the lab know and for planning purposes
- Dominik Fischbach is in charge of IT/computer support and will give access to the server and mailing list, I will send a Slack and TimeTree invitation.
- If you have a contract with the university holiday days need to be applied for (using the correct form, ask our secretariat for the blank version) and registered with the secretariat/approved by me. Everyone with a contract gets about 30 days of holiday per year and I expect everyone to take it!
- We have journal club currently after lab meeting on Mondays via Zoom, this is compulsory for senior researchers / postdocs, PhD and MSc students and optional for everyone else. The current format is that 3 – 5 selected people each week present a paper of their choice (in about 10 minutes or so). Dr. Mariana Baez is responsible for the journal club schedule.
- We have a group seminar currently on Thursdays at 11 am via Zoom, this is compulsory for postdocs, PhD and MSc students and optional for everyone else. Dr. Fei He is responsible for the seminar schedule.
PHASE Lab 