Lab Expectations

You are important, and I want you to succeed in your research, in your other academic experiences, and in life. Your wellbeing and happiness, your training and growth, and our work together are all important goals for me. However, as with almost any constrained multi-objective optimization problem, these goals are not always perfectly aligned and effortlessly achieved. This page, which is inspired by many other lab manuals, lab agreements, and similar resources, helps to support these goals.

If you are a current trainee in my lab, then please review my expectations on this page. If you are a prospective student, postdoc, or otherwise and interested in my lab, then please review the expectations and my advice for prospective trainees on this page. I am more than happy to discuss and revisit these expectations with you to help us achieve our goals.

Work-Life Balance

Our work together is important, and I expect you to make the most of our time together, but there also is much more to life than the lab. A healthy work-life balance is important both for good work and for a good life. It can be difficult to find and maintain a healthy work-life balance in academia, which affords considerable flexibility and fulfillment but also demands substantial time, effort, and energy. I do not pretend to have found a perfect balance for myself, but I am happy to discuss work-life balance with you, and I have included several resources at the bottom of this page that may help.

Communication

• You can expect me to communicate with you respectfully, empathetically, and constructively, and I expect the same of you. You can expect me to try to communicate better with you over time, and I expect the same of you as well.
• You can expect me to communicate your progress and performance regularly. Students should enroll in research credits, and they will receive research grades, but they should not be surprised by the grades that they receive. If you are ever unsure about your performance, then please ask.
• I expect you to actively participate in your professional development, and you can expect me to support your professional development, including collaborations, the completion of an Individualized Development Plan (IDP), and fellowships. I expect every trainee in my lab to write and submit at least one fellowship.
• You can expect me to discuss authorship at the inception and throughout a project. Authorship may change as the project evolves, but you can expect me to advocate for you and your contributions to the project.
• You can expect me to provide timely and constructive feedback for manuscripts, reviewer responses, presentations, fellowships and other activities. I expect you to share them as soon as possible, and I may not be able to provide less or less timely feedback without enough time.
• You can expect me to write letters of recommendation for you, as appropriate, while you are in my lab and after you leave my lab. I expect you to share requests for letters of recommendation at least three weeks in advance of the due date, and earlier near breaks and vacations or if I have not written a letter of recommendation for you in the past.
• I expect you to be aware of the requirements for your program and degree, including the program and graduate school handbooks, as appropriate.
• You can expect to meet with me for weekly one-on-one meetings and additionally for larger project meetings. We can meet more often as needed, and we can skip meetings during breaks and vacations. It is better to meet regularly and become more flexible with meetings over time than to meet less regularly and become less flexible over time.
• I expect you to attend meetings. I expect you to arrive on time, pay attention, participate, and take notes.
• I expect you to check your email at least a few times during the workday, and I expect you to respond within a few hours during the workday, as classes and other activities permit. I understand that some responses take time, and I encourage you to send a short response to manage expectations if you anticipate needing more time for a longer response. I do not expect you to respond on nights or weekends, on holidays, while on vacation, or when ill. Likewise, I will check and respond to email frequently during the workday with higher latency and lower bandwidth at other times. I may sometimes send you emails outside of the workday, but I do not expect you to read and respond to them then.
• I expect you to respond to calendar invites for meetings; you will receive the invitations through email, and should treat them like other email.
• I encourage you to take advantage of the flexibility of academia, but I expect you to notify me in advance of planned delays and absences, notify me as soon as you can about unplanned delays and absences, and ask for approval of extended or regular delays or absences. Likewise, I will notify you of schedule changes as soon as I can.
• If you have questions, concerns, problems, or otherwise, then please share them with you. If you do not feel comfortable sharing them with me, or if you have a conflict with me, then please contact a trusted faculty or staff member for support. Our Department Chair, Director of Graduate Studies, and Dean of Student Affairs are all good options. I have included several resources at the bottom of this page.
• Similarly, I will not ask you to do anything inappropriate, and if I say or do something that makes you uncomfortable, then please tell me or a trusted faculty or staff member for support. For one-on-one meetings, you can decide whether to meet with an open or closed door.

Project Management

• I expect you to keep notes of your work, including estimates of the time that you spent on different projects and different parts of a project. It is difficult to remember what you did or when you did it after the fact.
• I expect you to use Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Sheets, Google Drive, and Overleaf to share most materials. I expect you to use Emory’s OneDrive and Sharepoint as needed to share sensitive materials that are not appropriate for Google Drive. You can create a Google account for your Emory email address.
• I expect you to use GitHub for code. We will use private repositories for projects that are under development and public repositories for projects that are public. For reporting reasons, I will host public repositories for projects in my lab. No repository should have sensitive data or any data beyond what is necessary for minimal working examples or the like.
• I expect you to use my lab space on the department file system for sensitive and non-public data. Your personal machine should not contain Protected Health Information (PHI).
• I expect you to follow the requirements imposed by the department, the graduate program, and the graduate school, as appropriate.

Prospective Students, Postdocs, and Others

Like most faculty, I receive frequent emails from prospective students, postdocs, engineers, data scientists, and others. It is easier for me to respond, and to respond favorably, to emails that are well written and tailored to me and my work. Conversely, it is difficult to respond to emails that are generic and seem like they may have been sent with few or no changes to many other faculty.

Relatedly, I expect all members of my lab to have previous mathematical or statistical and programming experiences. I do not expect prospective trainees to understand everything already, but my papers, especially first- and last-authored papers, are reasonable reflections of my current research interests and approaches, so please skim them to help to assess fit. I am open to different programming languages, but I expect my lab members to use a programming language and conventions with which I am comfortable.

If you are interested in applying to our graduate program, then you are welcome and encouraged to reach out to potential supervisors to gauge potential research fits and to describe those interests and interactions in your statement of purpose. I recommend that you review their websites and publications, especially publications for which they are a first author or a last author, to see if their research is interesting to you. If you do contact faculty, then I recommend that you write a thoughtful message that demonstrates an informed interest in their research, including specific publications, to provide the best chances of receiving a positive response from them. If you do apply to our graduate program or to any graduate program, then I recommend that you tailor your statement of purpose to particular faculty and research activities in the program. You can and should share why you are excited about science, but you can and should also share what you want to do for your PhD in concrete terms that align well with the program and its faculty, who will supervise your PhD.

Health

If you have or believe that you may have a respiratory or other contagious infection, then please follow Emory’s policies to protect your and others’ health. Like many other faculty, I am happy to meet remotely or reschedule meetings for your and others’ health. Emory provides many health-related resources to students, so please contact Student Health for support.

Accessibility and Accommodations

I aim to provide an inclusive environment that allows every student to succeed. The Department of Accessibility Services (DAS) works with students who have disabilities to provide reasonable accommodations. It is your responsibility to request accommodations. In order to receive consideration for reasonable accommodations, you must register with the DAS. Accommodations cannot be applied retroactively, so you must contact DAS as early as possible to request accommodations and contact me as early as possible to discuss the plan for implementing your accommodations. For additional information about accessibility and accommodations, please contact the DAS at (404) 727-9877 or accessibility@emory.edu.

Support Services

If you are struggling with emotional, psychological, or other issues that threaten your success, then please contact Emory’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) or, more broadly, one of the support services and organizations through Campus Life. CAPS services are free to Emory students. Emory provides a variety of support services, including free, 24/7 support resources for emotional health, mental health, and medical support via TimelyCare. We understand that life happens outside of the classroom and the lab. If you suffer a tragedy, then please know that you can reach out to us, CAPS, and Student Health Services for help.

Inclusion and Safety

The members of our academic community represent a rich variety of backgrounds and perspectives. We are committed to providing an atmosphere for learning that leverages this diversity. We encourage members to:

• share their unique experiences and ideas;
• be open to the views of others;
• honor the uniqueness of their colleagues; and
• appreciate the opportunity that we have to learn from each other in this community.

Your safety is important. Emory faculty are required to report information about alleged sexual harassment to the Title IX Coordinator.

Academic and Research Misconduct

Misconduct impedes our work and can seriously affect lab members and collaborators. I expect you to notify me if you are aware of misconduct, and I expect you to ask me if you are concerned that you may be committing or may commit misconduct.

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