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Lab Communication

An overarching philosophy on lab communication is inclusivity and leveraging the common wisdom. Further, the intent is that prior conversations and issues (hopefully resolved) can be found by others (and future you). To that end, email is often considered a last resort. A side benefit is this should reduce email anxiety and overload.

Slack

Our means of general communication in the lab is through Slack. This is in lieu of email, providing a simple means of archiving, searching, and easy user management. IMPORTANT: This is considered to be ephemeral in nature. Anything worth coming back to needs to live somewhere else (lab notebook, GitHub issue, handbook, etc.).

GitHub Issues

A critical form of lab communication is via RobertsLab/resources GitHub Issues. This serves as a catch-all for problems, concerns, troubleshooting, purchasing, wish list, lab meeting topics, and other miscellaneous things that you might need help with (also for which the ideas/resolutions might be useful for the rest of the lab).

Lab Meetings

Lab meetings are where we share progress, learn together, and work on science as a group. You are expected to attend lab meetings within reason. Meeting links are posted in Slack and on the Roberts Lab Google Calendar. Meetings can be attended in person or remotely.

Weekly lab meeting

We generally meet weekly as a full lab. Topics focus on academic discovery and may include:

  • coding mini lectures
  • journal club (e.g. foundational paper plus a recent paper)
  • formal or practice presentations
  • round-robin code show and tell
  • handbook updates / highlights
  • peer feedback and data workshops
  • issue triage or specific Q&A

Progress updates may take the form of a short presentation or recent lab notebook posts. For meeting prep habits and goal-setting, see Project Management and Environment and Expectations.

Biweekly project progress meetings

On a biweekly cadence (~1.5 hours), all members discuss activities since the last meeting, planned work for the next two weeks, and project blockers. Goals are set each meeting and reported on at the next. Graduate students also meet one-on-one with Steven on this cadence; see Environment and Expectations.

Weekly Science Hour (optional)

Fridays — casual time to hang out and sometimes tackle science as a group (debugging scripts, interpreting analyses or figures, longer conceptual discussions). Optional, but highly encouraged.

Other meetings

  • Practice presentation meetings (as needed): Before conferences or symposia, schedule extra time for a practice talk and feedback (e.g. ~1 hour for a 15-minute talk).
  • Targeted topic meetings (as needed): When a subset of the lab agrees a focused session would help.

Schedule and topics

Current meeting themes and dates are in the sheet below. To suggest a topic, paper, demo, or lab meeting idea, open a GitHub issue with the lab meeting label.

go here to edit the sheet

For DEI support resources at UW and beyond (outside of lab meeting agendas), see DEI Resources.