Our Values

This page serves as a landing page for new visitors who may be interested in joining our team. It's also part of the lab handbook. These points are adapted from the research groups of Dr. Jiahe Li, Dr. Connor Coley, Dr. Mariam Aly, and Dr. Danielle Benoit and inspired by the MIT Research Certificate Program.

Updated: July 2025

Our Team

Detailed Expectations

Here, we outline the expectations for Research Assistants (RAs), Undergraduate (UG) students, Accelerated Master's (AM) students, and Graduate students who wish to join our team.

General expectations

As the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Lab, I am expected to:

Actively direct research undertaken in the lab.
Obtain extramural funding to pursue research objectives.
Develop and nurture a culture of curiosity, exploration, learning, teamwork, and positive, solution-oriented attitudes throughout the lab.
Ensure a safe and supportive work environment that is free from any form of harassment and is dedicated to personal equality. I am devoted to diversity of ideas, personalities, and group membership.
Ensure the overall quality and rigor of the work.
Provide mentorship, guidance, and support to those who work in the lab, including idea generation, experimental design, project strategy and planning, manuscript preparation and submission, lab logistics, job searches, award and grant applications, poster and oral presentations, teaching, letters of recommendation, professional development, and issues relating to work-life balance.

As a mentee in the lab, you are expected to:

Cultivate your curiosity and creativity. Select a research topic that excites you and will lead you to new knowledge.
Learn knowledge, skills, and technologies needed for your research and career.
Conduct your teaching and research with openness and integrity.
Take training in EHS, lab rule, assays, etc., seriously and as soon as appropriate.
Represent the lab with pride and show respect for others.
Each PhD student is expected to produce 5-8 peer-reviewed publications during their PhD. In general, this should take 4-5 years. NOTE: Not every PhD is created equal. A PhD with high productivity (8-10 publications) will get you much further in your career than one with 1-2 publications. I want everyone to be as successful – and happy – as you can and want to be.
Actively participate in all laboratory group functions (group meetings, subgroup meetings, seminars).
Maintain and treat all lab equipment and lab space with care.
Review the literature.
Actively seek out fellowship/grant/award proposals and apply for those you are a good fit.
Present your work at conferences – contingent on the progress measured by publications. Usually, high-quality, smaller-sized conferences, like GRCs, are recommended.
Share your expertise, experience, and materials with others in the lab. There are significant rewards for being generous with your time and knowledge.
We all want to get our research published and do great things. But we do this honestly. It is never ok to plagiarize, manipulate data, or fudge results in any way. Science is about finding out the truth, and null results and unexpected results are still important. This can’t be emphasized enough: no research misconduct!

Communications

Email: I expect everyone to develop a good practice of responding to emails from supervisors, colleagues, co-workers, collaborators, etc.
Don’t ever feel that you’re wasting my time or bothering me. You can let me know if I’m too slow to respond and it’s urgent (e.g., an impending deadline); the fastest way to reach me, in that case, is by cell phone. If there is something with a specific deadline, I will let you know a few weeks ahead.
We should all try to be as responsive to each other as possible. While I will try my best not to send emails outside of normal hours, if I do, it’s probably something urgent. Please try your best to respond to such urgent emails.
We are using Google Drive for project management. You would use Excel, Word, or Powerpoint in Google Drive to share your plan, research progress, and manuscript.

Meetings

There are three types of meetings in the lab: ad hoc meetings, weekly one-on-one meetings, and biweekly or monthly group meetings. We use shared lab google calenda for managing these meetings.
Ad hoc meeting is to address your urgent matters when needed, especially if you are new to the lab. For students have stayed over one year, you should develop your own independence.
One-on-one meetings once every week for every (single-advisor) group member. These are scheduled for 30 minutes but we can always increase or decrease the duration/frequency as needed. Most of the time, we’ll talk about recent research progress (new results, planned experiments, unexpected obstacles, etc.); for these cases, it’s helpful to prepare a handful of slides to guide our conversation. The slides don’t need to be in a formal presentation format, but should include sufficient information, including experimental design, results, representative images, potential explanation, and plans (see below). Other meetings might focus on planning, drafting, or revising manuscripts or fellowship applications. Others might focus on career development opportunities and long-term planning for your future career. We can also take this time to talk about your experience in the group/department more broadly, align expectations, and provide two-way feedback to each other.
- A key component in one-on-one meetings is your weekly progress report and draft plan. Here is an article from the Science journal that discusses the benefits of doing weekly progress reports.
- It is highly recommended to send a brief memo after the meeting
- We will be able to use our time most efficiently if you have thought about what you hope to get out of each meeting in advance and come with an agenda and slides.
Group meetings (Currently on hold)
- Group presentations will take place biweekly/monthly and will be scheduled for one hour. If we don’t need the full meeting time, we won’t use it. The presenter will give a semi-formal presentation on his/her/their research progress since the last group meeting presentation, or a practice talk for an upcoming thesis proposal, conference, etc.
- These presentations should be planned for around 40 minutes to leave ample time for discussion. Everyone should strive to be an active participant in these discussions and feel comfortable asking questions during the talk.
- You should never feel like you’re spending an inordinate amount of time making slides for the sake of making slides but don’t underestimate how helpful these presentations can be to yourself and others.
- Your presentation on your own research will help you reflect on what you have been working on and how it fits into the overall narrative of your project. Remind us of the context for your work, why it is important, who has worked on it before, who your collaborator is, how they contribute, what your approach is, how it is different, how you’ve progressed, and what the next steps you have in mind are.
- Your presentation on a research topic is an excellent way to force yourself to read the literature, bring other group members up to speed, and might eventually turn into an introduction for a manuscript or serve as the seed for a review article.
- As the group grows, we may split these into two separate meetings (research updates & journal club) each week.
- At the beginning of each semester, we’ll all select an appropriate time that works for everyone’s course schedules and other commitments (some time between 9 am and 6 pm ET during weekdays).
- Slides from group meetings, as well as other external presentations you make, should always be placed in the Google Drive (private to group members only ) following the YYYY MM DD naming convention.

Wellness and Work Hours

Please read this article about how to manage your time as a researcher
- Big picture: Big-picture planning encompasses long-term goals. For graduate students, this might include your ideal time to graduation, learning specific skills, or career exploration; (for a research professor, it might be completing projects, applying for funding, or improving teaching and mentoring skills).
- Academic term: At the end of each academic term, write out a plan for the next quarter or semester that considers three elements: Reflect, Forecast, and Prioritize. We will discuss the plan together.
- Daily or weekly: For the finest-grained planning, you can use a daily planner, but I prefer you working on a weekly timescale because your research often involves experiments that run over several days. In either case, you can assign specific slots for each task, known as time blocking (calendar), or use to-do lists.
While we should strive to do impactful, ambitious research, we shouldn’t do so at the expense of our well-being and happiness.
Academia offers you a lot of flexibility. It’s important to keep a healthy work-life balance and use that flexibility to your advantage. More time spent working does not translate into increased productivity.
There is a lot of work in academia that can be done at home. Reading papers, catching up on email, preparing slides, and writing papers, proposals, or dissertations.
I hope most of you will be able to keep relatively normal working hours (e.g., 9 am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday)
Media changes over weekends. As cells need fresh media, there are situations that require media change over the weekends. Lab members should help each other in media change. Please appreciate it when others help you and you should do the same in return. If you have an complicated setup, you should do it yourself. Also, be responsible when changing media for others.
Over the course of any project, there will be slow periods and there will be fast periods. If you’re at a point in your project where things are going well and you are highly motivated to push forward and make progress–do so! If you’re in a slower period and you’re feeling idle, unmotivated, or overwhelmed, take a break, go home/outside, and try to come back refreshed. I want you to feel comfortable communicating with me and your colleagues during these times so we can figure out how best to move forward.

Publication Expectations

Undergrads
- Please refer to the Undergrad trainee expectations (to be updated)
Grad Students
- a paper = a thesis chapter – and the papers come first (A thesis typically consists of three chapters. Avoid post-graduation writing as much as possible).
- 5-8 peer-reviewed publications during their PhD, including at least 3 first author research articles.
Think about when your first author papers will be submitted with respect to the job cycle.

Defining Research Projects

For each member, at the very beginning, I would ask you to develop a paper outline with key figures to accomplish, and you then execute. After a year or two, we should work together to identify meaningful and worthwhile projects that are suited to your interests and current/desired skills. As you progress, I hope to provide you with more and more intellectual freedom to define your own research directions.
All projects should have a clear path to publication when they are started. This isn’t to say we should be chasing papers, but it’s important to know the motivation, background, and significance of our work if we are successful.
Good research projects will have a combination of long-term goals and short-term goals. Shorter-term goals should be achievable on the timescale of weeks or months, while long-term goals may take multiple semesters. It’s also good for each project to have a very long-term objective in the 5-20 year time frame. Think of high-level phrases like “if only we could do <capability>, then <societal benefit>”.
Sometimes, our choice of research topics will be constrained by the grants we have secured and/or the grant opportunities we are eligible to apply for.

Collaborations

We encourage internal collaborations and avoid internal competition. Each lab member will have their own main project(s), and involve in contributing other member’s projects. In this way, preventing overlap while maximizing the everyone’s portfolio.
There are both informal and formal collaborations.
For formal collaboration, I encourage everyone to discuss potential authorships at the beginning of the collaboration so that everyone is on board and knows the responsibility and commitment. If there are additional contributors involved at a later stage, please inform other key collaborators. Read this article about why you should do so. https://www.science.org/content/article/i-avoided-authorship-discussions-collaborators-until-i-learned-some-hard-lessons
For informal collaboration, authorship can be discussed when the manuscript is finalized.
Internal collaboration. Every group members should be highly collaborative with each other. However, it does not mean that you will count on others to do the work for you.
Be extremely respectful of your collaborators both inside and outside Michigan Technological University. We have some collaborators in other institutions, and it is critical to keep our collaborators informed of your progress via emails, regular meetings, etc.
When you reach out to collaborators, please copy me in the email.
After meeting with collaborators, you should share a brief memo with all the attendees.

Inventories

Chemical inventory. We keep a Google Excel spreadsheet that documents catalog, location, storage temperature, and vendors.
Mammalian cells: We keep a Google Excel spreadsheet that documents location, passage time, date, seeding density/flask, medium recipe, etc. We have early passage stocks serving as cell bank, which only fully trained senior members can expand. The expanded later passage of the cells are for everyone’s experiments. Please pay attention to these two different categories. New lab members are required to notify senior members for accessing our cell stocks in the liquid nitrogen tank.
Bacterial and plasmid stocks: We keep a Google Excel spreadsheet that documents location, sequencing data, antibiotics, source, and benching link. Only sequencing verified plasmids and corresponding glycerol stocks will be moved into our inventory and you should have benchling links with sequencing results attached to each plasmid and glycerol stock.
Lab members are required to update the inventory on a regular basis and restock the items when they are running low. For example, when only two vials of mammalian cells are left, you must start to expand and freeze down extra vials.

More information: Ten simple rules for managing laboratory information

Protocols

We have a library of training videos for common assays. New lab members should watch these “how to” videos several times before performing these assays.
We have a Google Drive folder that maintains common protocols. You should strictly follow the protocols to ensure reproducibility.
You are allowed for certain flexibility by editing and revising the protocols when the protocols are not working for you. But you need to track your changes and alert your supervisor when such changes are made. Please make sure to include proper controls.
Every new lab member, regardless of your prior experience, should assume that you would need to follow the protocols in our lab as opposed to your previous labs.
When developing a new protocol, you are advised to refer to at least three different sources from (1) commercial kit manuals and (2) literature. It is anticipated that new protocols require several rounds of revisions between you, other lab members, and your advisor. A finalized protocol will be uploaded to the Google Drive folder once you have successfully obtained desired results.

Data Management and Reporting

You should write down your key experiments and results everyday. It is essential that we keep careful notes of our work for the sake of publications, patent filings, and reproducibility.
You should upload raw data such as flow cytometry, gel images, fluorescence images, etc. as soon as they are acquired to prevent data loss; It is especially critical as nowadays some journals require you to submit raw data along with your manuscript.
You should name your data folder in a clear and scientific manner. For example, project short name + date of experiment + brief experimental aim. In the data folder, you should include a document that describes experiment setups, e.g. cell line, antibody, temperature, drug.
We have a Google Drive folder that stores raw data on each desktop and make sure you upload them to the correct folder each time when the experiment is over.
Never procrastinate when it comes to data analysis. You should use Google Powerpoint to manage your data with Date and detailed experimental conditions to track your progress and facilitate our weekly one-on-one meetings. Please make sure the pictures are not compressed. If you use Adobe Illustrator, please make sure it's RGB, 300 DPI.
Your total data organized in Powerpoint slides or Adobe Illustrator, will eventually become key figures in your manuscript. So, please take it seriously when updating your slides or illustrator files.