Lab Meetings...

[Ollie123]

My team is rapidly growing after a recent move and we're at a point where I think it makes sense to launch lab meetings for my team. Since becoming faculty I've always been part of centers that had larger cross-group meetings so this is my first time with the freedom to design them myself. I'm in an AMC so we are a pretty diverse group in terms of level/educational background (BS/MS level staff, post-docs, medical students, upper-level undergrads, some community college undergrads from another school joining as part of a research exposure experience).

For those of you holding your own lab meetings (or attending them for the students!):
1) What do yours involve? We'll obviously do project updates and the like, but I want to avoid this being a purely business-focused "checklist" meeting as my goodness I have too much bureaucratic nonsense in my life. Things I'm hoping they can help provide: intellectual stimulation, motivation, establishing a lab "culture", opportunities to share ideas, providing me an opportunity to observe "systems".
2) How big are they and how frequently do you meet?
3) What works and doesn't work in how your meetings are set up?
4) What else would like to see, but don't have?

I want to get creative with this and have some ideas, particularly around lab culture, but also wanted to see what ideas I can leech from you all. I'm hoping to create a culture where failures and/or struggles are openly discussed. In part because good science depends on this and in part because I think it is incredibly valuable for trainees to see that other people struggling rather than just thinking we're all brilliant and successful and all our projects work perfectly. While I don't want it to turn into a therapy group, I'm also thinking about ways to integrate publicly committing to biweekly SMART goals, etc. to help foster progress on projects, particularly for the more junior folks.

Basically, help me design a lab meeting that isn't just "Jim, how many participants do we have enrolled in the XYZ trial now? Sarah, I just got a note that your CITI training expired, please do that today. OK, let's run through the list of papers we're working on again."

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[szymk1sm]

Junior faculty here ... our group has 3 types of lab meetings - all via Zoom at this point (and b/c we have some staff who work very remotely -- like not in the same state)...

1) "general" lab meetings - brief updates on studies, important lab info, etc... everyone is present (occurs twice / week for 30 minutes)
2) "clinical" team meetings - for anyone involved in recruitment across the studies - more in depth study issues are discussed (occurs once / week for 30-60 min)
3) "imaging" lab meetings - where only those involved in processing and interpreting imaging are present - discuss progress, analyses, paper ideas, etc. (occurs once / week for 30-60 min)

The PI has tried to do additional meetings with more science-based discussion for a select subgroup, but these have fallen to the wayside for various reasons (conflicting schedules, another group already doing a journal club, other time limitations, etc.).

The PI does schedule one-off smaller group meetings to discuss a specific paper or set of analyses (these occur as needed). And then some have individual weekly meetings with the PI (think med students or residents doing a research rotation, junior faculty working towards K submission, etc.).

I actually get more out of the individual meetings I have with the PI (in terms of some of the things you mentioned above)... Covid has really put a damper on team science at my center IMO, so I would suggest being mindful of this (though I unfortunately don't have much else to offer in terms of how to improve it).

 

[iliketohelppeople]

Ollie, my comment speaks only to the aspect of failure.

One of my most memorable experiences training was my first week at my post-doc site. It was a few post degree unlicensed folks like me, an intern, and some practica students, as well as some of the other staff. One of my supervisors told us about a giant mistake that she had made on internship that caused issues, and what happened. She told us this so that we would feel comfortable coming to her if we made a mistake/had issues. As a trainee, I had not had a supervisor be that vulnerable with failure before, but I always felt safe going to her if there was something that I thought I had made a mistake about, because she was so open about it. Also, she was one of the top two supervisors that I had during my clinical training (the other was the other supervisor at that same site).

So, as I recommend being vulnerable - talking about your own mistakes/failures - that could contribute to the type of culture that you are seeking.

On the topic of culture - maybe start off each meeting with a brief personal wins/updates for folks too? Root each other on and celebrate with each other?

Other supervisor I had ends meetings with a smart goal like framework for what you will do by the next meeting, and then we check in on those at the next meeting as well.

 

[Ollie123]

Junior faculty here ... our group has 3 types of lab meetings - all via Zoom at this point (and b/c we have some staff who work very remotely -- like not in the same state)...

1) "general" lab meetings - brief updates on studies, important lab info, etc... everyone is present (occurs twice / week for 30 minutes)
2) "clinical" team meetings - for anyone involved in recruitment across the studies - more in depth study issues are discussed (occurs once / week for 30-60 min)
3) "imaging" lab meetings - where only those involved in processing and interpreting imaging are present - discuss progress, analyses, paper ideas, etc. (occurs once / week for 30-60 min)

The PI has tried to do additional meetings with more science-based discussion for a select subgroup, but these have fallen to the wayside for various reasons (conflicting schedules, another group already doing a journal club, other time limitations, etc.).

The PI does schedule one-off smaller group meetings to discuss a specific paper or set of analyses (these occur as needed). And then some have individual weekly meetings with the PI (think med students or residents doing a research rotation, junior faculty working towards K submission, etc.).

I actually get more out of the individual meetings I have with the PI (in terms of some of the things you mentioned above)... Covid has really put a damper on team science at my center IMO, so I would suggest being mindful of this (though I unfortunately don't have much else to offer in terms of how to improve it).

Thanks - very helpful. Rotating schedules may make the most sense for this and oddly enough I could probably use a near-identical setup (also do imaging work and expecting my first imaging R01 to start in April!). I'm absolutely still planning 1-on-1's with people, but just want to something that connects everyone. I run labs in two cities (technically three since I'm still finishing out a project at my prior institution) so we're also distributed. There are members of my research team who literally do not know the other exists at this point.

For clarification, this will all be over zoom for now (realize I didn't say that).

 

[Ollie123]

One of my most memorable experiences training was my first week at my post-doc site. It was a few post degree unlicensed folks like me, an intern, and some practica students, as well as some of the other staff. One of my supervisors told us about a giant mistake that she had made on internship that caused issues, and what happened. She told us this so that we would feel comfortable coming to her if we made a mistake/had issues. As a trainee, I had not had a supervisor be that vulnerable with failure before, but I always felt safe going to her if there was something that I thought I had made a mistake about, because she was so open about it. Also, she was one of the top two supervisors that I had during my clinical training (the other was the other supervisor at that same site).

So, as I recommend being vulnerable - talking about your own mistakes/failures - that could contribute to the type of culture that you are seeking.

This is pretty much exactly what I plan to do day #1 and repeatedly over the years (though focused on research versus clinical work obviously). Always a proponent of leading by example and can't expect trainees to do so if I'm not willing. Conveniently, I have a grant being reviewed in study section today. Hoping I don't have to kick off my lab meetings with reviewer summary statements about how much I suck, but perhaps this submission will provide fodder If not, we can do a post-mortem on some projects with complete nonsense results.

Glad to hear you had a positive reaction to that experience.

 

[albatross_at_crossroads]

Basically, help me design a lab meeting that isn't just "Jim, how many participants do we have enrolled in the XYZ trial now? Sarah, I just got a note that your CITI training expired, please do that today. OK, let's run through the list of papers we're working on again."

As a starting point, I am going to share how we have lab meetings. So we have several research specific meetings (for the recruitment team, technical, etc.) and only the people involved go to those, usually under 30 minutes, which works well with everyone's schedule. Especially since we moved them online, it is easy to keep everyone on track without wasting a lot of collective time.

Our general lab meeting is weekly, usually one hour - half of it devoted to updates and half of it devoted to learning something / debating an issue as a group. Sometimes we pick a recent article and discuss, sometimes people try out their conference presentations, a few times we invite specific experts to discuss their area so that we all get up to speed. We also had a couple of just general discussions regarding ethics in our studies or how we can get organized better. I do like this format a lot, since we are a bunch of folks with really diverse educational backgrounds and fields, so this brings us up to speed with many things. I don't think it's perfect, but I would hate a general meeting with just research updates, since people get bored pretty fast in those.

What also really helps is having a shared messaging medium - so much easier to communicate issues to all and then have private conversations where needed. If you can do this with your lab, it works so much better than just email, and cuts down on the "updates" thing during meetings.
I know the above setup is not perfect, so I am looking forward to learning from others here

 

[psych.meout]

For those of you holding your own lab meetings (or attending them for the students!):
1) What do yours involve? We'll obviously do project updates and the like, but I want to avoid this being a purely business-focused "checklist" meeting as my goodness I have too much bureaucratic nonsense in my life. Things I'm hoping they can help provide: intellectual stimulation, motivation, establishing a lab "culture", opportunities to share ideas, providing me an opportunity to observe "systems".

I'm a grad student and I think my lab's meetings work pretty well. We do a variety of different things.

• Standard lab project updates, but also crowdsourcing feedback and ideas on certain aspects of research. For example, we might all pilot the the website being used to gather data for an upcoming study and then come together to discuss all the feedback.
• Peer-review for journal manuscripts. My mentor gets lots of requests to be a reviewer for manuscripts at several journals within our specialty area. At least a couple of times per semester (though he does way more of these on his own) he will bring one of these to us and lab meeting will consist of discussing and critiquing it and deciding what should be done with it. The grad students take turns writing up the response to be sent to the editor and we send it back and forth with edits. It's a great way to teach students how to critique articles better and cement better writing skills.
• Feedback on our own manuscripts. Someone will send around part or all of their manuscript that will be submitted for publication and then we'll provide feedback and discussion during the meeting. This is usually pretty interesting because you want to balance giving genuine feedback that will help the person get published with maintaining camaraderie and cohesion amongst lab members.
• Grant Review. My mentor will share feedback he received on his grant proposal from study sections, which has been...interesting. Review 2 is always a jerk.
• Present on our own research work. Obviously we know each other well and work together a lot on stuff, but people get so caught up in their own stuff that we might not know the full extent of what each of us are working on for research milestones or, for new grad students, what older students previously did before they entered the program. So at some point each of us would present on one of our research milestones.
• Presenting on a topic of your choice/interest. Related to having our own individual research projects and milestones, we each have own interests within the domain of our research specialty and so one of might present on that topic to teach the others about that very niche area with which the others might be less familiar. For example, some of us are more interested in provider side research in our area, while others do more patient focused research. Within the latter, some of us are interested in more of the cognitive side of things and others are more intervention focused. Other times it's just a general topic of interest, from opioid epidemic related issues to animal model stuff (we don't do any animal research, but one grad student thought it was interesting and did some research on it and presented to the rest of us). These presentations are great for learning more and honing your skills in teaching and communicating about your area of interest.
• Similar to the last one, sometimes we'll discuss a more "classic" article that is provocative and promotes discussion, like Meehl's "Why I don't attend case conferences." These tend to be either more clinically-focused.
• Elevator pitches. We only did this one semester, but it was interesting to have to condense down your clinical and research interests and experiences to very short pitches that might be useful for things like internship interviews, talking with people at conferences, etc.
• Event-related meetings. These tend to be focused on things like new applicants for the program and our lab, feedback from students who just applied for internship, etc.
• Book club. I think we've done book club twice so far since I've been in the program and this is usually for over the summer and broken up over several weeks. It's usually a book either in our specific research area or psychology in general. Each week someone (or pairs) are assigned to lead discussion of that section of the book.
• Podcasts. We'll listen to a podcast episode that is in some way related to our research or psychology in general and discuss during lab meeting. Similar to book club, someone is leading the discussion.

2) How big are they and how frequently do you meet?

I don't think we've ever had more than ten people in lab meeting at a given time. The core of it is the grad students and our faculty mentor, but we tend to also have a couple of undergrad research assistants and a post doc or two. More recently we've had a couple of psychologists who are close collaborators with our mentor, one from another program in the psych department and the other a psychologist at a local AMC. It's nice to have people from different levels of training in the meetings.

We tend to meet weekly throughout the academic year and less frequently in the summers.