Our lab is committed to doing great science. This doesn’t mean that everything we do will be flashy and be published in a high impact journal, but we will always strive to make it solid, reliable, in honest. And while we value our work, we strive to ensure that we don’t allow it to have a negative impact on our well-being or quality of life.

Treat your colleagues with respect. Racial or sexist comments are not tolerated under any circumstance. The lab should be a place where everybody feels welcome and appreciated.

At any given time your colleagues in the lab will be doing different activities that require different levels of concentration. Respect this. Keep the volume of your conversations at a reasonable volume. If you need to have a chat with colleague it is of course ok, but for longer meetings please book one of the meeting rooms so you don’t distract your colleagues unnecessarily.

Your health and safety are more important than your research. In the event that you will be doing lab work, please adhere to the lab safety codes established by the Department. Try to avoid working in the lab by yourself if you are doing potentially dangerous things like extractions etc. The same goes for field work, always have a companion along for any field work in the event that something would happen.

I help to foster a supportive and productive training environment by emphasizing collaborative research and close inter-connections between members of the lab. Collaborations usually emerge organically within our lab depending on the needs of a particular research project due to the multi-disciplinary nature of our team, allowing each lab member to bring their own unique set of skills and background knowledge to bear on the problem. At the same time, each lab member has a clearly defined set of scientific questions and/or technical expertise, ensuring that they can take ownership of their primary research efforts and enable a smooth transition to scientific independence.

Science is hard and our research team values work ethic, creativity, intellectual curiosity, and team spirit above the rate of progress. We aim to celebrate well-designed and executed experiments regardless of the result. I schedule weekly one-on-one meetings with all lab members to provide regular feedback on career progression, collaborations, and experimental results. In these meetings and our weekly group meeting, we focus on constructive criticism, highlighting key successes and working together to troubleshoot problems. In return, I expect lab members to be open and honest with me about my mentorship style and ways that we can continue to strive for excellence.

I want you to work hard while you are in the lab, but to most importantly I want you to work efficiently and be excited about what you do. Try to hit the goals that we establish for your career without working more than 40 hours a week (more may be necessary sometimes when a deadline is approaching, but that should be rare). Have a life outside the lab, exercise, work on your happiness, eat good food etc etc.

Postdoctoral fellows and senior graduate students should assist in identifying and writing postdoctoral fellowship applications, develop project ideas, including independent projects that can be pursued after leaving the lab, analyze data and interpret results, and write and submit manuscripts. It is also important to discuss future career goals—whether in teaching, academia, or research—and plan ways to facilitate these objectives. Weekly meetings are expected to discuss progress and challenges. Additionally, maintaining a well-organized set of lab notes, including structured directories of data, annotated code versions, and detailed methods, is essential to ensure that results can be reproduced without additional instructions. Participation in general lab responsibilities is also required, such as maintaining servers, common areas, hosting visitors, and engaging in communal sampling and fieldwork. Attending and contributing to colleagues' talk rehearsals is encouraged, and giving at least one institutional seminar per year is expected. Participation in training graduate and undergraduate students is optional but welcome for those interested.

Junior PhD and Master's Students are expected to develop project ideas for their thesis, collect and analyze data, and interpret results. Discussions about future career goals—whether in teaching, academia, or research—should be held to plan strategies for achieving these objectives. Maintaining well-organized lab notes, including structured directories of data, annotated code versions, and detailed methods, is essential to ensure that results can be reproduced without additional instructions. Writing the thesis in a timely manner, ideally before the fellowship ends, is also a key expectation. Additionally, students should participate in general lab responsibilities, such as maintaining servers and common areas, taking turns hosting visitors, and engaging in communal sampling and fieldwork. Contributing to colleagues' talk rehearsals is encouraged. Presenting research progress through a poster or talk at conferences—preferably once a year—is expected. However, I usually allow students to attend their first conference without presenting, so they can gain an understanding of what a scientific conference entails.

We are lucky enough to work in an area where flexible working hours are the norm and I would say that flexible work hours are probably the number one perk of working in academia. There will be times when your project requires to work in the weekends or late and you should make sure to take some time off to compensate for this fi you feel that it is necessary.

In order to be able to interact with the rest of the persons in the labs we expect everyone to be in the lab between 9:30 to 16:30 for most days, since this is when most of the academic activities will happen. If, for whatever reason you can´t make it on regularly basis please let me know. If you take holidays, let me know in advance.

We follow the IJME rules for authorship rules. In principle, the following things are required for inclusion as co-author on a publication from the lab:

1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND

2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND

3. Final approval of the version to be published; AND

4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Projects evolve over time and authorship, inclusion and author order will be re-evaluated accordingly. If you are in any way worried or concerned about anything related to authorship on a manuscript, please come talk to me as soon as possible. I’m sure we can solve it to everyone’s satisfaction.

All lab members must use lab notebooks; even if you are only doing computationally based analyses. These lab books belong to the lab, and must stay at the university at all times (including after you finish working in the lab).

The ideal lab notebook would be the following: a composition or graph notebook for notes, with each experiment dated.

For in silico lab books I strongly recommend storing scripts and analyses together with comments in things like R or Jupyter notebooks.

When you start your lab composition notebook, leave a few (3-4) pages blank at the beginning. You can update these over time to provide a table of contents for your lab notebook, which will make it easier for you (and everyone else!) to find info in your lab notebook later.

Write details for everything you do, and keep things organized. Write lots of details — you can never have too many details and you will remember much less 6 months from now than you think you will! It will also be immensely helpful later,  if someone need to go back and figure out a specific detail regarding what was done.

Never go back and change anything in your lab notebook at a later date

All data must be backed up daily. If you feel we need additional external hard drives for data storage, let me know and I will arrange that.

Data should always be stored in text-only files, never in Excel!!!!

Include metadata along with your datafiles. What is metadata? It is the data about the data. For example, it might be a text file explaining what data is contained in each of the txt files, and which R scripts go along with those data etc etc.

Once a data set is published, we will make the data  publicly available through sites such as Zenodo, Figshare or Dryad.

Analysis scripts and any software developed should be made available though the lab GitHub repository.