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Roles and responsibilities#

Who does what, and what to expect of them – and yourself.

PI#

You can expect me to do the following:

  • Have a vision of where the lab is going.

  • Be aware of where the field(s) are going.

  • Care about your happiness.

  • Create and submit funding applications to support the science in the lab.

  • Support you in your career development, including:

    • helping you prepare for a successful career both in and out of academia
    • writing letters of recommendation
    • introductions to other scientists
    • funding trips to relevant conferences
    • funding training at advanced schools
    • promoting your work in talks
    • inviting you to jointly peer review papers
    • make available to you example grant applications, both successful and unsuccessful. Comparing the two will show the fine margins involved.

  • Support you in your personal growth by giving you flexibility in working hours and environment, and encouraging you to do things other than science.

  • Be available to meet with you, to talk about your science, about your future plans, and any other issues you want to raise.

  • Provide feedback in a timely manner on abstracts, posters, job and fellowship applications

  • Work with you on your papers. Sometimes this will be comments on a manuscript; sometimes this will be redrafting; sometimes this will be working on code.

What does a PI do?

For better or for worse, the best way to understand how a modern biomedical lab works is to picture it as a small tech start-up. It pitches projects to raise funds from investors, hires people to work on projects, and produces outputs from those projects (scientific ones: papers, techniques, and code). And just like a start-up, it has to deal with all the admin of a business: HR, accounting, marketing etc. A PI does all the things that a start-up CEO does: pitches; fund-raises; interviews and hires people; leads projects; advertising and marketing; accounting; quality control of products. Also, as they are employed by a University, they teach and sit on administrative committees. This is why succeeding in academia is about more than just being good at science.

Postdoc#

Postdocs are research positions typically funded from research grants. As a postdoc in the lab you are expected to:

  • Develop your own independent line of research. If funded from a specific project grant, the aims and ideas of that grant are your starting point, not the end-goals.

  • Become the lab expert in your line of research, including reading the literature

  • Regularly update Mark on your progress: from short messages on what problem you’re tackling now, to in-person meetings on key results and decision points

  • Challenge me (Mark) when I’m wrong or when your opinion is different

  • Help train and mentor students in the lab (whether undergraduate, MSc, or PhD) when they need it – either because they ask, or because I ask you to

  • Present your work: at local events; at other labs; and at conferences

  • Plan your future, as appropriate:

    • Apply for jobs (academic, industry or third sector) when you’re ready, but no later than 6 months before the end of your current postdoc contract. There are more, and in many ways better, jobs outside academia, for which you are well-qualified.

    • Apply for fellowships, well in advance of the end of your postdoc. For external funders (UKRI etc), the typical lag between submission deadlines and being able to start a Fellowship is a minimum of 10 months. Submission deadlines are at most three times a year; many schemes are once a year. Plan well in advance.

  • Take responsibility for your career development: produce work in a timely fashion necessary to support your own career; where practicable, take advantage of the opportunities that arise from working in the lab

PhD student#

  • Develop a line of research for your thesis. Developed with Mark’s help.

  • Read the literature in your research area

  • Regularly update Mark on your progress: from short messages on what problem you’re tackling now, to in-person meetings on key results and decision points

  • Present your work at local events and conferences

  • Do some soul‑searching as to what type of career you want to pursue, e.g., academic jobs that are research-focused or teaching-focused, non‑academic jobs like data science or science writing.

  • Assist in training and supervising undergraduate students

  • Stay up-to-date, and keep Mark up-to-date, on any deadlines that you need to meet to fulfil the training programme, School or Faculty requirements for your PhD.

MSc/undergraduate project student#

The primary goal of a project student is to produce a quality piece of written work, that reflects a solid piece of research work.

  • Work on your assigned research project

  • Plan your research time according to the course’s project deadlines

  • Plan your writing time too.

  • Stay up-to-date on your project deadlines, and inform Mark of them.

  • Attend lab meetings if they fit into your course schedules.

Intern#

The purpose of an internship is to find out how a lab works, and if their line of research is something you’d be interested in pursuing in future. Thus the expectations for an internship are:

  • Find out what the other lab members are working on

  • Work on your assigned research project

  • Attend lab meetings