Welcome to the research culture Uncovered podcast, where in
every episode we explore what is research culture
and what should it be? You'll hear thoughts and opinions from
a range of contributors to help you change research culture
into what you want it to be.
Hi, it's Nick Open research advisor, based in the
library here at the University of Leeds. For this episode of the research
Culture Uncovered podcast, I'm very pleased to be joined by not one,
not two, but three colleagues, Benjamin Tendler, Maddy Welland
and Karla Miller from the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging at the
University of Oxford. We're talking about their Lab Handbook
initiative, which, as we'll hear, is a flexible document that outlines the ethos
of a research lab or group. I've linked their article for
elife in the show notes below, but before you download
that over to Ben, Maddy and
Karla.So I'll ask them to introduce
themselves first. I'll start with you, Benjamin, if that's okay, and
perhaps give me a quick introduction of who you are and what you do
at WIN, and perhaps also exactly what is integrative
neuroimaging. Bearing in mind I'm a layperson and don't really know what that involves.
Yeah, sure, I'd be delighted to do that. So, my official
role at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging is as
a research fellow. So more officially, my current title is a Sir
Henry Wellcome postdoctoral fellow, which effectively means that I've been
provided with some funding and resources in order to establish my
own independent research program. So, with respect to my
research, my background is in physics and I currently use my
background and experience in physics within the field of neuroscience.
So currently my research focuses on developing methods to
image the brain using magnetic resonance imaging or MRI. These
are scanners, which you'll find dotted in hospitals and research settings across
the UK and globally as well. From
the perspective of things outside of my research,
something which I'm really interested in is trying to improve the environment in which research
is performed, and that's what has led me to get involved
with the lab handbook initiative itself. So,
with respect to interpretive neuroimaging,
the way which I think about this is typically about how we
can perform investigations of the brain across multiple different domains and
scales. So from my perspective, if we think about
how a typical or canonical
neuroscience or brain investigation is done, you might have a
research question of interest about the brain, and you might go about this
investigation by performing a study involving, say,
one modality. And if you're doing imaging, say, one imaging modality or
performing an investigation in one domain, be that, say, in a human
study or perhaps in a species. Now, one of the
really powerful things at the Wellcome center for Interactive
Neuroimaging is that we have access to a wide variety of different
methods to image the brain. So this includes things such as magnetic resonance
imaging, in addition to other methods to image the brain, such as
magnetic encephalography, and also many different
domains in which we can perform these types of investigations. So we can, for example,
for investigations living people, we also have access to
methods to perform investigations in species and also in things such as post mortem
tissue using microscopy techniques as well.
So when I think of integrative neuroimaging, what I really think is the idea that
rather than just using a single modality or investigative domain, we can actually
leverage information across multiple different domains. So we can combine information,
say, different species, across different scales, across perhaps different populations,
in order to address the questions which
you want to answer with respect to neuroscience, with
really a more comprehensive approach to being able to answer them.
Wow. So that sounds fascinating, and I'd love to talk to you in more detail
about all that stuff, but of course, we're not here to talk about that today.
That is correct. More about the handbook, which we'll come on to in a
moment, but if I can ask you, Maddie, to introduce yourself. So
this is Maddy Welland. Hello. So
I am the Wellcome EDI officer. I've been at the WIN
for three years, but I technically work across all of Oxford's
three Wellcome centres. So I'm connected
to this lab handbook initiative through
our inclusive leadership program, which we've been piloting for a couple
of years, and we'll be working on within the medical
sciences division for the next two. Yeah,
I'll keep it short and sweet. Okay, thanks, Maddie. Thanks. And welcome to the podcast.
And last but not least, Karla Miller. If you could introduce
yourself, please. Yeah. Hi, my name is Karla Miller.
I'm a professor of biomedical engineering. So I run a research
group, relatively large research group of about
30 people. And so maybe later we might talk a bit about
why having such a large research group led me to want to
take on this lab handbook initiative. But that's not my only
role in Oxford. I am associate director
of the WIN, as we call it, the Wellcome center
for Integrative Neuroimaging. And I also have a role
within Oxford more broadly. So in the medical sciences
division, I am the academic lead for
equality, diversity and inclusion, or EDI. And so this is
something that, again, it's a longstanding interest of
mine that intersects strongly with initiatives like the lab handbook that
might initially not seem to have so much to do with equality, diversity and
inclusion. But as we'll talk about later, actually, I think it's one of the more
impactful kinds of projects that we can do to promote positive research
culture, which enables people, regardless of their background or
whether they might initially feel comfortable in a place like Oxford.
It enables them to really flourish and do their best work
because they actually feel included and understood and seen.
Right. No, thank you. And we'll certainly get onto that. And I'm glad you call
it the win, because that means I can as well. I hope you practice
saying integrative neuroimaging because it took all of us a long time for that to
roll off the top. Well, no, as I was saying, I was just. I think
it came out okay. So. No, that's great. You did great. So, no, that's
great. Thanks to you all for those introductions.
And so, Ben, perhaps start with you, really, in terms of
perhaps a quick overview of the Hamburg. You've already given us a crash course
on integrative neuroimaging. I won't say it again, that's
the last time I'll try and say it, but yeah, so perhaps just give us
a quick overview of the handbook, a little bit about its history and
development. Sure, sounds great. So, to us, the lab
handbook is effectively a document which is written at
the research group level by a research group which is
aiming to outline the culture and ethos that the group is
aiming to create. So different groups might approach
the lab handbook initiative in different ways, and they might have things which are
valuable for them, for what they think should be included in a
handbook. But broadly, what I'd say is that a typical lab handbook
would provide information about the roles and expectations of different researchers
within the group at different career stages, the culture that the
research group is able to create, and how the research group supports the
development of individual members from a career's
perspective. So broadly, what I can say is that by doing this,
what we're really aiming to do is to address the many challenges that can often
arise in a research group settings that are due to poor communication
between individual group members and a lab handbook aims to do this by
explicitly defining expectations. So giving everybody an insight
into what you can expect from me and what I can expect from you in
return, providing a consistent and explicit message on
exactly how the lab operates, and by virtue of doing
this, provide accountability for everybody. Within a group, including
people within senior management positions. Okay, great. Thank
you. And just to come to you, Karla, and
ask you, you've already just alluded to this, I think, in your previous
answer, but why did you feel that handbook
was needed? And I suppose interested in your role as in leadership,
as the PI, and you've already sort of said a little bit about that. We
can go say a bit more about why you thought it was needed?
Yeah, so I think. I think...so I've always felt
very strongly that one of the most important things, as a
principal investigator or a lab group leader,
that you have a very important duty to the people in
your group. I do kind of believe that I work for the people in my
group as much as they work for me. Right. We work together, but that there
are different roles that people have. And one of the things that I
realized, although I take my role, I have always
taken my role very seriously. But as I became
a bit, as I took on more responsibility, one of the things that
I realized is that I was not,
I wasn't living up to my own standards in the way that I wanted to.
And that came in a few ways. The most important to me
was I didn't feel like I was achieving consistency of communication
with people when they would join the group. I would start to realize that although
I wanted to have certain conversations with people when they joined, to
be clear with people about my expectations, what I
think they needed to feed back to me, all of that kind of stuff, that
creates a good culture, I was not doing that
consistently. And a lot of that was about the fact that I was just
becoming more and more busy. I just had many, many, many things on my plate
every day. So a big motivation was achieving
consistency of communication. But then along
with that came a lot of other things that the handbook enabled.
So it encouraged people that I wanted
to receive feedback. And we can talk a bit about some of the feedback that
came out of it that I found incredibly helpful, realizing that sometimes
I was communicating a different message than I intended to,
it was really helpful for empowering accountability.
So one of the challenges with running a large group, and in
particular, as you start to get more senior, is people don't...you actually
stop receiving feedback. Or maybe sometimes in a given role, you never receive
feedback, and yet feedback is incredibly helpful,
provided you really are open to it. And so
it would kind of empower people to hold me
accountable to the standards that I hold
myself to. And then I guess the final thing that it
enabled me to do is it enabled me to, in a setting where
it was outside of the context of a problem or
frustration from someone, it enabled me to explain my
working reality, what it's like to actually be a
principal investigator in modern science, which is not something that
people who are earlier in their career within my group will have
experience. And so it's kind of difficult for them to understand certain
aspects of my own behavior, which stems from
what it is like to actually be a modern principle
investigator. That's really interesting. Just sort of that
sense of transparency, I suppose, in terms of
your own expectations and expectations of the
colleagues in the lab. Yeah. And I think oftentimes with
transparency, I think there's sometimes
a bit of a fear from people who are leading groups
that transparency is somehow going to undermine them.
If there are aspects of what it's like to be a PI
that you think people won't necessarily like to
hear. So, for example, the fact that sometimes I am going to take long to
answer an email or I am going to take
longer to return a paper to people than I would like
to do. But I think because it's the reality, just being
open and transparent about why those things happen and how it is that people
can help me to do my job better, I think I found that to be
a really powerful thing. For example, not sending really long emails, I
struggle to get through them, read them, and respond to them. Even just
explaining some of that has helped people to get more out of
me and when they need it, because they understand how we
can communicate and work effectively together. No, that's really great. I'm going to come
to you in a moment, Maddie... I was going to hop on that point.
So Karla is my line manager and has been for the past three
years. And this is a really valuable aspect
of the lab handbook, I think, because what happened when I joined
is that I didn't know that. I didn't know that actually
emailing, you know, because that's, that's how you expect
to converse with people if you're not seeing them in
person. And I would send lots of emails. I would send
lots of long emails. And it got to a point where Karla had
to be like, right, listen,
let's have a conversation. You may not like it. And, you know, I'm, I'm
robust. And I was like, oh, right, okay, cool. You're not criticizing me. You're just
clarifying, um, your expectations. But that's probably
a conversation she's had to have 30 times, you know, and
now it's written down now she doesn't have to
wait until a crisis point until someone new joins and
annoys her so much that she has to take them aside and
say, please stop. But, yeah, yeah, no, that's
great. And just to follow on with you, Maddie. So
perhaps tell us a little bit about how the handbook relates to
your role. Not, you know, in that particular context of personal experience,
but, you know, in terms of your role now as EDI officer, I think, is
your role? Yes. It's sort of transitioning
to something slightly different, but I don't know what my new title will be.
So part of my role has been to take some of the
initiatives that the WIN has created, and the lab handbook is one of
them, to basically disseminate it
across the division, across the university.
There's definitely more
of a fit towards the medical sciences and the physical
sciences, and maybe it would need further adaptation to be a great fit
for, you know, the social sciences or humanities. But currently I'm
working on disseminating it across the division, and
there's lots of interest. You know, it's so
amazing to work in a place where you can create something amazing and then just
sort of share it, and people are, there's such an appetite for it. So
that's part of my role, but it also fits
really neatly within the inclusive leadership program that we've been
piloting. So in the first year, we were
able to help participants pursue a
project, and basically that was, you know, a project
related to any diversity and inclusion goal
that they had locally. But the lab handbook was something we offered
alongside that, which was a sort of IKEA flat pack,
ready to go project. And actually, I would say at least
half of the people on the, on the program took it up because they could
see the value in it, and they were all senior
PIs. And again, this year, when we've been piloting it,
yeah, people, people have had things come up, and
every time people go, oh, well, you know, I've got this problem in this
area, or I don't know how to talk about this. It just seems like
such a useful vehicle for handling or
bringing up an issue in a, in a sensitive way that isn't,
you know, overpowering, really. And what's the history of the initiative? How
long has it been sort of active? And it's a living
document, I think, perhaps come on to what that exactly means. But when was, was
it actually written and sort of rolled out? I'm trying to
remember what year we actually began. It was
2021, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, was it? I thought it was
pre pandemic. I think it started, perhaps it
was late 2020, but then I think we returned to it in the beginning of
2021, after we had the pause for a bit due to
the start of the pandemic. Yeah, so it began.
And if you go to the resources that we have, which hopefully we can include
a link to. Yeah, I'll put any links I can put in the show notes.
Yeah. So there was a Twitter thread that
where. And I can't remember who it was, but they did a brilliant
job of going through similar documents, sort of these ethos or
culture documents for research groups in STEM,
and they read a number of these and they distilled
it down to a series of topics that one might want to cover.
And I read that thread and I thought, this is brilliant. This is what I
need. Because it came at a point where I could tell that
my responsibilities were increasing, my group was growing,
and I was really starting to realize that I
was dropping balls with respect to people in my group in terms of communication
and expectations and all of that. And so at that point,
I just said to this broader research group, which is, it's not
just all under me, it's an amalgamation of. I think there's now about seven of
us PIs in one large group. And I just, at a group meeting, I just
said, why don't we try to do this? And anybody who's interested, let's
just have a series of sessions where we sit down and we try to write
this thing, and we use this Twitter thread as a guide to what we might
put in it. And then we just, as a group, we wrote it. So I
think a really important point is, with lab handbooks, all of us,
our overwhelming experience is, this is not something that a PI writes on behalf of
their group. It's something that you co create together. And there's a number of
reasons why that's important. It achieves buy in.
It ensures that when you write
it, you create something that everyone agrees that they're happy to
sign up to. And also, critically, really, really importantly,
as a PI, one of the things that comes out of
it is, I learned a very valuable lesson. You
find out about things that you have been trying to communicate, but which you have
been miscommunicating. So I'll give you the example that came up for me.
I've always been very keen that people have good work life balance. I don't think
it's healthy for people to work excessive hours and so what I
would tell people is, I don't care how many hours
you work, I just want you to be productive. Now, about half of my
group, it turns out when I said that was hearing, I want you to
have work life balance, and I want you to find the flexibility of working in
a way that works for you. But maybe as much as
half of them heard, I don't care how many hours you have to work,
you work until you produce, which is exactly the opposite message from what I was
trying to communicate. And if I had sat down and written this handbook
myself, I would have written what I've been saying for years. But
what came out was, I can tell from Karla that you're trying
to encourage work life balance, but that is not how I interpret this thing
that you wrote. So even the process, and this is something that Maddie often
talks about, she sometimes says, and I encourage her not to say this, but she
sometimes says, write the thing and then throw it away and write it again. Because
the process, and I do believe this, the process is by far the most
important part of it. It's useful to have the thing written down, but
creating it together, you learn an awful lot about each other, what
people want, what they need in a way that you don't. If it's a one
way communication stream. Well, and there's that issue of
collaboration again, which gives me an opportunity perhaps just to try and crowbar
in some open research, because I was just looking through before we came on
the headings, etcetera. And obviously you've got the roles and
expectations, and then you've got developing researchers
and career development. And that includes explicitly open and responsible
science. Collaborating is actually in there as well, as well as public
engagement. So I was just really interested. I mean, first
of all, I'm not that sure of the structure of the
Wellcome. I mean, do you have a library there? Do you have other
departments within that that support research, dissemination or open access
and all that kind of thing? So we, we don't have a, we
don't have a library within our department per se, but we do have something which
we refer to as the open WIN community. And the open WIN community
are actively involved in our department in making
our studies and the data which we produce from our studies as open as
possible. So the way which they're going about this
is a variety of different means. So they're thinking about, for example, you know, building
what kind of infrastructure do we need to be able to, to share the data
which we produce? This perhaps might involve producing things in house in
addition to resources which are available elsewhere,
there's also ethical considerations with respect to how
we can go about sharing data, in particular, sensitive data, which is
involved often with newer imaging studies. But
also the community is quite involved in a cultural
shift as well, trying to promote the values and importance
of open science to the researchers
within our center, which is a really imperative thing to get us to
what I would say as maximizing the most that we can get out of the
data which we produce. You know, that's good. And I'm really interested in this sort
of what we're trying to do at Leeds as well. I think this holistic approach
to research culture, of which, you know, my role in the library,
is an aspect of that, but obviously, it intersects with so many other aspects of
that. I don't know if Maddie or Karla have any other thoughts on
how it relates to other parts of the organization
or. When you're talking about collaboration,
do you mean collaboration scientifically? Do you mean just how
we work with each other? Well, I think. I suppose I mean everything around
that. I'm just really interested. I mean, I was just talking to colleagues
on campus recently, so at Leeds this week we've been having Africa
week. So that's a. It's been a big initiative with colleagues
from Africa and different organizations, etcetera. And I was just having
lunch with colleagues there and talking to a
colleague I haven't met before. We were talking about the power of collaboration and the
value of that in all sorts of ways. You know, whether it's research, culture, or
science itself, or writing a handbook. You know,
that, to me, is such an underpinning principle that
perhaps we can all be better at, and culturally, we need to
develop. Yeah. Okay, well, so I think one of the
defining features of WIN
is exactly collaboration. So I think one of the
most....WIN is one of
the....It's one of the world leading centers in this field
of neuroimaging, where we're specifically talking
about, in particular, the kinds of imaging that you would be able to perform in
humans. So, MRI and MEG, as Ben mentioned, um,
one of the things that has really set this center apart from other
similar places, um, uh, is
the, not just that collaboration is valued, but the
interdisciplinarity of the center is valued. So oftentimes
in, um, in imaging centers, what ends up emerging is a kind
of hierarchy, scientifically. So oftentimes what ends up
happening is, is that you have, um, a higher value
placed, for example, oftentimes in clinical departments, there's a
perception that the clinical end, as opposed to the methodological
end, is sort of the real science. And
where people are working on methodology, that's sort of a second
class citizen. And this sort of thing plays itself out
in many aspects of interdisciplinary research
across many, many, many disciplines. But one of the things that's most remarkable, I
think, about, WIN, is that from the outset, there was this ethos
that all of this science is really valuable, and that actually, we do the best
science when we genuinely approach it collaboratively.
And so, as an engineer in a clinical neurosciences
department, I'm not. We
do have a lot of engineers and physicists, and that makes a huge difference
to creating critical mass
so that we can do really cutting edge methodological work. But we're
also rubbing elbows every day with the people who have the
problems. And so we actually understand the problems, and we get to
see our methods being used in real
world, what we would refer to as applications of the
methodological research in real world
neuroscience problems. And that is hugely valuable. And I think
the fact that neither of these things is seen as being of higher
importance. It's the synergy between the two that
is what makes us such
able to achieve really impactful work in that
space. So, really, it's all about collaboration. But collaboration only
works when everybody really, truly values
the breadth of expertise and
backgrounds that we have in the
center. And a different version of that that isn't
interdisciplinary is the breadth of backgrounds that people bring
personally... ...they may have been trained in different countries, they have different life experiences,
and all of that, if you have a supportive atmosphere, if people
feel like they can really bring that into the science that they're doing, all
of that makes our science better, but only, only if you're able
to create an environment where everyone, if they
may be coming at it from a slightly different perspective,
if everyone feels like they have something to contribute.
Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Thank you. I suppose. I was thinking about
that...I read your paper, obviously, why every lab leads a handbook. That, again,
I'll link in the show notes, and there's an example you
mentioned in there where I'll just quote, actually, "an experienced technician
is frustrated because they were not included as an author on a paper to
which they feel they made a substantial contribution". So I'm guessing you're familiar
with the CRediT taxonomy, which is
a bit of a library thing. So that's exactly one of the things that we're
trying to promote here, at least for example, to ensure that, well,
people like myself, for example, in terms of the data management work that I do
are credited on a paper or a technician or whatever. So that's,
again, an area where it sort of intersects with the
open agenda more generally. Absolutely. And I think
there's so many different people who bring expertise into the studies that we
do, and yet we still have this kind of
archaic way of, of indicating who
has done what, which is in this massively
constraining thing of what order are you listed on a
piece of paper? And, I mean, it's obviously not even a piece of paper anymore.
Right. So, yeah, so we're very keen on that. In our space, for
example, there are people called radiographers. So they are the
people who actually run the scanners. So they would be the equivalent of
a wet lab technician. And often they might have a
huge influence on how good the data quality is setting up the study,
etcetera. And yet very rarely are they actually included.
And so having a way of indicating their
contribution, we feel is enormously helpful and it clearly makes a massive
difference to them. Yeah, yeah, no, that's great. Thank you.
Just a little conscious of time. But I just want to raise,
just ask you, Ben, really, if you have any insight on this, because this, I
suppose just from a personal perspective as well. I'm just interested in how
a handbook such as this can help with personal challenges. I
mean, for example, I'm quite open now, again, being a little bit older and
longer than the tooth and comfortable in my own skin of mental health problems
I've had in the past and anxiety or whatever. And that's something,
again, that's explicitly mentioned. So I think that's an important area of transparency,
again, that perhaps enables people to engage with these issues on their
own terms? Perhaps, yeah, I mean, I think a lab handbook
is a really fantastic document to help support people with respect to
their mental health and wellbeing. There's probably a
few...there's a few kind of different ways that it can achieve that.
So one of the things which I think is that by having a document where
you explicitly describe your commitment to the wellbeing of
individuals within a group and describing how you're going about doing that,
you're going to encourage people within the group to feel
empowered to have conversations with their principal investigator
or their group, lead on how things within their personal lives, such as,
say, child care responsibilities, care responsibilities, or perhaps personal
disability, interact with their work
responsibilities. Now, by having these kind of things written out explicitly
in a lab handbook document, you can begin to open up those conversations
between different members of the group to try to identify
places where perhaps adjustments can be made in terms of how they work to
promote healthy work life balance, and by virtue of that,
promote their wellbeing. Another thought, and this kind of links back to
what Karla was saying a bit earlier with respect to working
hours. So one of the things which is often quite challenging in terms
of defining how people work within research settings is
working hours. And by being really explicit about
working hours within a document such as the lab handbook, and really communicating in a
clear way what your expectations are, you can prevent people
arriving to the group with their own interpretation of how they believe
that they're supposed to work. ...and that can often arise from...that could arise from,
for example, stereotyped expectations of what it means to perhaps be a
researcher within a research setting. Or alternatively, it could be that they've
perhaps worked in a previous lab environment where it's been, where the culture has
been perhaps a bit more negative, and there's been an expectation of working long hours
and presenteeism. So by writing those things down, I think you can prevent
challenges such as burnout from arising. People know from day one how
they can be expected to work with respect to hours, and preventing things such
as burnout will be enormously helpful with respect
to mental health and personal wellbeing. If you
talk in your lab handbook about inclusivity, and you talk about how you
promote yourself as an inclusive lab and give examples of that,
you'll make people feel empowered to bring their whole
selves to work. If that's something which they want to do, which I think can
also be really important for people in their individual
personal lives. You can also just provide general
information to just signpost people through resources that perhaps
might not be available within the actual... ...within the
actual group itself. So I, for example, I am not an expert on mental
health and wellbeing, but I certainly know that there are resources, perhaps at a departmental,
university level, or perhaps even externally, which can
be...which people in our center, in
our group, can have access to, which perhaps can help them navigate their personal lives
if perhaps they don't necessarily want to have these conversations with their colleagues
surrounding them, and want to speak to people who have more professional insights.
The other thing, though, which I say is probably even more
critical with all of this, is that everything which I've said so far more relates
to people who perhaps want to have support with respect to their own mental
health and well being. But something else is also actually speaking to people
who don't necessarily consider these things a challenge for themselves. And
I think what you're really doing with the lab handbook is by talking about topics
such as well being, mental health and inclusivity,
you're communicating with people that may not necessarily be directly
impacted by these challenges and giving them information and insights in terms
of how they can support their colleagues who may be having challenges within
this space. And there are really simple ways that you can do this. You know,
you can think about just respecting the preferences or the needs of others within
the group, and doing that in a natural way,
which doesn't necessarily require people to have to have conversations to
justify why they want things to be done in a certain way, which can be
often quite difficult to do. And I think just by making these things really transparent
and clear, it will benefit. It really benefits
people. Everybody within the group. Yeah, we'll come back to that transparency
issue. So Ben mentioned the value
in signposting to resources. One of the things that I would encourage people to do
is to take advantage of your
institution's administrative teams that can help you with it.
You can't suddenly become an expert on mental health or
necessarily understand how best to
help people when things become really challenging. But we
engaged our HR team and some of the people who had expertise in mental
health in order to make sure that we got those sections right, and we found
them to be incredibly willing to help us on those sections.
So it may sound a bit daunting to people, the idea that you have to
write about some of these issues, but there are people, there will be people at
your institution who would be delighted to help you do it, I'm sure.
Yeah. And when we've been trying to introduce these
initially to a department and then sort of cascading it throughout the department,
it's been quite helpful to raise that point for
people to not have to continually search for those
resources again and again, but to have the admin teams be part of the
process so that you can, you know, where those
sort of central signposting things are, and you can have that.
You can share it more easily. That's great. And again, it all
comes back to transparency for me. I think. I think that's what I'm really hearing,
that sort of transparent approach in all sorts of aspects. But
I suppose just a question for all of you, really, in terms
of future plans and where can people find out more?
So there's kind of two aspects, I think, with respect to our future directions, with
respect to our own lab handbook within the WIN physics
group that we've created, and speaking to other people in terms of how they've
utilized the lab handbook within their group. The general idea
is that people will be returning to this document periodically to
update it, have a discussion as a group, and see where improvements and changes can
be made more broadly. With respect to our initiative,
we're very keen to promote the use of lab handbooks more generally
to a wider audience than just within our.
Just within our lab or just within our...our
center. And so we've been...our initiative, which we've
been really promoting over the past few years, is
really trying to push the idea of lab handbooks to other, other
departments, both within and also outside
of Oxford, and try to get more, a larger fraction of the research community
really engaged with what we believe is a really powerful tool
to improve positive research culture.
So what we're currently doing in terms of future directions is
just continuing to engage with those different departments, both within and outside
of Oxford, to not only promote the initiative, but also seeing where we
can provide some resources and some
support from our side in order to be able to do this, to make this
something which has a more broader impact on
higher education and research settings in
general. We published a feature article on this.
We published an article on this last year, and
essentially, so the article, anyone can find it by searching
lab handbooks elife or I'll make sure it's linked.
I'll make sure it's linked in the show notes as well, but, yeah, Sounds perfect.
And within this. Within
this document, within this article, we basically describe what a lab handbook is,
why they're beneficial, how to go about writing one, and we also
provide a series of different resources to help labs build their own. So
anybody who's interested in finding it more can look into that and they can
get access to those resources and gain a bit of another insight into
why this is such a valuable document to have. That's brilliant. Thanks very much.
Anything to add from Maddie or Karla? Yeah, I was just going to add
that in the short term,
I'm really hoping to capitalize on the interest from professional services
teams because they are
part of the culture of our departments, but may not see
themselves within lab handbook specifically. But it's a really
flexible tool and, you know, the bones of it will apply
to any team. So, actually,
my short term plans are to work with the teams within the medical
sciences divisional office, of which there are many, you
know, finance, comms, HR, all of these kinds of
teams, and just kind of look at how we can adapt
the resources that we have to be able to fit into a more professional
services style team. Yeah, well, I'd be really
interested in that because obviously interested in how I
might relate to the teams and that I'm in
a big academic library. I think there's well over 200 people in our library and
even in my local team there's 25 people. So again, we have
obviously similar challenges in that sort of team. So now that's great. Thank you very
much. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for coming on to the
podcast and just say
goodbye to you all and if you want, say goodbye as well. Thank you. Thanks
very much. Thank you. Bye. Thank you.
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