Meetings - updated September 2023

Meetings will be listed on the lab calendar. Meetings won’t take place over holidays or when they clash with other events, like conferences that multiple people in the lab are involved in. We sometimes take “weeks off” meetings, to give everyone a much-needed break.

Meetings are in person where preferable, although it is usually possible to join by zoom, using the same lab meeting link. Check the lab calendar or slack for the password. Please give enough notice (2 hours) if you will join a meeting by zoom, so that someone can set it up.

Lab meetings for everyone (weekly)

Lab meetings are the regular opportunity for the whole group to come together to talk about science, and about important logistics. Please schedule other responsibilities to avoid lab meetings where possible. Lab meetings are a mutually respectful and supportive environment.

The goal of lab meeting is for everyone in the room, including the presenter(s), to learn things that are useful to their work.

Lab meetings can include various formats:

• Research update - led by a single lab member, is most common
• One-slide meeting - everyone presents one slide on their recent work
• Standup style - everyone updates with one thing they have done or learned recently, one goal for the next week, one thing they need help on, in at most 5 minutes each. See manual page on standup
• Guest presentation from someone outside the lab
• Journal clubs - one or more lab members lead discussion of a relevant paper
• Other - for example, a “welcome back” meeting, a “write some of the lab manual” meeting, a “state of the lab” annual-ish meeting,

We are trying a new experiment in autumn 2023 of combining a round table somewhere between 1-slide and standup style, then a main presentation.

Currently Edward is organising the lab meeting schedule. The lab meeting schedule is updated on the lab outlook calendar, and discussed every so often on slack or in-person at lab meetings. Please give at least a week’s notice of any changes to the schedule, as it is much easier to reorganise a meeting at the previous week’s lab meeting rather than later.

Timing

Lab meetings are 15:00-17:00 Thursdays in Waddington 1.07 (through summer 2024).

The aim for timing is:

• 14:45 someone hopefully volunteers to make coffee?
• 15:00 prompt, start of round table with 5 minutes each
• 15:45 latest, discuss any other lab business
• 16:00 latest, start of main presentation (research update/journal club/etc.)
• 16:45 latest, show the last slide
• 17:00, everyone should leave

We will try this for at least the month of October 2023 and evaluate how it goes. We will have to be disciplined about timing given that we are trying to fit in more parts.

Giving a Research update presentation

The purpose of these lab meetings is to communicate and to exchange useful ideas, not to simply “update”, nor to impress. This will usually be a talk with slides, with sub-goals:

• Teach the group about your work.
• Articulate what you are thinking about your work’s status and future.
• Solicit feedback and ideas from other lab members, to improve your project(s).
• Practice for talks outside the lab, in a friendly environment.

The key point is that the presentation must be accessible to everyone in the lab. There is always a new student who hasn’t heard about your project before. There are also people who have heard you talk before, however, they are unlikely to remember those talks clearly, because they are human and also focused on their own project. The presentation must be accessible to all of them, which requires thoughtful prioritisation of what you choose to present.

Research update presentations should usually:

• Give an introduction to your project, highlighting important ideas and objects (e.g. proteins/genes).
• Give each slide a helpful title, ideally a sentence that describes its content.
• Explain how to interpret each kind of data that you present, concisely and clearly. All data and axes need readable labels.
• Include a small number of crucial ideas/results from elsewhere, appropriately referenced.
• Make it clear when the talk shifts to your results; present selected primary data.
• Address problems, uncertainties, and obstacles.
• End with some kind of conclusion and plan for future work.

Lab members working on a new project will usually present a more in-depth introduction and plans for future work, not any new data. Similarly, it can be important to present incomplete or inconclusive data in lab meetings; sometimes this leads to the most helpful discussions. A well-thought-out lab meeting will strengthen your future work, by enabling a productive conversation with the group about your ideas and plans.

Aim for a 45-minute talk with at most one slide per minute, to allow time for discussion; a shorter talk is fine. It is a good idea to discuss your plan for lab meeting with the PI at least a week in advance.

Conversely, it is the responsibility of everyone else in the lab meeting to engage with the presenter and the presentation. Everyone is welcome - indeed, encouraged - to ask questions. We all bring value to lab meetings, and for each of us there are very many things we don’t know; if one person has a question, it’s likely other people have the same question.

Some resources on giving good presentations and lab meetings:

• Giving effective presentations, by Claus Wilke
• Text on slides, also by Claus Wilke
• Giving a Good Talk, from Maya Schuldiner’s mentoring page
• Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides focuses on single slides
• Ten simple rules for short and swift presentations focuses on structure of short presentations
• How to survive your first lab meeting
• How to survive and excel in lab meetings

One-slide meetings

In brief, everyone presents one slide on their recent work. Guidelines:

• The slide is an opportunity for scientific feedback and discussion on your work.
• You could present a result (a gel, a figure, an analysis, etc)
• You could present the design for a future or in-progress experiment
• You could present a cartoon or schematic figure to explain a mental model you’re working with
• The slide should have a title that is a sentence summarizing the message of the slide
• 5 minutes is not a lot of time to explain lots of things. There is probably only time for one panel of a figure, or a small cartoon schematic followed by a result.
• We don’t care how much you have done (everyone knows you have done a lot) - we all want 5 minutes of interesting scientific discussion.
• Because the group is big, we will be keeping strictly to time and cutting off after 5 minutes. With a 1-minute warning.
• Any questions, ask around.

Claus Wilke’s blogpost, share your preliminary work with other people, gives an eloquent perspective.

Journal clubs

Roughly we like to do journal clubs:

• We choose a relevant paper, that everyone should read before the meeting. Come prepared to talk about what you learned from the paper and any questions you have.
• The paper can be old, new, or a preprint. The big criteria for choice is that it has to be valuable for us to discuss as a group. Maybe it’s the ideas, maybe the methods, maybe the subject matter.
• Discussion is usually led by one person (leader), and/or can be shared around the group. We don’t need perfect presentations, just enough structure for a good discussion.
• It is usually helpful to start with some context about why the paper was written and why you chose the paper / why it’s relevant to us.
• The leader is encouraged to showcase their own data/project or other related information in the light of the main journal club paper. These have been some of the most useful journal club moments.
• Everyone suggests papers for next meeting, and we decide on one of them. It is ok to suggest a paper that you have already read.
• PI aims to attend all journal clubs, however it’s fine for them to continue even if PI can’t attend.

Thoughtful article on Interactive Journal Club: Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks.

In 2021 and 2022 we tried more regular fortnightly dedicated journal clubs. We did these on Thursdays at 11am “opposite” to the SynthSys OCM Thursdays, also on a different day on the lab calendar.

Subgroup meetings (no longer happening)

From January to June 2021 we tried journal clubs in themed subgroups:

• RNA-binding proteins, Ssd1 and so on - Rosey, Marah, Louis, also Paddy and Yuxuan. 10am alternate Mondays (weeks 1+3 in lab rota).
• 3’UTRs - Sam, Weronika. 10am alternate Tuesdays (weeks 1+3 in lab rota).
• Fungal pathogens - Laura, Liz, Rachael. 10am alternate Mondays (weeks 2+4 in lab rota)
• Ribosome profiling had a separate meeting on Wednesday afternoons, see bbsrc-nsf repository.

There was a lot of learning that happened, despite the large time commitment and stress of working from home and/or shift system. We stopped doing these when people moved back to work in lab more.

Sometimes we tried a different format, for example discussing a manuscript draft or designing a tricky experiment.

1-1 meetings (fortnightly)

Most lab members have 1-1 meetings with the PI, fortnightly, that last 55 minutes. These guidelines are intended to be “as simple as possible” to make these meetings most pleasant and productive.

• The lab member takes notes and sends a summary to PI later on the day of the 1-1 meeting. Notes should begin “1-1 meeting notes [date]”. Email is the preferred delivery method.
• Meeting starts by discussing progress on agreed priorities and action points from previous meeting.
• Meeting includes reviewing lab notebook, or other data/analysis/writing/slides, as appropriate.
• For wet lab workers, the lab notebook (RSpace) should be updated before the 1-1 meeting.
• Meeting ends by agreeing priorities for the lab member for their next fortnight, which go in the notes. Realistically, there will be between 1 and 3 priorities for the next two-week period, because larger numbers of things cannot all be prioritised.
• Notes should include action points for PI (with deadlines), and any questions arising from the meeting that we don’t yet have answers to.
• Notes can be brief; whatever can be written up in 15 minutes is good enough.

Why bother with these guidelines and with writing notes?

• Guidelines are a checklist to make sure we cover the important points.
• Notes act as a “diary” of what we did, which makes it easier.
• It’s pretty easy to misunderstand each other, especially on zoom. Written notes help to clear up those misunderstandings, and especially to clarify what is and is not a priority.
• “Producing a record of each key supervision meeting and forwarding it to their supervisor for agreement,” is a responsibility for research students in the University’s code of practice for students and supervisors.

Project students should find these guidelines useful to make the most of their meetings with the PI and any co-supervisors, although the meetings may have a different frequency or format.

1-1 meeting timings

Edward prefers to keep 1-1 meetings on Monday/Wednesday/Thursdays to keep Tuesdays and Friday free for extended thinking / experiments / etc.

We will try to schedule 1-1 meetings using the outlook calendar meeting invite service. Edward works to make that calendar reflect when he is free and when he is busy.

Lab socials (whenever we feel like it)

Guidelines:

• Organize a lab social when you feel like it.
• Be inclusive.

We also have an very irregular lab coffee 10:30am Fridays.