The guiding principles of the lab rest on four main pillars:
1. Respect and Inclusivity
Human beings exist in a diverse array of colours, sizes, shapes, cultural backgrounds, gender presentations, and sexual orientations. Some humans are neurodiverse, some have disabilities, visible and/or hidden. In this lab, all humans are welcome. We operate a zero tolerance policy for harassment, bullying, discrimination, hate speech, racism, and sexism. We believe that everybody deserves respect, and the opportunity to advance both science and themselves.
2. Honesty and Integrity
Science is the search for understanding the fundamental principles that govern our universe. Research fraud is catastrophically damaging to this enterprise, and can potentially set humanity's knowledge back decades. In this lab, scientists and scientists in training are expected to be ethically bound to reporting true and accurate results. Data that we report to the world must be a true and accurate representation of our findings. We will not engage in plagiarism and will correctly attribute knowledge to its source. Moreover, we will not engage in statistical manipulation in order to report an effect.
3. Scientific Rigor
We are ethically bound to carefully design our experiments to ensure that the resources we have available are not wasted. We design our experiments with care and thought, ensuring the appropriate controls are made to make meaningful conclusions from our data. We consider effect sizes, sampling bias, and we consider our eventual statistical analysis before we collect data. We understand that science involves much failure before we succeed, and we persist. We acknowledge that we have only truly failed if we fail to learn something from our attempts.
4. Openness and Transparency
Within the lab, this principle means that we will have clear communication about objectives, expectations, challenges, and obstacles. We will strive to be a nurturing environment in which members of the lab are unafraid to ask for help, within or outside the scientific context. We will strive to be clear and fair in the allocation of resources and time. Outside of the lab, we will prefer to publish results in journals that operate under open access models. When offered the option, when financially possible, we will publish our results open access in journals that operate a mixed model. We encourage scientists and trainees to preprint their results wherever they see fit (Rob personally uses BioRxiv, but trainees are free to choose). We will post code that we develop to a public repository such as Github for the good of the community. Where possible, we will make our raw data freely available.