MUNN LAB - POLICIES

WORK-LIFE BALANCE

HOURS

The main lab hours are 9-5 Monday to Friday. That being said, that's just when you can expect to find me around. People have lives outside of the lab, and obligations to which they must attend. You should work whenever and for as long as you need to make progress on your projects. We are focused on producing a stream of work (including dead-ends and cul-de-sacs) not on who is in the lab the longest. The only expectations on attendance are that you attend scheduled meetings, and lab group meetings.

COMMUNICATIONS

We use Teams for intra-lab messaging, and general email for other communications. That said, don't fall into the trap of feeling like you have to be contactable straight away 24/7. I personally have a policy of replying to non time-critical communications within 36h, and suggest you develop a similar policy for yourself. Don't use work email on your personal devices (seriously). Turn your email off when you take leave. Speaking of..

LEAVE

Take some. No one is a science robot turning out research 24/7 365. Protect your mental health, recharge. All I ask is that you discuss it with me first. The nature of science is that you will go through intense periods where you might be working 12 hours a day for 7 days. This is not sustainable. When you get a chance, take a day or two (or three) to decompress.

DATA PROTECTION AND SAVING OUR (COLLECTIVE) SANITY

DOCUMENT YOUR WORK

You might prefer to use a notebook, or maybe an e-ink tablet or ipad are more your style, but document your work. It's important for a number of reasons - your awesome new paper might come out of review with a few questions about how you did some experiments. No problem, right? I'll just...oh. You might leave the lab and a new PhD student might reanalyse some data that you left behind and you'll get on a paper! Not if you didn't write notes about how you got your data. You might realise that two conditions were switched in your experiments! Or were they? We'll never know if you didn't write it down!

IF IT'S NOT BACKED UP, IT DOESN'T EXIST

Back up your work. No, seriously. Right now. Stop reading this and go and back up your data. If your data is stored as a single copy on a local hard drive, that hard drive will die. Usually in an expensive and/or unrecoverable fashion. I recommend the 3-2-1 strategy - 3 copies of your data, 2 on different media, 1 offsite. Otago uses Onedrive which is a good cloud solution. We also have lab high-capacity storage. Back up your code to the lab github.

AUTHORSHIP

Potentially a contentious subject, who gets to be on a paper and where needs care and thought. In general our criteria to be an author on a paper follows the ICMJE guidlines, in that there needs to be

Substantial intellectual contribution to a paper (planning experiments, analysis of data etc) AND
Actual authorship (i.e. a written contribution to the paper, substantial edits, or both).

We follow the usual conventions of author ordering in Neuroscience - the student or postdoc leading the project is first author, and I'm typically last. In general though, we operate a model where contributions to a project and authorship are negotiated up-front, so people are always clear what their intellectual and/or physical labour will produce.