Updated on June, 2026. This is partially adapted from the Coley Research Group at MIT and the Van der Donk Group at UIUC.

Communications

  • Email: I expect everyone to develop a good practice of responding to emails from supervisors, colleagues, coworkers, collaborators, and other relevant parties.
  • Don’t ever feel that you’re wasting my time or bothering me. Please let me know if I’m taking too long to respond, especially if it’s urgent (e.g., an impending deadline). In that case, the fastest way to reach me is by cell phone. If there is anything with a specific deadline, I will let you know a few weeks in advance. 
  • We should all strive to be as responsive to one another as possible. While I often send emails outside of normal working hours, I won’t expect you to be working when I am; you don’t need to respond to non-urgent emails in the evenings or on weekends.
  • We are using Google Drive for project management. You would use Excel, Word, or PowerPoint in Google Drive to share your plan, research progress, and manuscript.

Meetings

  • There are three types of meetings in the lab: ad hoc meetings, weekly individual meetings, and biweekly or monthly group meetings.
  • An ad hoc meeting is held to address urgent matters as needed, especially for new lab members. For students past their 1st year, you should develop your own independence.
  • One-on-one meetings are held once a week for every advisor group member. These sessions are scheduled for 60 minutes, but we can adjust the duration/frequency as needed. Most of the time, we’ll talk about recent research progress (new results, planned experiments, unexpected obstacles, etc.); for these cases, it’s helpful to prepare a handful of slides to guide our conversation. Other meetings might focus on planning, drafting, or revising manuscripts or fellowship applications. Others might focus on career development opportunities and long-term planning for your future career. We can also use this time to discuss your experience in the group/department more broadly, align expectations, and provide two-way feedback.
  • Group Presentations
    • Group presentations will take place biweekly/monthly and will be scheduled for one hour. If we don’t need the full meeting time, we won’t use it. The presenter will give a semi-formal presentation on their research progress since the last group meeting presentation, or a practice talk for an upcoming thesis proposal, conference, or other event.
    • These presentations should be planned for around 40 minutes to leave ample time for discussion. Everyone should strive to be an active participant in these discussions and feel comfortable interjecting with questions during the talk.
    • You should never feel like you’re spending an inordinate amount of time making slides for the sake of making slides, but don’t underestimate how helpful these presentations can be to yourself and others.
    • Your presentation on your own research will help you reflect on what you have been working on and how it fits into the overall narrative of your project. Remind us of the context for your work, why it is important, who has worked on it before, what your approach is, how it is different, how you’ve progressed, and what the next steps you have in mind are. 
    • Your presentation on a research topic is an excellent way to force yourself to read the literature, bring other group members up to speed, and might eventually turn into an introduction for a manuscript or serve as the seed for a review article.
    • As the group grows, we may split these into two separate meetings each week (research updates & journal club).

Vacation Policies (adapted from https://mse.engin.umich.edu/graduate/graduate-advising/gsra-vacation-policy) GSRAs are entitled to 10 business days of vacation per calendar year. This is separate from other types of leave (e.g., University holidays, sick leave, FMLA leave). Note that academic breaks, such as Spring Break and Fall Break, are not University holidays and would be counted as vacation. Vacation dates must be approved by the research advisor. Lab members are expected to: (1) Request dates in writing as soon as possible, at least 14 days ahead of time, and (2) Recognize that the needs of the lab group may restrict available dates.

Wellness and Work Hours

  • Please read this article about how to manage your time as a researcher https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04364-2
    • Big picture: Big-picture planning encompasses long-term goals. For graduate students, this might include your ideal timeframe to graduation, learning specific skills, or exploring career options; for a research professor, it might involve completing projects, applying for funding, or enhancing teaching and mentoring skills.
    • Academic term: At the end of each academic term, write out a plan for the next quarter or semester that considers three elements: Reflect, Forecast, and Prioritize
    • Daily or weekly: For the finest-grained planning, you can use a daily planner, but I prefer you working on a weekly timescale because your research often involves experiments that run over several days. In either case, you can assign specific slots for each task, known as time blocking, or use to-do lists.
  • Group members are mostly working to advance their own careers, making themselves competitive for future academic or industry jobs, rather than for their advisor’s. In 2025, for one industry role at major pharmaceutical companies, such as Merck and Lilly, with many alumni from UM, over 500 applications were received, with more than 100 being internal referrals. Similarly, one faculty position in a UM department attracted 375 applications.
  • While we should strive for impactful and ambitious research, we shouldn’t do so at the expense of our well-being and happiness. 
  • Academia offers you a lot of flexibility. It’s essential to maintain a healthy work-life balance and utilize that flexibility to your advantage. More time spent working does not translate into increased productivity.
  • A significant amount of academic work can be done remotely, including reading papers and responding to emails.
  • Do not spend extended time on your computer unless the research is directly related, and refrain from bringing personal or business tasks into the lab.
  • Permission to work from home must be requested. If you are sick, you should take time off and rest well at home. Check out this Science article on how remote working affecting mental health https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec7671?utm_campaign=Science+Magazine&utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=ownedSocial
  • I hope most of you will be able to keep relatively normal working hours in the lab (e.g., 9 am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday, or a minimum of 40 hours per week).
  • As experiments demand, research sometimes requires group members to come in on evenings and weekends. While working on weekends is not required, it can enhance your productivity, and sometimes it will be necessary to complete experiments successfully.
  • Departmental events and other extracurricular activities can be valuable for professional development, but they should not regularly displace time needed for experiments and other project-related work. Please limit participation in non-essential activities during work hours and plan them around your research responsibilities.

Publication Expectations 

  • Grad Students – a paper = a thesis chapter – and the papers come first  (A thesis typically consists of three chapters. Avoid post-graduation writing as much as possible). For PhD students in their first 2-3 years, please refer to this article https://www.science.org/content/article/how-ph-d-riding-bike
  • Postdocs – you have a 2- to 5-year stay; plan carefully.  Discuss possible future papers with me.  
  • Think about when your first author papers will be submitted with respect to the job cycle and fellowship application.
  • Throughout any project, there will be periods of slow and rapid progress. If you’re at a point in your project where things are going well and you are highly motivated to push forward and make progress, do so! If you’re in a slower period and you’re feeling idle, unmotivated, or overwhelmed, take a break, go home/outside, and try to come back refreshed. I want you to feel comfortable communicating with your colleagues and me during these times so we can figure out how best to move forward.

Planning Research Projects

  • For each member, at the very beginning, I will work with you to develop a paper outline with key figures to accomplish, and then execute it. After a year or two, we should work together to identify meaningful and worthwhile projects that align with your interests and current/desired skills. As you progress, I hope to provide you with increasing intellectual freedom to define your own research directions. Please read this article https://www.science.org/content/article/when-i-stopped-trying-have-all-answers-my-lab-members-thrived
  • We should have a living outline of the paper we are trying to write. It is not the finished paper but a flexible map: what story are we telling, what figures would we need, what do the conclusions look like if this works? We return to it constantly as the science leads us into territory we did not expect to enter. It is not designed to check a box. It helps you stay oriented when the work feels like wandering. Each week, you would start with a few items from the outline and map the hours around them. Purposeful enough that you could go home and mean it when you said to yourself: I did enough today. Flexibility without structure is chaos. Structure is what makes working less possible. With a plan, you can go home knowing that you did enough for today.
  • All projects should have a clear path to publication from the outset. This isn’t to say we should be chasing papers, but it’s essential to understand the motivation, background, and significance of our work if we are to be successful.
  • Effective research projects will incorporate both long- and short-term objectives. Short-term goals should be achievable within weeks or months, while long-term goals may take multiple semesters to achieve. It’s also beneficial for each project to have a long-term objective spanning 5-20 years. Think of high-level phrases like “if only we could do <capability>, then <societal benefit>”.
  • Sometimes, our choice of research topics is constrained by the grants we have secured and the grant opportunities to which we are eligible.

Collaborations

  • There are both informal and formal collaborations.
  • For formal collaborations, I encourage everyone to discuss potential authorship at the outset, ensuring that all parties are on board and understand their responsibilities and commitments. Read this article about why you should do so. https://www.science.org/content/article/i-avoided-authorship-discussions-collaborators-until-i-learned-some-hard-lessons and https://www.science.org/content/article/how-i-recovered-collaboration-gone-wrong
  • For informal collaboration, authorship can be discussed when the manuscript is finalized.
  • Internal collaboration. All group members should be highly collaborative with each other. However, it does not mean that you will count on others to do the work for you.
  • Be extremely respectful of your collaborators, both inside and outside the University of Michigan. We have a few collaborators at other institutions, and it is essential to keep them informed of our progress through regular email updates and meetings.
  • When you reach out to collaborators, please copy your advisor in the email.

Inventories (Ten simple rules for managing laboratory information)

  • Chemical inventory. We maintain a Google Excel spreadsheet that documents catalog information, location, storage temperature, and vendors.
  • Mammalian cells: We maintain a Google Excel spreadsheet that documents location, passage time, date, medium recipe, and other relevant details. New lab members must notify senior members to access our cell stocks in the liquid nitrogen tank.
  • Bacterial and plasmid stocks: We maintain a Google Excel spreadsheet that documents the location, sequencing data, antibiotics, source, and benching link for each stock. Only sequencing-verified plasmids and corresponding glycerol stocks will be added to our inventory. You should have Benchling links with sequencing results attached to each plasmid and glycerol stock.
  • Lab members are required to update the inventory regularly and restock items when they run low. For example, when only two vials of mammalian cells are left, you must start to expand and freeze down extra vials.

Protocols

  • We have a Google Drive folder that maintains common protocols and guidelines. You should strictly follow the protocols to ensure reproducibility.
  • You are allowed a certain flexibility in editing and revising the protocols when they are not working for you. However, you must track your changes and notify your supervisor whenever they are made.
  • Every new lab member, regardless of prior experience, should assume they will need to follow the protocols in our lab rather than those in their previous labs.
  • When developing a new protocol, you are advised to refer to at least three different sources: (1) commercial kit manuals and (2) literature. It is anticipated that new protocols will require several rounds of revision among you, other lab members, and your advisor. A finalized protocol will be uploaded to the Google Drive folder once you have successfully obtained the desired results.

Data Management and Reporting

  • You should upload raw data, such as flow cytometry results, gel images, and fluorescence images, as soon as they are acquired to prevent data loss. This is especially critical, as many journals now require you to submit raw data along with your manuscript.
  • We have a Google Drive folder on each desktop that stores raw data. Please ensure that you upload them to the correct folder each time the experiment is completed.
  • Never procrastinate when it comes to data analysis. You should use Google PowerPoint to manage your data, including dates and detailed experimental conditions, to track your progress and facilitate our weekly one-on-one meetings.
  • Your total data, organized in PowerPoint slides, will eventually become key figures in your manuscript. So please take it seriously when updating your slides.