Benoit Lab Manual

Benoit Lab for Therapeutic Biomaterials Laboratory Manual

Updated 7/11/24 

General Expectations

As the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Lab, I am expected to: 

• Actively direct therapeutic biomaterials research undertaken in the lab. 
• Obtain extramural funding to pursue research objectives. 
• Ensure the overall quality and rigor of my laboratory's work. I will maintain high expectations for this work and actively work to foster openness, integrity, and reproducibility in our research.
• Develop and nurture a culture of curiosity, exploration, learning, teamwork, and positive, solution-oriented attitudes throughout the lab. • Provide mentorship, guidance, and support to those who work in the lab, including idea generation, experimental design, project strategy and planning, manuscript preparation and submission, lab logistics, job searches, award and grant applications, poster and oral presentations, teaching, letters of recommendation, professional development, and issues relating to work-life balance.
• Ensure a safe and supportive work environment that is free from any form of harassment and is dedicated to personal equality. I am devoted to diversity of ideas, personalities, and group membership. • Develop and nurture collaborations with other lab PIs and their lab members. 
• Be constructive and timely with comments on abstracts, proposals, and manuscript submissions; this will mean returning drafts within one week unless stated otherwise. 
• Approve all abstracts, manuscripts, posters, and oral research presentations from the lab. 
• Attend and present at research conferences. Give credit where credit is due, actively promote those who work with me, and look for opportunities for lab members. 
• Provide lab members with informal performance feedback as needed and formal performance feedback at the end of each academic year. 
• Hold weekly lab and individual meetings with lab members; if needed, ad hoc meetings are possible, as the PI’s schedule allows. 

As a mentee in the Therapeutic Biomaterials Lab, you are expected to:

• Cultivate your curiosity and creativity. Select a research topic that excites you and will lead you to new knowledge. If you’re funded by a particular project, your work will be closely associated with that project.
• Conduct your teaching and research with openness and integrity.
• Take training in safety, use of animals, etc., seriously and as soon as appropriate (safety ASAP, animals Just In Time).
• Represent the lab with pride and show respect for others. You are now an ambassador for the lab as well as a member. How you interact with our colleagues will shape our reputation.
• Each PhD student is expected to produce 4-6 peer-reviewed publications during their PhD. In general, this should take 4-5 years. For postdocs, 2-3 per year of training. There may be some flexibility here depending on journal strength, etc. NOTE: not every PhD is created equal. A PhD with high productivity (8-10 publications) will get you much farther in your career than one with 1-2 publications. I want everyone to be as successful – and happy – as you can and want to be.
• Actively participate in all laboratory group functions (group meeting, subgroup meetings, BioE Seminars, Wu Tsai Seminars, Knight Campus Seminars); this means paying attention, asking questions, offering feedback, and using phones and computers only for work that is directly related to the meeting at hand.
• Maintain and treat all lab equipment and lab space with care; if we are running low on a necessary supply, if software licenses are set to expire, if computers need updating, etc., alert the PI. • Review the literature. Read all the literature I suggest and a boatload more! Learn to use google scholar (and set google scholar alerts!), pubmed, SciFinder, Web of Science, Scopus. Read outside of your discipline (Science/Nature are good places to start) to get some perspective and maybe new ideas too.
• Actively seek out fellowship/grant/award proposals and apply for those you are a good fit for. Remember that providing letters of recommendation and feedback on drafts take time and effort from those writing them; do not apply for opportunities for which you do not meet the requirements. • Present your work at at least one conference per year – contingent on progress measured by publications.
• Be familiar with and meet the deadlines and benchmarks in your Departmental Graduate Student Handbook. Meeting these are entirely your responsibility, not the PIs.
• Manage research challenges. Perform research! Plan experiments well, don’t forget about necessary controls, keep good notebooks, and record everything! Try to perform at least 2 experiments/day in lab! Make sure these experimental outcomes would be acceptable figures/tables/data for a publication!
  • Sit down and carefully think about the solution yourself
  • Look for answers in the literature
  • Solicit advice from your lab mates o Please seek advice from the PI; I am always happy to discuss issues but it is in all of our best interest if you work on the problem yourself first
  • If we’re still struggling, we’ll go outside of the lab for advice (e.g., to collaborators or colleagues), but please talk to the PI about this first.
• Share your expertise, experience, and materials with others in the lab. There are significant rewards for being generous with your time and knowledge. 
• Share responsibility for mentoring undergraduates working in the lab. 
• MS Office/Endnote/ChemDraw/Prism/Biorender software will be used for writing, figure making, chemical structures, statistical analysis, etc. Learn them now and it will save you lots of time! 
• Back up data: Dropbox and Benoit Lab Server (yes, both. In alternating months). • Get/keep a life! Something that took me some time to learn. Get a hobby, love someone, be passionate about things other than research. A must in this equation is a balance – to keep yourself sane and give your brain time to process experiments and come up with innovative ideas and ways to circumvent problems you’re having.
• Exercise and eat right. It does your body and mind good and is worth the time in rewards. 

Guidelines for Communication and Soliciting Feedback

• Let the PI know if you will miss any classes, department events, or lab meetings/functions.
• Mentees are expected to respond to email within 24 hours on weekdays unless they have given notice that they will be away. It is fine if the response is something akin to, “I cannot look at this now but will get back to you before X date”, but the message should be acknowledged within a day. If you know you will not be able to respond to email within 24 hours, you should turn on an away message (in addition to informing the PI of your absence ahead of time).
• Include the PI on all communications regarding any lab research (yours, mine, or other lab members’). This includes cc-ing the PI on emails and making the PI aware of any conversations outside of emails. Keep in mind that, although our social arena is quite informal, others are not; use formal writing and professional titles in communication with people outside of the lab; this includes department and university administrative and support staff.
• Writing will need to be organized/planned accordingly to meet deadlines – do not underestimate this process! For brief submissions or questions (e.g., conference poster or talk abstracts, award or grant applications that are two-pages or less, letters of recommendation, professional development or study design questions), the “turnaround time” for the PI to respond to you is one week or less, not including weekends or PI travel days (which you will always know about ahead of time). For longer submissions (e.g., lengthy grant or award applications, manuscript drafts), expect a two-week turnaround time, not including weekends or PI travel days. Keep in mind that some submissions will require multiple, even many, drafts, and plan around deadlines accordingly (e.g., initial draft of an abstract should be developed and edited by PI no less than 1 month before the deadline).
  • It is highly recommended that you ask your lab mates and graduate student colleagues for feedback on your work before sending it to the PI. 
  • The quality and specificity of the feedback you receive will be in proportion to the quality and specificity of the work you submit (e.g., an early, rough draft will get more big-picture, general comments than a later draft that is more fleshed out).
• For new manuscripts or lengthy proposals, you should first submit a detailed outline and figure board for feedback. This will minimize the chance of needing to restructure large sections of your writing • Seek approval and feedback from the PI before submitting anything on which she is a coauthor, even it has been approved for submission elsewhere.

Authorship Guidelines

For Manuscripts:

• An author is considered anyone highly involved with most parts of: idea generation (e.g., research question, theoretical framework, hypotheses), research design (e.g., selection and/or creation of materials or methods), data collection, data analysis, and manuscript drafting.
  • Decisions about authorship should be made as early in the writing process as possible, ideally as soon as it is clear that a project is publishable. However, authorship may change as the project develops and contribution shifts; collaborators should be open, straightforward, and respectful of others’ feelings during these conversations.
  • Except in exceptional circumstances, the first author should write the bulk of the first draft of the paper, including preparing tables and figures, and should manage submission duties such as drafting the cover letter, preparing the manuscript in the correct format, submitting it online, and checking proofs. These responsibilities may be shifted through group discussion, particularly if a potential co-author needs to do more to earn authorship or if someone has contributed less than others.
  • The first author assumes responsibility for the publication, making sure that the data are accurate, that all deserving authors have been credited, that all authors have given their approval to the final draft; the first author also handles the bulk of the resubmission process and responses to inquiries after publication.
• It is generally assumed that the lab PI will be involved in any research conducted using lab resources (e.g., lab-owned computers, lab software, lab space, lab reagents) and, as a result, will be an author on any resulting manuscript. 

For Talks and Posters:

• If you are interested in presenting work on which you collaborate with others, you must get their approval before moving forward with plans for presentation. In situations where more than one collaborator wants to present the same data, the first author should have priority. 
• If you are presenting on a specific paper, the co-authors of that paper should be offered authorship. 
• If you are presenting on multiple papers and someone is a co-author of most or all of those papers, that person should be offered authorship.
• If you are presenting on multiple papers, each with unique authors, you should acknowledge co-authors as collaborators, but do not need to offer them co-authorship. 
• A very general rule of thumb for talk and poster authorship is that you should offer authorship to anyone who is a collaborator on at any of the results you present.