Two people shaking hands over a table, with a third person involved in the meeting, possibly having had a resolution meeting as a strategy for dealing with a difficult lab supervisor.

5 Types of Difficult Lab Supervisor and How to Handle Them

The lab is a melting-pot full of workers from different cultures and backgrounds, so some conflicts of personality are inevitable. However, when the lab head is the person that you are struggling to get along with, it can make your life a lot harder. Check out some different personality types and get advice on how to work with them effectively.

mentoring

Successful Students: Mentoring Students in the Lab

I have been teaching scientific laboratory courses for years. While I was an undergraduate student, I worked as a laboratory teaching assistant for Organismal Biology and volunteered for “Super Science Saturday’s” to educate youth through science demonstrations. I gradually moved on to universities that allowed me to independently instruct students in Anatomy and Neuroscience. Today,…

Dealing with tension and conflict in the lab

A busy research lab can be a challenging place to work for a variety of reasons. Science is a high pressure environment, often with looming grant or research paper deadlines, troublesome reagents, and experimental failure. Combined, these factors can cause many kinds of strife in the workplace, here are a few examples and some of my top tips for dealing with them!

post docs

Survival as a PhD Student: Keep the Post Docs on Your Side

From one lowly PhD student to another: we need post doctoral scientists. From their ability to seemingly do everything right to their moral support after a weekend of failed experiments and questioning the decisions that led you up to this moment * clears throat *. The list of support post docs offer is endless. So…

Talk to me: Good communication with your PhD supervisor / scientific advisor

Talk to me: Good communication with your PhD supervisor / scientific advisor

Few scientists in the training stage are lucky enough to have the perfect advisor (aka PhD supervisor PI, boss).  The reality is that most scientific advisors receive little to no training on how to be good mentors.  You may want to take a look at a companion post to this one called “Getting the Most…

DIY method for isolating yeast

How To Survive The Next Meeting With Your PI

Every scientist, at one time or another, has avoided meetings with their PI. They are, however extremely important in shaping the direction and progress of your project. Having regular productive meetings with your PI will help maintain a positive working relationship and contribute to the success of your project. Keep the following in mind when…

Management Skills in Science

Management Skills in Science

Amid growing recognition that a successful scientific career requires skills beyond scientific acumen, institutions are racing to provide management training for newly minted principal investigators. Young scientists spend years conducting complicated experiments and crunching data, but when they are finally given the keys to their own lab, they suddenly face tasks they were never trained…