Our mission & ethos:
Our mission is to uncover biological knowledge and new medicines by developing advanced methods to quantify and mine the rich information in images. Together, our team explores the inner workings of biological systems and makes discoveries that can transform patient care. We take pride in creating open-source software that makes a real difference and we champion reproducible science. We maintain a welcoming, scientifically and morally conscientious, and inclusive environment where we balance passionate scientific pursuits with sustainable work practices. We enjoy a professional, friendly, no-fuss atmosphere where team members can thrive both in their research and beyond.
Your responsibilities:
Lead your projects, education, and professional development. You are the primary driver of your career! We are happy to discuss strategy. Let us know the resources, advice, or training you need. You should take intellectual ownership of your projects by taking notes in meetings and sharing them with the project team afterward, making sure projects don't stall or fall through the cracks. Please check with Anne and Shantanu before committing to new collaborations and keep us informed on all projects. We don't want to limit what you do, but we can accelerate your projects and make sure the Institute and funders' policies are followed.
Prioritize your physical and mental health. See our Mental Health Page* as well as Broad Intranet*.
Participate in group meetings. We have weekly group meetings to present your work to our lab + Cimini lab several times per year. We also have weekly group check-ins with Anne and Shantanu to discuss:
- Past progress/data
- Future plans
- Ideas about how to help you, or the group as a whole, function better
Document your work electronically so it is reproducible and backup your work at least weekly. Be sure to capture things like:
- Goal: what is the point of this project overall? What does this particular experiment or analysis test? What variables are under investigation? What methods have you researched or what prior work is it based on? What are the potential outcomes & conclusions?
- Correspondence with other project team members
- Conclusion: what did the experiment/test tell you? What are the next steps?
- Results/Data: the numerical output of the experiment, qualitative observations, notation of where resulting images are stored, etc.
- Procedure: Detailed procedures, software, algorithms, pipelines, images, etc. used
Contribute to scientific manuscripts, grants, and presentations. Submit work to preprint archives, and share datasets publicly prior to publication, when collaborators allow. Give drafts of your proposals or manuscripts to us well in advance of deadlines to allow time for feedback. Do not submit abstracts, papers, or presentations without checking with us first. Follow our overall tech strategy* and Institute policies, especially about data privacy.
Manage your time well and follow working policies: Full-time positions are 40 hours per week. Your actual working hours are flexible and should facilitate your collaborations as much as possible. If you aren't feeling well, please stay home, take the day off, and rest up! Many lab members work from home regularly, though it requires more active communication* and none of us are fully remote. We aim for 2-3 days per week at the lab (including Tuesday/Thursday), with newcomers coming more frequently to learn. Take your allotted vacation time to recharge and use the Institute calendar for scheduled meetings and reporting vacation/sick time so others can easily schedule meetings.
Give credit where it is due, and respect the confidentiality of collaborators’ projects. Do not discuss their research goals, ideas, or results with anyone outside our group or the collaborator’s laboratory without prior permission from the collaborator.
Prudently buy/use lab resources including cloud and computational resources.
Follow legal policies. Gain permission before doing any consulting work from Broad's Deputy Director, and follow any work permit rules. Don't sign anything (e.g. publication copyright agreements, consulting agreements) as yourself without checking with Anne or Shantanu; signing makes you personally liable, so usually there is a Broad person responsible for signing. Report intellectual property that you develop to the Broad Business Development Office. Obey intellectual property laws. Report unethical/inappropriate behavior to Anne, Shantanu, or to the Institutional Ethics Officer (ask Human Resources or check the intranet). Represent the lab professionally.
Contribute to the lab's culture of exceptional thoughtfulness and intellectual rigor so we can all continue to enjoy a happy and healthy research environment!
Our responsibility to you:
Provide a cheerful, integrity-filled, learning-oriented workplace that propels biomedical research. Build a scientific community within and beyond our group that works for those of all backgrounds and identities.
Provide good ideas and starting points for projects; provide guidance throughout.
Provide support for your development. Provide training in scientific project planning and execution, specific techniques and methods. Lab members usually attend at least one scientific course, conference, tutorial, or workshop per year and have membership in a society that benefits their work. We also encourage you to enrich yourself and the Broad community by joining affinity groups and program meetings.
Provide career advice and mentoring. We are well-connected to academic, industry, and 'alternative' career contacts and are happy to help you find your next niche in the world. We truly want researchers to love what they are doing, even if it is not within our group. We prefer 2-3 months' notice so that we have time to hire a new person that you can train and transfer knowledge to, helping make the most of the work you have contributed to the team. We promise in return to support your decision. We can provide letters of reference that reflect your performance, skills, and interaction with the rest of the group, within two weeks.
Provide a healthy working environment where ethical behavior is expected and where interpersonal conflicts and unethical behavior are handled professionally.
Allow you to spend some of your work time finishing up revisions of papers from your prior lab experience; however, unless you are funded by a fellowship, remember that you also have a full-time obligation to the funding source paying for your time so this should be kept reasonable; ask Anne for boundaries.
Determine appropriate journals to submit to, and authorship on publications. Our team often works on projects with many collaborators and multiple labs involved who jointly decide journal venues, but we push for pre-printing and open-access publication. For authorship, we follow the guidelines of The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors:
"acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, alone, does not justify authorship. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content; ALL three of the following criteria be met for authorship to be warranted:
- substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data;
- drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and
- final approval of the version to be published."
Note that while just providing data doesn't automatically warrant authorship, that doesn't mean we have permission to use peoples' data for publications without asking. Practically speaking, this means that if we are using peoples' data we should involve them intellectually, or alternately talk to them first and ask if it's ok to use the data in a limited way while excluding them as authors.
Determining author order can be contentious but we usually work things out well in advance to be sure expectations are clear. First authors typically lead the project, draft the manuscript, assemble most figures, and lead revisions after review. If you notice roles shifting, please raise concerns about authorship order proactively. It is wise to submit your first-authored papers before leaving the lab; it is also important for the health of the lab to not leave years of work unpublished. If someone else needs to take on major work for a paper you had been leading, such as revisions, your status as first author, or sole first author, may change.
Minimize the bureaucracy you need to deal with while doing your research.
Provide unlimited coffee and tea at the lab :)
*Hyperlinks are available on our intranet only to current lab members.