culture

Dana Research Group Culture and Values

Group Overview

• We develop new computational and experimental approaches to accelerate R&D in the chemical sciences. We focus on addressing methodological challenges that will eventually enable autonomous discovery: closed-loop platforms combining software and hardware to drive the discovery of processes through automated hypothesis generation, refinement, validation, and revision.
• Our research covers the full spectrum between fundamental science, methods/algorithm development, and applications. We also have a spectrum of work from computational to experimental. Each group member will be on a different part of this spectrum; this may evolve over time, depending on your interests and project needs.
• There are a number of domains we will work in: drug degradation and oxidation, pyrolysis, combustion, catalytic processes, etc. Don’t hesitate to expose the group to new domains and suggest new research directions and collaborations. We are interested in developing generalized methods that are relevant to many applications.
• We are proponents of open science. This means that we submit our manuscripts as preprints to arXiv or ChemRxiv after submitting them to Peer Review Journals, we open-source our code on GitHub, and we try to make our tools easy to use and accessible for others (e.g., through public websites, detailed installation instructions, recorded tutorials, thorough documentation, and reasonable docstrings and code comments).
• I will strive to be as open as possible about the “operations” of the group. You’re welcome to ask me about hiring plans, current projects, the financial situation of the group, etc. I will be upfront about these at the beginning of each year with a “State of the Group” presentation.

Group Values

• We should all create a positive workplace for each other and support each other in our professional and personal goals.
• Excellence is independent of background. Having a diverse group is essential for generating and sharing new ideas, whether that diversity is with respect to gender, race, ethnicity, family status, religion, cultural background, or any other aspect of personal identity. It is important that all members of the group recognize the inherent importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in addition to the benefits to research and community well-being they provide.
• We present our work accurately and honestly and follow through on promises. We do not try to make our results "look better". We remember that we were sent by the larger society to study and develop beneficial technology, and we report our results as they were obtained. We of course strive to improve our measurements and calculations, and do so in a transparent manner.
• We constantly strive to push the frontiers of knowledge, to discover ways to solve important problems, and put what we learn to the benefit of society. When appropriate, we make distribution-quality software or file patents to increase the probability that our research discoveries will have a positive impact.
• To foster scientific and engineering advances, we make it easy for others to replicate and expand on our work. We understand that everyone makes mistakes, and we work to rectify any mistakes we make as soon as we discover them, so they will not mislead or harm others.

Communication

• Emails are preferred for sharing documents (e.g., paper manuscripts) back-and-forth during revisions.
• However, Slack is nice because it provides a semi-permanent record of scientific conversations and makes it easy for others to participate and for new members to read and search. A Slack channel that is public to the rest of the group is a recommended place for talking about research updates/progress/questions. Feel free to “eavesdrop” on any of these channels and contribute your thoughts. Research is more fun with more people involved!
• Don’t ever feel that you’re wasting my time or bothering me. You can let me know if I’m too slow to respond and it’s urgent (e.g., a nearing deadline); the fastest way to reach me in that case is by email, not Slack. I will do the same for you: if there is something with a specific deadline, I will let you know in my message.
• We should all try to be as responsive to each other as possible. While I may send messages outside of normal working hours, I won’t expect you to be working when I’m working; you don’t need to respond to non-urgent emails in the evenings or on weekends.

One-on-one Meetings

• I’d like to have one-on-one meetings once a week with every graduate student / postdoc. These are scheduled for 30-60 minutes but we can always increase or decrease the duration/frequency as needed. They can always be rescheduled or cancelled, but it’s good to have something on the calendar. I’m always happy to allocate more time for our meetings.
• What we discuss at each meeting will vary over time. Most of the time, we’ll talk about recent research progress (new results, planned experiments, strategy, unexpected obstacles, etc.); for these cases, it’s helpful if you prepare a few slides to guide our conversation. Other meetings might focus on planning, drafting, or revising manuscripts or on fellowship applications. Others might focus on career development opportunities and long-term planning for your future career. We can also take this time to talk about your experience in the group more broadly, align expectations, and provide two-way feedback to each other.
• You are expected to arrive with an agenda for our meetings. If there's nothing to discuss in a specific week, it's OK to cancel the meeting in advance (at least 1 day ahead).
• Once a year graduate students / postdocs will have a Mentoring Meeting with me where we discuss scientific progress, professional development, mentoring needs, and group climate. Please schedule your Mentoring Meeting with me once a year (counting from the month you joined the group).

Group Meetings

• Group meetings will take place weekly and will be scheduled for 1.5 hours. If we don’t need the full meeting time, we won’t use it.
• One person will give a semi-formal presentation on either (a) their research progress since their last group meeting presentation, (b) a particular research topic of interest to the group, providing an overview of the field and summary of relevant literature, or (c) a practice talk for an upcoming thesis proposal, conference, etc. We will also try to use this time for inviting guests to give a seminar to the group.
  • These presentations should be planned for around 45 minutes to leave enough time for discussion. Everyone should strive to be an active participant in these discussions and feel comfortable asking questions during the talk.
  • Respect everyone's time by preparing in advance for your talk. You should never feel like you’re spending too much time making slides for the sake of making slides, but don’t underestimate how helpful these presentations can be to yourself and others.
  • A presentation on your own research will help you reflect on what you have been working on so far and how it fits into the overall picture 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.
• At the beginning of each semester, we’ll all select an appropriate time that works for everyone’s course schedules and other commitments (some time between 9 am and 6 pm during weekdays). We’ll also assign each week to a member of the group, taking turns as equitably as possible.
• We also hold weekly “subgroup” meetings for particular subtopics in the group. In these subgroup meetings, we’ll have informal research updates in a round-table style discussion, where each person might present 1-3 slides of that week’s results and lead a brief, informal discussion. Each member of the group will have a primary subgroup where they’ll provide an update, and several members will have a secondary subgroup where they participate and provide feedback. This does increase the number of meetings you’ll be expected to go to, but I think it’s important to promote technical discussions and more frequent interactions between us all.
• Slides from group meetings should be placed in the Google Drive private to group members only: TBD. Any notebooks/scripts from coding demos should be placed on GitHub: https://github.com/DanaResearchGroup/Scripts.
• We record our virtual (Zoom) group meetings on our internal servers. We do not publicly open them, so everyone can feel free to express. THe recordings will only be used to the benefit of new group members to learn from.

Wellness, Work Hours, and Expectations

• While we should strive to do impactful, 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 important to keep a healthy work-life balance and use that flexibility to your advantage. More time spent working does not translate into increased productivity.
• There is a lot of work in academia that can be done remotely or at home. Reading papers, catching up on email, preparing slides, and writing papers, proposals, or dissertations. Since a lot of our work is computational/theoretical, many aspects of our work could be done remotely.
• We should do our best to keep relatively normal working hours at the office during most weekdays, arriving at about 8:30 am and leaving not before 4 pm; Other than going to lectures, I would like 10am - 4pm to be a time when most people are present at the office/lab. It’s nice to be in the office at the same time as your colleagues, both socially and so that you can quickly ask each other questions throughout the day. However, I realize that everyone’s work style and family obligations are different and you should communicate to me what works best for you.
• You aren’t expected to work evenings or weekends if we aren’t running up against immovable deadlines and if you’re managing your time well during the week.
• Over the course of any project, there will be slow periods and there will be fast periods. 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, and let me know so I can see how to assist.

Holidays and Vacation

• You should take all Technion holidays and a minimum of two weeks vacation a year 100% guilt-free.
• I highly support tacking on personal vacation days to the ends of conferences abroad if your schedule allows it, since your flight costs will already be covered. Unless there is a significant price difference, you’re welcome to book your flights to arrive/depart a couple of days early/late (keep screenshots of flight prices to include in your report for reimbursement).

Defining Research Projects

• We should work together to identify meaningful and worthwhile projects that are suited to your interests and current/desired skills. Of course, I am here to provide as much guidance as needed, particularly toward the beginning of your research career. As you progress, I hope to provide you with more and more intellectual freedom to define your own research directions.
• All projects should have a clear path to publication when they are started. This isn’t to say we should be chasing papers, but it’s important to know the motivation, background, and significance of our work if we are successful.
• Good research projects will have a combination of long-term goals and short-term goals. Shorter-term goals should be achievable on the timescale of weeks or months, while long-term goals may take multiple semesters. It’s also good for each project to have a very long-term objective on the 5-20 year time frame. Think of high-level phrases like “if only we could do [capability], then [societal benefit]”.
• Sometimes, our choice of research topics will be constrained by the grants and funding we have secured and/or the funding opportunities we are eligible to apply for. That’s why it’s essential to keep an eye out for fellowships and grant opportunities that will offer us the flexibility we need to do the research we are most interested in (more on that later).

Documenting and Backing up Work

• Keep backups of everything. I personally do all of my work either in GitHub repositories that I manually sync or in OneDrive/Dropbox folders that automatically sync. You should actively maintain private GitHub repositories for all of your projects involving code. When dealing with large datasets, maintain copies across multiple servers when possible. We can always purchase external hard drives for the group or use cloud storage solutions if needed. Don't let Murphy's law control the safety of your important documents and code. Once in a while create check-points of your work in a safe location.
• I recommend following a strict naming convention for all presentations (at conferences, for group meetings, etc.) and all documents (meeting notes, manuscript drafts, etc.) of “YYYY.MM.DD [minor version] [Document Name]”, e.g., "2021.04.15 a Conference X.pptx". Whenever I make a significant modification to a file, I rename it with a different minor version, e.g., "2021.04.15 b Conference X.pptx", and of course when I work on the file on a different day I rename the new version with the current date. The date refers to the time you edit it, not to the conference date. This method will make sure all versions are saved for you, so you can always go back and find past ideas and save time. It also automatically and correctly sorts all files of this format in a folder by date due to the "YYYY.MM.DD" structure.
• You should strictly keep track of all your server jobs and experiments and index them appropriately. For example, use a running index of "xea1001", "xea1002", "xea1003"... for tagging jobs that you run or physical experiments you conduct at the lab. Here, "x" stands for "experiment" (even if it's a theoretical computation), "ea" stands for the specific project (e.g., "ethylamine" -- change it according to your project). Create an Index Table spreadsheet with the index number, the date, the server / experimental apparatus, conditions (T/P/X...), comments, etc. This will save you time later on when you analyze data.

Manuscripts

• Publishing in academic journals and conferences is one of the primary ways that we communicate our research with the broader community. We should never see publishing as a numbers game, but we should be aware that the quality of our manuscripts is a major way in which we are evaluated as scientists.
• The quality of a manuscript and whether the right audience reads it is more important than the sheer number of papers we publish or the impact factors of the journals we publish in. However, we can’t neglect the fact that these factors are often used by hiring, fellowship, and grant committees.
• Deciding on authorship order and inclusion is not always straightforward. Consult with me as early as possible to avoid misaligned expectations.
• Before starting to work on a manuscript (or even a project, if it is expected to be short-term), you should prepare a draft outline for us to review together. The longer the contribution is expected to be, the earlier we should have that conversation.
• After we work on an outline together, you will write the first draft. We will likely go through many iterations together; don’t worry about getting it 100% polished before showing me a draft, but do try to make sure there aren’t many distracting English errors. As we get closer to finalizing the content of a manuscript, my comments will shift from high-level organizational changes to nitpicking grammar and word choice.
• I would like us to use Overleaf (an online collaborative LaTeX editor) for writing manuscripts as much as possible. It might take some time to get used to writing in LaTeX, but the ease of formatting figures, tables, references, and cross-referencing in the text makes it worth it--especially for graduate students who plan to use parts of the text in their thesis.
• Figures should look clean and professional, using consistent font families (sans serif like Arial or Helvetica) and sizes (8-10 pt). I recommend using Adobe Illustrator / Adobe Photoshop for final touches of figures. Chemical structures should always be drawn in ChemDraw, preferably using the ACS style. Graphs should be prepared programmatically using tools like Plotly (if they benefit from being interactive; the plotly_white template looks nice), seaborn, matplotlib, or similar programs. I strongly prefer that you don’t make plots in Excel because they aren’t generated programmatically and are harder to reproduce. See https://serialmentor.com/dataviz/ for a nice introduction to data visualization and figure preparation.
• Please do not ever submit work for publication (abstracts, posters, papers) without making sure I’ve had a chance to look it over.

Grants

• Writing proposals and securing funding for the group is one of my primary responsibilities, but it is also good practice for you to develop your research and communication skills. I hope that with few exceptions, graduate students and especially postdocs will help craft grant proposals for the lab (as long as it doesn’t significantly detract from the time you need to spend on your research). This includes brainstorming, writing text, making figures, and attending meetings with potential collaborators.
• When articulating research ideas for a proposal, keep in mind the Heilmeier Catechism.

Literature

• It’s your responsibility to stay on top of the state of the field for your research project. It’s always good to begin a project with a thorough understanding of what has been done before so we don’t end up accidentally reinventing the wheel (or worse, working all the way to a manuscript that we realize does not represent a novel contribution).
• We have a #papers channel in Slack where you should post anything and everything that looks interesting and broadly relevant to the group. If it’s only of interest to you or a subset of the group, still consider posting it to one of the research-related channels; this helps me know what papers I should be reading to keep up with your topic. Read it before you post so you can provide a few bullet points summarizing the main results. If anyone thinks it’s worth a deep dive, please suggest or volunteer to present it in an upcoming group meeting.
• I highly recommend setting up Google Scholar alerts with as many keywords as you can think of. Also, set Google Scholar alerts to "Follow" researchers in your field.
• You should make sure you have a good citation reference manager. I personally use Mendeley that lets me quickly download and categorize papers I have open online. You should save every paper that has even the slightest chance of being useful in the future (e.g., referring back to, citing in a paper, sharing with a colleague). You can copy Mendeley's references as BibTeX to paste into .bib LaTeX files.

Fellowships and Awards

• Keep an eye out for fellowships that you’re eligible to apply for. We can work together to help prepare a competitive application for you. Pay attention to deadlines and special requirements.
• Applying for fellowships will help your career and also with the lab budget. I am willing to spend a lot of time working with you to craft your proposals and statements. Group members are also encouraged to share their application materials within the group regardless of whether they were successful.
• You should also be on the lookout for internal and external awards. If you find one that’s relevant to your situation, you should feel comfortable asking me to nominate you. Don’t feel bad for seeking external recognition!
• Try to give me 2 weeks notice to prepare a recommendation letter if I don’t already have a recent one on file. Send me your updated CV, any materials related to the application, and anything you would like me to highlight in my letter.

Graduate Student-Specific Information

• We should be discussing your thesis proposal a few months after you have joined the group. As mentioned above, we should work together to define your research topic so you have ample time to become familiar with the literature and formulate a plan.
• Your thesis is unlikely to consist of one continuous, fully-cohesive project. Most theses end up being collections of different projects, each resulting in some publication or other output, that are thematically similar or build off of one another. We should begin a conversation about the “story” of your thesis several months before you begin writing it. We should make sure there is time to go through several revisions before it is due.
• If you have published 3 or more papers in peer-reviewed journals within the period of you studies towards a Degree (PhD), the Technion allows you to submit a "paper-collection thesis". In this case, you should only write a thorough introduction and summary for the thesis, describe each paper, and include the papers in your thesis. This is a significant time-saver. If you can, try aiming for at least 3 publications as the leading author. If you have more than 3 publications, let's think together which ones you should include.

Undergraduate Student-Specific Information

• As an undergraduate researcher, you will be working closely with a graduate student or postdoc (once the group grows a bit larger - for now undergraduate students work directly with Alon). The two of you should be meeting at least weekly (in person or via Zoom), even if you have frequent communication through other means (e.g., Slack) between meetings. I will join these meetings as-needed, since I am also invested in your success but might not have enough time to commit to a weekly frequency.
• You’re encouraged to attend group and subgroup meetings! Depending on your project, I may suggest that you present a technical talk at a group meeting. This is a good and supportive environment to practice giving presentations.

Opportunities for Outreach

• Group members are highly encouraged to organize and participate in outreach activities! Please let me know if you hear of events where the group can have a large presence.

Professional Development and Career Guidance

• One of my primary goals is to make sure you are well equipped for the next stage of your career and have all of the support and connections you need. I will provide my network of connections from academia and industry to each of you. We should periodically discuss your career goals, at least once per year, to make sure you’re on the best course.
• Graduate Students and Postdocs will be required to fill an Individual Development Plan form once a year and bring it along to an annual development meeting we will have.