Over the summer, I have focused my own professional development on productivity and strategic planning within a academic research environment. I was motivated to spend some time thinking abut this after realizing that our research team has grown substantially with upwards of ten members starting this fall. I read this paper in Molecular Cell and felt motivated to put a version of this plan into action this fall as a way to improve our team productivity and communication.

On Friday September 15th, we spent the day working together as a group, discussing tools that we can we can use to make our research time more productive and efficient so that we are better able to balance our research, and teaching responsibilities with our personal lives. We also spent a considerable amount of time working on individual strategic plans for the fall semester. We will meet again in December to evaluate how well we were able to put our strategic plans into action over the course of the semester. Personally, I have found that my semester plan has helped me to prioritize my tasks and I feel much better organized as a result.

This week we also had our first lab meeting led by Emma. We had a great discussion with each person bringing and presenting a paper from the peer-reviewed literature that was important to their development as a scientist. It was a great first lab meeting! At our next lab meeting Rachael is going to teach the group how to work with R markdown.

math.epi.lab