The Brook Lab is an equal-opportunity group, committed to enacting anti-racist and anti-sexist policies to promote inclusivity in our lab, the biological sciences, and the academy. We believe that black lives matter, womenâs rights are human rights, and no life is illegal. Laboratory members hail from a variety of backgrounds, including underrepresented ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, and lifestyles. We value and applaud our differences, which we view as our strengths, and we do not tolerate intolerance expressed in any form both within and outside our lab group.
We believe that open policies and expectations promote a more equitable and inclusive laboratory environment. This âLab Values and Policiesâ is a living document designed to provide guidelines for conduct for the PI, postdocs, PhD students, lab managers, and collaborators who make up the Brook Lab.
In Berkeley, the land on which we gather, inhabit, work, and live represents the original homeland and traditional territory of the xuÄyun (Huichin), the original landscape of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people. We recognize the Indigenous peoples as original stewards of this land and all the relatives within it. These lands continue to be embedded with the rich histories and struggles for the survival of each nation. Berkeleyâs founding came at a dire cost to Native Nations and peoples whose land this University was built upon. This acknowledgment is the education and inclusion we must practice in recognizing our institutional history, responsibility, and commitment. Read more on the UC Berkeley Centers for Educational Justice and Community Engagement website.
In Madagascar, where we conduct the bulk of our field work, the land represents the original homeland of the Malagasy people, who arrived to the island around 2000 BCE, traveling from modern-day Indonesian and shortly after from Africa. Today, Madagascar is home to 18 distinct ethnic subgroups, who speak varying dialects of Malagasy and inhabit different regions of the country. The Brook lab members from the Global North, in particular, humbly recognize that field work in Madagascar would not be possible without the support, contributions, and sacrifice of both historical and modern-day Malagasy. We affirm our commitment to scientific capacity building, development, and equitable attribution of scientific credit to the original stewards of the land in which we work.
A weekly hour-long lab meeting forms the core of our laboratory culture. We hold these meetings as video conferences to facilitate equal partnership with our colleagues who are not based in Berkeley, most particularly those who are based in Madagascar. We set the calendar for lab meeting on a semesterly basis, with different lab members taking turns leading each session. We open each semester with a lab meeting dedicated to discussions and readings surrounding issues related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).
After our inaugural DEI meeting, we alternate between weeks focused on âResearch Updatesâ and âScience Lessons.â Prior to the central topic of the day, all lab meetings open with individual updates where each lab member shares one positive result from the week, one frustration, and one topic of anticipation for future weeks.
âResearch Updatesâ are informal presentations designed to solicit feedback from the rest of the lab about work-in-progress (data analysis, project design, grant/proposal/paper writing).
âScience Lessonsâ are more flexible: we ask only that you teach us all something new. This can take the form of a journal club, a review of a particular area of the literature, a tutorial on a useful tool, or a facilitated discussion of relevant science or science-related news.
You should expect, on average, to lead ~two lab meetings per quarter, one âResearch Updateâ and one âScience Lessonâ. We are also always available for impromptu meetings if a lab member needs to practice a talk or receive quick feedback on a piece of work.
Students, postdocs, and lab managers who make up the UC Berkeley contingent of the lab are expected to attend regular half-hour meetings with Cara. The schedule for these will be made available at the beginning of the semester, and you can sign up on Calendly as frequently as you would likeâsufficient timeslots for all members of the lab will be available each week, but you do not need to sign up weekly unless you wish to. It is advisable to aim for an every-other-week cadence, however, especially for new students. One-on-one meetings can take place in person or digitally, as you choose. The agenda is yours during this timeâwe can discuss ongoing work, future plans, or anything else you may need. I am also available to meet in impromptu settings at other times during the week for both UC Berkeley and University of Antananarivo members of the labâplease donât be shy to ask!
Funding is rarely discussed openly in academic settings but is generally a critical component of scientific research. I am trying to make this a more open dialogue in the Brook Lab. Explicit funding policies are as follows:
If you are a UC Berkeley postdoc or technician or a University of Antananarivo PhD student, your salary is covered by the lab for the duration of your contract and subject to renewal on an annual basis (UC postdoc appointments are two-year contracts, per union negotiations). If you are a UC Berkeley PhD student, you are funded through a combination of departmental funds, training grants, personal fellowships, and grant money from the lab. I expect and encourage all PhD students and postdocs to pursue fellowship opportunities, as grant writing is good practice, and fellowships are prestigious additions to a CV. UC Berkeley Department of Integrative Biology guarantees PhD students five years of funding with semesterly Graduate Student Instruction (GSI, the Berkeley word for âTAâ) service; however, I will aspire to substantially reduce the number of semesters you are required to GSI by supporting you in fellowship applications and writing your role into my grant applications. Note that two semesters of GSI service are required to graduate from the program.
Per university policy, UC Berkeley salaries include medical and retirement benefits.
It is the duty of the PI to support student and postdoc research interests financially. I will work to raise money for projects you have proposed, and I will fund publication fees on your work, though I ask that you seek fee reductions or waivers when possible. I also encourage students and postdocs to apply for small grants, as these are great opportunities to fine-tune your research questions, while also boosting your rĂ©sumĂ©. A list of small grants with links to websites can be found here, including several that are UC Berkeley-specific opportunities â please add as you find other opportunities.
UC Berkeley and University of Antananarivo PhD students, postdocs, and lab technicians working in the Brook Lab will have the opportunity to purchase one computer for personal research use during their tenure in the labâthis can be acquired immediately upon entering the lab or at a later date, as each person sees fit. The exact specifications of the machine will be worked out on a case-by-case basis between the student and the PI. Please be aware that UC Berkeley monitors all computer purchases and registers machines within their network, and all machines must be returned at the end of each individualâs tenure within the lab.
UC Berkeley graduate students will have access to $1000 to be used as desired for personal development (monitors, headphones, books, workshops, etc.) across the course of their PhD. These funds can be used in a single lump sum or periodically throughout the duration of training. All PhD students will be issued a private chartstring at the beginning of their enrollment to allow them to charge these accounts freely. Equipment or tech purchases exceeding $200 will not be allowed in the last 12 months prior to graduation. Please use your funds early.
UC Berkeley PhD students, postdocs, and technicians will be funded to attend one domestic conference annually per person for a full value of ~$500 (conference fees, travel, lodging). I encourage attendance at the annual Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases (EEID) meeting, which I almost always attend, though I recognize this may not be the best academic fit for everyone. Lab members interested in attending more than one conference annually are encouraged to apply for travel grants or use personal development funds. On rare occasions, I will consider funding multiple meetings in the same year with justification.
University of Antananarivo PhD students will be funded to attend one international conference per person during the duration of their PhD tenure (conference fees, travel, lodging). If opportunities for domestic conferences that are scientifically relevant arise within Madagascar, the lab will fund attendance to these, as well.
Outside of the Brook lab, UC Berkeley graduate students in the Department of Integrative Biology can apply for $600 each year to support their dissertation research, in addition to another $600 to support conference travel. See here for detailsâapplications are due on the last Monday of each month.
Additionally, UC Berkeley grad students are eligible to apply for travel and professional development grants through the Graduate Division ($600 for California travel, $900 for US travel, and up to $1500 for international travel). Check here for detailsâapplications are accepted quarterly (fall, spring, summer).
UC Berkeley postdoctoral scholars are eligible to apply for professional development funding through the Visiting Scholar and Postdoc Affairs (VSPA) office. Details are posted annually on the VSPA website.
Lifestyle freedom is one of the great perks of being an academic, and I do not police strict hours in the lab. I often work odd hours or from various locations (home, cafés, library, etc.) myself, and I trust you to do the same. We recognize that our team is composed of self-motivated and ambitious scientists that may choose to deviate from a traditional 9 to 5 workday in order to meet our collective goals. Research is project-based work, and some weeks are long and intense while others less so. I expect you to work hard and take advantage of the opportunities afforded to you, but I also value work-life balance and maintaining health and sanity. Please be kind to yourself so that you do not burn out.
You are entitled to 4 weeks of vacation, 8 designated holidays, and 12 sick days per year per university policy. You can allocate these as you see fit, and I trust you to keep your own calendarâif you work on a Sunday so you can take a Friday off when family is in town, that is perfectly reasonable. For longer vacations, I simply ask that you keep me informed of your plans a month or two in advance. For my own part, I often take vacation as: ~1.5 weeks off around the holidays, ~2 weeks off in the summer, and a smattering of long weekends interspersed throughout the year.
Due to our cross-continental extent, the Brook Lab has many policies in place that support remote work. That said, UC Berkeley PhD students and postdocs are expected to live in Berkeley to attend courses and participate in departmental and lab activities. Deviations from this practice should be addressed with Cara on a case-by-case basis.
University of Antananarivo PhD students will be funded to train at UC Berkeley for a minimum of one four week session during the course of their PhD research. These trainings will require significant advance planning and flexibility with timing on the part of the student.
We are a family-friendly lab with several parents on staff. Parental leave during employment follows the policies of UC Berkeley, as outlined here. That said, I am more than happy to negotiate flexible working arrangements for new parents; please let me know if this becomes an issue under consideration for you, and I am happy to discuss arrangements that will work for both you and the lab.
Code and data for all projects carried out in the lab must be uploaded to a project folder on our Brook Lab GitHub team platform, where we also store composite datasets available for any lab member to use following clearance from the PI (Cara). Use of lab data resources should be accompanied by a data-sharing discussion with the PI, and it is likely that any members of the lab involved in data collection (in particular those based in Madagascar) will need to be included as co-authors on the associated work.
We keep track of helpful computing resources and tips (including use of the UC Berkeley computing cluster, Savio) in our teamâs resources on GitHub.
Additionally, we also communicate regularly and share progress on Slack.
We are committed to making our data, methods, and research findings freely accessible and available whenever possible to support future use in meta-analyses, reviews, and revisitations of our work. We reserve the right to restrict access in limited cases (e.g., human subjects data, exact animal locations) to respect privacy and confidentiality and/or reduce harm to threatened animal populations. In addition to sharing data and code for published manuscripts via our Github platform, we are also committed to publishing final manuscripts and intermediate research products in the most accessible formats available to us. Finally, we encourage all members of the lab to engage in public outreach (e.g., blog posts, popular press articles, public talks) in addition to professional outreach (e.g., scientific conferences).