I am disturbed by the reduction of opportunities for PhD students and postdocs. The loss of funding for programs will have effects for generations of scientists. Although our research group certainly is not immune, we are financially better off than most.

Thus, we are going to make an effort to increase the number of trainee spots in our group.

I am not doing this because it is the most efficient or easiest way to run a lab. I am doing this because I care about this generation, I love science, and I want there to be great scientists in the future. In many ways, it would be easier for me personally to have a smaller group populated by professional staff.

On the other hand, mentorship can be a sublime experience, with trainees exploring new directions and sparking joy. Watching a young scientist develop is thrilling! But I have found that it works best when expectations are clear up front. Here are some things I would like you to know in addition to our overall expectations of group members.

I believe that our time is a gift, and our funding is a gift from taxpayers and private foundations. I feel gratitude for that every day. I am thrilled every day that we get to do basic research— that’s amazing — and I hope you feel that too.

I want you to translate that into passionate engagement. I am not asking for some insane number of hours at work, or that you ignore the rest of your life, but I really want you to care. That means that if there is a mystery to be solved, you doggedly persevere to figure it out, whatever that takes. That means that you have pride about the quality of your work. In contrast, if your sense is that a PhD or a postdoc is a mediocre-pay intermediate job until you can find something better, I suggest finding a different lab.

The lab rotation is important. This is a time that you can show your ability and motivation. We will come to an agreement about what success looks like for your project. Before you break ground, you should have a clear idea of what I expect of you, and I should have a clear idea of what you expect of me.

Our “niche” is at the intersection of real biological questions, probabilistic modeling, and gradient-based inference (e.g. neural networks). Thus I expect group members to be able to write clean Python, to be able to reason about conditional probabilities, and develop models in PyTorch. I also expect members to be able to read biological literature and think about the relevance of their work. If you want to join the lab, you can brush up on those skills and read relevant papers.

I do not expect you to arrive with jedi time management, consistent emotion regulation, ideal organization, a great command of the literature, spotless code, or perfect focus. However, I expect you to do your very best to improve on those fronts during your time in the group.

These are high standards, no doubt. In exchange you will get my highest level of devoted attention. I will promote the heck out of your career.

I understand that these are challenging times for young scientists. I cannot make any ironclad guarantees about future funding. Heck, I don’t even know if I’ll have a job in 4 years, or if the institutions that we are part of will even vaguely resemble what they were last year. Despite all that, let’s be optimists, take a leap into the void, do our best, and enjoy every minute.

PS: We are an AI-positive group. I understand that there are ethical considerations around AI, and I appreciate those, but until future notice we are all-in for AI increasing the quality and quantity of discoveries we can make. I expect you to explore ways to give yourself AI superpowers.

PPS: I would like to credit Frances Frei for heavily influencing my management style.