Five tips on facilitating an academic research group for new faculty

---

Contributors: Marian Kennedy, John Ballato, and Thompson Mefford

---

Here are five simple tips to help your research group get off the ground or reset the culture and productivity of an existing group. While a research group must have a clear mission, it must also have clear lines of communication between all members and a culture that encourages diving into the foundational literature of the group’s research focus. Based on our experience, we would recommend:

• Set expectations for what being part of the research group will be like.
• Consider having each group member submit a weekly email summarizing their productivity and plans for the coming week to you (the lead investigator).
• Have a weekly group meeting in addition to individual meetings with students in your research group.
• Ask students to develop semester research plans and submit them to you.  Ask for revisions until you are in agreement on those plans.  Then return to this at end of each term to make sure student is on the expected path.
• Create a culture of continuous reading and discussing.
• Put time in your schedule for learning and implementing good management techniques.

The paragraphs below expand on these ideas.  Set expectations for each student joining the research group.

While incoming students have probably talked to peers about research and gotten some information during an initial interview, we would strongly encourage you to set up a welcome email that highlights general expectations.  These emails can gently remind students that they are most likely joining the handful of groups in the world working in this area and that this entry comes with some general expectations. Thompson and John send emails to their new students that highlight several key concepts:

• Each student is a reflection of the group and their research advisor on and off of the main campus. 
• The lead investigator (advisor) is responsible for providing resources, but not there to do the work for the students in the research group.
• That degrees are earned by merit and not based on time completing research or enrolled at an institution.  Students earn degrees based on new knowledge they create from generated data and the analysis of those results.
• Research is research precisely because the study has not been done before, so students need to be patient and diligent. Have a purpose or hypothesis behind every experiment even if that purpose is to test whether something won’t work. There is something to learn from every experiment as long as its thought-out beforehand. Reframing “success” in terms of learning something new helps off-set the fact that most experiments will fail in the sense that they do not result in the expected outcome.
• There are no substitutes for being in the lab, at the library, or writing. Because the student is part of a select experimental research group, it is expected that they will spend a substantial fraction of their productive time in the lab. They must own their research project and are responsible for conducting a close examination of the literature.  Both groups highlight that two hours in the library could save the student two weeks in the lab.
• A research group is a team and that through collective efforts the group will achieve great things.  Be a good team member.
• For a research groups to be at the top, it means that the group must lead through results and that other research groups will follow these initial results.   This can only be achieved by all students in the group working hard and having a constant sense of urgency. 

  Emails describing accomplishments from the prior week and aims for the next week.

We have found that having students send us weekly updates helps the entire Group stay organized. Receiving such emails on Friday prompts us to reflect on each member of the group’s trajectory and to make slight modifications to get them aimed closer to their research targets. To make it easy on the group members, I (Dr. Kennedy) have provided a template for the students that describes what should be emailed to me. Over time, I have added two small additions that ask students to highlight any roadblocks they have and identify their next meetings to ensure everything is on my calendar correctly. Below is some of the text from this template that you might find useful.

Research Completed This Week: This section should include work done during the week that aligns with the project. You might have read research papers, outlined experiments, collected data, analyzed data, etc. In all cases, you should try to include a summary of what you did. If you read a paper, send a paragraph along with the citation. If you collected data, send the plot of the data.

Research to Be Completed Next Week: This section should include all the tasks that you hope to accomplish next week. You can absolutely bullet point these. Please try to have specific goals, such as reading and summarizing 1-2 journal articles related to the wear of high entropy alloys, instead of just stating that you plan to read journal articles.

Roadblocks or Deadlines: In this section, highlight any issues that you need help from Dr. Kennedy on. This includes finding the right staff person, ordering supplies, etc. You should also use this section to update Dr. Kennedy on upcoming deadlines. Some weeks, you will just indicate that there are no roadblocks or upcoming deadlines.

Next Meeting: Indicate when your next meeting is planned with Dr. Kennedy or other group members.

A tip that I picked up from John Ballato was to send a running list to all the group members so that they could see what other researchers were doing each week. This increased synergy between students in the lab who were not working on the same projects. It also allows students in the Group to help each other out if they happen to be, for example, running equipment that week that could also benefit someone else’s research.
Weekly group meetings with all members of your research group encourage direct communication between all team members instead of always channeling through the lead investigator.

John Ballato established a Monday morning group meeting by borrowing the Swedish tradition of “Fika.” Fika involves coffee, a little something to eat (like sweet pastries) and time to catch up with colleagues. It is different than just having a “coffee” break because it is a group activity, and no one can just sit at their desk. With a large research group, the students and postdoctoral researchers have many projects running in parallel. This meeting allows the team members to learn about the projects they are not on and to see the synergy between their work and others in the group. In larger teams, it is not always easy for students to see who they can get help from or where they can work in parallel with others on basic fabrication or characterization steps. Have your students create a research plan for each semester.

This idea that came from my colleague Thompson Mefford. He showed me this technique whenhejoined Clemson back in 2009. The student is asked to first think about and complete the document and then modify it after discussions the group leader and their peers. Since there are often changes over the course of each student’s time in our research groups, we ask that the plan be updated each term. We remind students to continually modify the document to reflect changes in the research hypothesis or expected milestones. We encourage our group members to keep a folder on a network with documents from each semester and keep a printed copy in their laboratory notebook. Below are key parts of my group’s current planning document.

Name: (First and last name)

Date: (Last revision date of this form)

Degree Sought: (BS, MS, MEng or PhD and associated program)

Predicted Graduation: (month/year)

Long-Term Career Goals: Where will you be and what are you doing after graduate school. You might say that you want to work at a national laboratory as a scientist in ten years. This might require completing your undergraduate research project with your advisor and then applying to graduate school.

Thesis, Dissertation or Undergraduate Research Project: What your research objective or research hypothesis is. You should also include a few sentences about how you are approaching it (computational, laboratory experiments, etc.).

Recent accomplishments: What new data or knowledge have you generated n the last month? An example might be “Cleaned data from survey of researchers and adhered to IRB protocols.”

Goals for current semester: Provide a list of goals for rest of this semester, including research objectives and mentoring. Be specific. You can add more numbers as needed. These should align with your stated research hypothesis or research objective stated earlier OR your career plans. Anything that does not align should not be a goal. An example might be “Measure the mechanical properties of chitosan deposited with plasma method using the nanoindenter located in Sirrine Hall Rm. G52.”

Milestones: Provide a list of milestones for rest of this semester, including research objectives and mentoring. Be specific. You can add more numbers as needed. These should align with your stated goals above. Anything that does not align should not be a milestone. Also, I use the numbering system to show how these relate to the goals above. An example might be “Ensure that the nanoindenter is calibrated by testing standard of fused quartz and comparting to published results.” 

List collaborations with other groups: I ask students to keep a running list of the internal and external collaborators they will be working with on a project. For example, a student may be getting samples made by a collaborator at a local manufacturing facility in Greenville, SC. The bullet point would include the contact’s name and how they are affiliated with the project.
Create a culture of continuous reading of literature

I (Dr. Kennedy) had the opportunity to collaborate with faculty in the Clemson Engineering and Science Education department and one of the things that I most enjoyed was how they institutionalized reading of journal papers. Lisa Benson, a professor in Engineering and Science Education at Clemson, was one of the proponents of this practice. The department makes it clear that graduate students should be reading at least 2-3 research papers per week. To help, the students and faculty collectively read one paper together each week and discuss it during their Friday afternoon student organized “lunch and learn.” Two graduate students in the department are responsible for choosing the papers (based on peer suggestions) and facilitating the paper discussions as everyone eats their lunch. This group discussion helps everyone increase their knowledge of basic experimental methods (such as Likert scale development), understand the implications of research study findings by hearing how others integrate them into their findings, and gain a larger understanding of the research landscape of their field beyond their own research project. If your department is large, meeting with two to three other research groups at your institution instead of the whole department may be advantageous. Or start a journal group with a group working on similar work at a different institution.

One of the suggestions that I received from John was to use these meetings to also help teach students about the writing style of our field.  He points out to his students when he does or doesn’t like how a paper is structured or written.  This can lead into discussions about what questions the students might have wanted to ask the authors if they were reviewers during the evaluation of the paper. 
Educate yourself on how to work with and motivate others towards the shared research vision

Over your career you will be lucky enough to work with people driven to pursue their own research interests and not jump to pursue your vision just because you ask them to. You will need to gain the skills to engage collaborators and motivate them towards a shared vision. Yolanda Gil eloquently identified this essential component of running a research group as “learning to work with others” (see “Ten Simple Rules for Starting a Research Group” by in AI Matters 2014). She also highlighted that this was not necessarily a skill that you developed as a graduate student or post doc, so it typically is a skill that is developed through informal educational routes such as reading, observing your best collaborators to identify their practices, or intentional reflection on your experiences to find best practices. In her article, she outlined some common-sense starting points:

• Take the time to listen and observe your group members.
• Approach collaborators on how they will benefit from the research work they are doing.
• Provide a timeline for work to be completed and help them understand they urgency of any deadlines.
• Lead by example by meeting the set deadlines or letting everyone know that the deadline will need to be shifted and when to expect data to be completed.
• Provide a plan for each of your group members to grow their research skills. Each group member will have strong skills and areas for improvement.

About Dr. Ballato: John Ballato is a professor of materials science and engineering at Clemson University, where he also holds the J. E. Sirrine Endowed Chair in Optical Fiber. He has published nearly 500 technical papers and holds 35 U.S. and foreign patents. He is a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society (ACerS), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Physical Society (APS), the Optical Society of America (OSA), and the International Society of Optical Engineering (SPIE), as well as an elected member of the World Academy of Ceramics and the U.S. National Academy of Inventors. . You can find out more about his research here (Wikipedia).

About Dr. Mefford: Thompson Mefford is the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies in the Clemson College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences. He earned his PhD in Macromolecular Science and Engineering in 2007 from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, then completed a postdoc with the Ohio State University Department of Chemistry. His research focuses on developing stable, biocompatible polymer-metal oxide nanoparticle complexes and composites for biomedical, environmental, and energy applications. You can learn more about his research here (Google Scholar).