Berkeley Grad Students Learn Lab Management Skills

Traditionally, graduate training in science focuses on developing technical skills and expertise. However, when graduate students advance in their careers, managing a group of people often becomes a key responsibility. Formal training in handling interpersonal interactions is rare or ad hoc, and graduate study tends to neglect the skills needed to manage a lab effectively. 

A group of graduate students at Berkeley has put together a unique seminar series to address this education gap: SLAM (Science Leadership and Management).  Teresa Lee (one of the organizers in her final year in Molecular and Cellular Biology) told me: "This seminar focuses on the importance of leadership and management skills in a scientific context, while covering some practical aspects of maintaining an efficient and productive lab." The target audience for this course includes upper-level graduate students and post-docs in science who have broad interests and backgrounds. "We strongly believe that the skills discussed will be applicable to a variety of career paths", she added.

One of the original founders of SLAM, Anna Goldstein (Chemistry, 5th year) started the project in 2012. "I noticed that many of my peers were dissatisfied with the quality of management in their labs, and I wondered if there was anything that we could do to change the culture of academic science and bring to light the importance of training scientists in effective management techniques. I recruited four like-minded graduate students to join me in this effort, and we decided to host a weekly series of guest lectures by scientists to discuss the best practices of how to run a lab."

The students originally designed the series as a course, using the Cohens' book 'Lab Dynamics: Management and Leadership Skills for Scientists' as a text.  Carl Cohen told me "I'm gratified to see graduate students understanding the importance of developing interpersonal and management skills before they shoulder the responsibility of managing their own labs. These students are breaking the pattern of scientists focusing on the technical aspects of running a lab and ignoring the people issues."

The SLAM seminar series is open to graduate students and post-docs on a weekly drop-in basis throughout the Fall semester. These seminars cover the broad range of skills and considerations necessary to run an academic lab, topics like mentorship, communication, lab administration, and starting as a new PI. Around 40 students showed up each week for the class.

According to another organizer, John Haberstroh (3rd year Physics student),, "We try to bring in both experienced and new PIs and scientists as speakers, as well as experts from the leadership and management sphere to try to present a well-rounded and well-informed collection of opinions. We think that having a diversity of people with varied real-life experiences allows people to better understand the breadth of possibilities for scientific leadership and management."

Funding for the seminar comes from a variety of sources: "We’re supported financially by QB3 (the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences), Bob Bergman (distinguished professor of Chemistry at Berkeley, who is also faculty advisor to our group), the Berkeley Chemistry department and, for 2014 we are very excited to be receiving major funding from Berkeley Visiting Scholars and Postdocs Affairs, since we’ve been reaching a lot of Berkeley postdocs along with grad students." said Ben Thuronyi, a 5th year student in Chemistry.

At the end of the seminar, I was pleased to offer a full-day interactive workshop on "Conflict Management and Negotiation" to give SLAM participants hands-on practice in handling difficult situations and people in a research laboratory context.

Teresa has advice for grad students or postdocs thinking about organizing a SLAM seminar series for their own department or campus: "If you think this sounds like a great idea, but are worried about the time-commitment or finding support at your university, I’d like to reassure you. It’s true that, as with any seminar series, there is a significant time commitment during the planning stage and whenever you host a speaker - but overall, it’s very manageable in the context of an entire semester." And the students have even put together a SLAM Organizer's Handbook.  Teresa observes that "while the handbook is Berkeley specific, it should be useful to anyone trying to develop a similar course - feel free to email us to get a copy."

You can reach the SLAM organizers at Berkeley.SLAM@gmail.com.