Pimm is looking for examples of good laboratory homepages — he has links to a few, but is looking for more.
There is actually a conundrum there: most labs don’t want to reveal work in progress on the web (except to a limited extent), they aren’t particularly interested in public PR (something it would be good to change), and they are mostly populated with students and post-docs with a limited tenure and a specific brief that does not include webmastering. Most of the lab web pages I’ve seen out there are simple portals to a cv and maybe a few publication pdfs.
Here is the one I made for our lab.
As a graduate student who enjoys making web pages in my spare time, I’ve found that for some reason professors seem to be hesitant to want to put any time into making a web site, even though in my mind it’s important.
Prospective graduate students, members at institutions you may be visiting for seminars, and possibly your undergraduate students (in search of course material) will all potentially be visiting your site. The cost of putting it together well is quickly repaid.
I’m also interested in potential uses of (privately-accessible) dynamic web applications for lab management, such as a readily available protocol database, internal blogs for student/faculty communication, etc.
Our lab has tried to make an effort on this front.
http://www.genomesize.com/gregorylab/
Maybe it’s because revealing any work in progress could tip off a competitor. If our lab is not the first to publish the data then what is there to publish? We’ll endanger our RO1 and other grants, dangering the lab’s existence.
… and what else is there to publish online besides data?
I’m a student who will begin grad school this fall. In my search for programs and potential advisers, lab webpages were very important. They were the primary way I read about a faculty member’s research interests. If someone didn’t have a page explaining their research–unless they were a huge researcher in the field and I already knew them–it automatically meant they wouldn’t make my list of potential people to apply with.
Check out ours: Redfield Lab.
We post our grant proposals as soon as they’re submitted (click on “What we’re planning”), and the “Who we are” and “What we’re doing” pages have links to our blogs about our research-in-progress.
Maybe it’s because revealing any work in progress could tip off a competitor.
Ours acts as a repository for already-published data, short blubs about past projects, and basic public information about current projects – as well as contact information for lab members and such.
The material here is out of date, but this was set up by an undergrad working in my granular media lab, and was pretty snazzy at the time:
http://groups.physics.umn.edu/sand/
In general, those physicists looking at the proerties of granular mdeia have pretty good web sites.
Jim
Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics
Really an institute composed of 9 lab groups. A colleague and I have recently finished the first public version of this site.
Scorpion Systematics Research Group
One of the labs in the SICG; website made by my colleague, a grad student.
Well, I am joining grad school this fall – and when I was applying, lab pages were *very* important in the search for the right professor. An out-of-date lab page made me doubt an otherwise promising piece of research. Luckily though, I got speaking to the Professor, and cleared it up. So, I think that for faculty who want to recruit new students, up-to-date lab pages are very important.
I looked for these things:
What research is going on?
What was published in the past few years?
What are the prof’s former students doing now?
What kind of funds does the lab have?
-Vishvas Vasuki
This is a real concern–I’m doing data analysis for a PI who’s doing some really unique work with sun bears. I had the bright idea to post the data on a lab web page, both to show some exciting work-in-progress, and to maybe interest some funders. The PI signed off on the idea, although not being particularly web-comfortable, I’m not sure how informed a consent it was.
Then I read something you wrote, PZ, about how someone stole your data from one of your pages (if I’m misquoting from memory, I apologize; if I’m extremely off, then I’ll go find the cite and see what it really was). Since this is not my data, I’m even more paranoid about posting it now.
I think, once she publishes, it will be cool to post the data in the way I envisioned, but until then, I don’t want to be the one who inadvertently scooped my own PI.
Rosie, when I get a chance, I will look at your pages to see how you are doing things, since that may give us some ideas on what we’d like to do.
The ‘Purvis Lab’ at Imperial College, London UK, has an excellent homepage. Lots of papaers, recent works, CVs, links and the rest.
http://www.bio.ic.ac.uk/evolve/
and TR, yours too–didn’t mean to miss your comment the first time around…
I need caffeine, stat!
Here’s the one for my boss’ lab (Iain Campbell):
http://www.ocms.ox.ac.uk/idc/home.html
I like the organization of the site, and there’s a decent balance between information for outsiders and useful stuff for lab members, although we could definitely put more information out there for the general public.
A couple of years ago I did a sabbatical in the lab of Jim Ehleringer at the University of Utah. That lab has an excellent website. It encompasses not only the usual pages for staff, students, and postdocs, but some real-time and historical data of carbon dioxide concentrations in the Salt Lake City basin, and other data streams aimed at teaching schoolkids how data are collected and analyzed.
The problem seems to be that lab web pages are rarely a team effort, but are written and updated by one person – who typically isn’t the PI, so the updates stop when (s)he leaves.
Maybe the answer is to have departmental webpeople to keep lab pages up to date. But then we’d probably have only the dry scholarly information up there, and none of the quirky personal stuff – which is what really lets potential students/postdocs know what the lab’s atmosphere is like.
I agree with Vishvas above, I’m currently scoping out grad schools and it’s very frustrating to come across a professor whose CV has papers I find fascinating but has no web links to more information about their lab, current projects, whether they have availabilities, etc.
Another graduate student and I recently started a website for scientists. It is designed to be a meeting place for scientists in the web 2.0. It has social networking and information sharing features, etc.
Because of this site we are learning a lot about how scientists communicate with each other. The sad reality is that most scientists do not communicate with colleagues outside of their lab group or local institution. They are also not very familiar with the internet and how to use it efficiently to communicate.
I should clarify that I’m referring to the average graduate student or post-doc. The exceptions are bloggers, who use the web frequently, and PIs. PIs communicate with their colleagues at meetings and other social functions that students and post-docs are not able to attend. I would guess that most PIs do not feel that they need a good website to communicate with their peers because they don’t use websites to find out about their peers, they talk to them at a meeting.
Lab websites primarily benefit students and post-docs. Web 2.0 is a great opportunity for students and post-docs to give themselves a voice. Instead of making a lab website why don’t scientists make a personal website? This could be used to promote their own research interests and promote themself, without giving away any confidential data. We need a science MySpace and this was one of the motivating factors for our site.
http://www.JeffsBench.com
I’ve updated our lab web page several times, mostly to update the personel page when new lab members arrive/leave. But we do share our lab protocols and data from our zebrafish enhancer trap screen (since we cannot use all of the animals we generate in this screen). We were hoping that other zebrafish labs would see if any enhancer trap lines would be of interest to them, but I don’t think that has happened!
http://zfish.wustl.edu/
And click on tol2 gene list for the enhancer trap data.
I took the photo of the fish on the front page, too.
One solution to the out-of-date webpage syndrome might be this interesting life science research portal generated by the library folks at Cornell University. It utilizes a database to populate the fields for publications, grants, student and postdoc information etc.
It also includes a research area search that allows you to find the life science researchers (in several departments) working on a particular topic (e.g. biodiversity, climate change). A search for “evolution” discovered 109 faculty members at Cornell whose statements of research interest included that word. I don’t know how many of them are named Steve…
Obviously this is a lot of work, but most of it is done by the library staff. And it does give the institution a good place to showcase its research efforts, without relying on those researchers to constantly be updating their webpages!
Biologic Labs
Discovery Institute
Seattle, Wa.
PS KRISTINE YOUR BROOMSTICK IS DOUBLE PARKED.
I used this one quite a bit in grad school:
http://www.stanford.edu/~rnusse/
Particularly the link to the wnt pages:
http://www.stanford.edu/%7ernusse/wntwindow.html
http://ratner.openwetware.org/
Adam Ratner at Columbia University uses OpenWetware!
See the Research Lab pages at Element List for links.
When looking at graduate programs and postdocs I relied extensively on individual faculty websites. People without information online got written off the list.
As a postdoc I feel that my professional website is very important to networking with colleagues and having basic information about my research and interests available for googling.
Most universities make server space available for free to students, faculty, staff and instructions for setting up your own site. Or for a little $ you could buy your name from a commercial site and not have to migrate if you changed schools.
Here are two of that rare creature: philosophy labs.
I was more or less affiliated with the first one while at CMU:
CAAE
LSEC
Not a biologist, but the publications page at our lab is pretty slick (IMO) and automatically generated from a big BiBTeX file. I ever get around to finishing documenting it I’m planning on releasing the code to the public.