Lab life

Meetings

Individual: Meetings to catch up one-on-one happen at least once a week. With only a few lab members in the beginning, these meetings are usually spontaneous, frequent, and casual. 

Group: Since we're a new small lab, we don't have critical mass for weekly data/journal clubs yet, and instead we talk about science casually on a daily basis. Once we gather enough lab members, we'll have weekly meetings. 

We participate in a monthly data club with other systems neuroscience labs across our department.

There are a good number of neuroscience seminars across Oxford, both in and outside of our department.

There is also an annual Oxford neuroscience symposium to hear about neuroscience across the university. 

Open Science

We want to actively share our work with the neuroscience community, so we regularly give talks, present at conferences, post submitted papers on bioRxiv, and make our data and code freely available. We also advocate making tools and resources available and maintained for use by other neuroscientists.

Living in Oxford

Oxford is a vibrant city, large enough to support events and gigs but small enough to have tight-knit and easily accessible communities.

It's easy to get into the countryside from Oxford, and it's about an hour's train ride to London. There is also a bus service that runs directly between London and Oxford 24/7, and buses that run directly from Oxford to London airports

The university is composed of many colleges - these are separate from departments, and offer social and academic events to their members. All students are part of a college, and colleges are increasingly offering opportunities for postdocs. 

Work-life balance

It's a great privilege to be able to do science for a living, but producing good science takes a lot of effort and perseverance. Our work is most sustainable when we're able to keep up excitement about science, which is best achieved by switching off on a regular basis. We encourage taking holidays and participating in external events to further your career. The experiments we do can routinely run through weekends, so working time and days can be flexible to let each person be efficient and productive in the way that suits them best.

We believe that a dynamic and interactive lab culture comes from physically working together on a daily basis. Remote working ideally only happens if it's necessary for a particular reason.