Social & Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

Lab’s atmosphere

We expect all lab members to contribute to a productive and friendly environment. This includes treating your colleagues with respect, listening to others’ viewpoints, and ideas, and ensuring the lab is a place where everybody feels welcome and appreciated. We intend to build an inclusive environment where diverse identities, cultures, experiences, and thinking are welcomed and valued.

Mentorship

Together, we will define clear expectations about each other at the beginning of our collaboration. These concerns, for example, the degree of autonomy in the work, setting deadlines, scheduling meetings, etc. As a PI, I value regular communication (open door policy). If you are anxious about your academic performance, stressed about balancing work and life, or unsure about planning your future, we can talk about it.

Collaborations

Most of us are employed on specific research projects. This implies that we have some responsibilities to our funders. Second, we have responsibilities to our host institution (Ghent University) and department (Department of Experimental Psychology), as they provide a workspace workspace and resources for us to perform our research. This being said, we very much encourage exploring new ideas and methods. Although we want to encourage you to seek for complementary knowledge and skills within the lab, and possibly collaborate with other members of the lab as much as possible, we also encourage you to establish collaborations outside our lab whenever your project might benefit from it. If I am the “main” promotor of your PhD or postdoc project, I do ask you to be transparent about potential collaborations and side projects.

Work-life balance

I do not require lab members to come or leave work at a defined time each day. Working from home is of course possible. However, we encourage people to be at the department at least three days per week to promote socialization and scientific collaboration between the members of the lab and the department. We encourage members of the lab to take part in lab meetings, seminars, journal clubs, and other scientific or social events happening at the Faculty. You are not expected to work outside regular working hours, or during the weekends (and the PI is not expected to do so either), unless we are trying to meet an important deadline (for example, for a paper or project submission).

However, we do respect different values and backgrounds, so we think it’s also fine if some people like to work out of regular working hours. But it’s important to set up a boundary and get to each other’s habits. For people who do work out of prime time, it’s not expected that they will get a response from other people.

Training and networking opportunities

Senior students and postdocs are encouraged to organize tutorial sessions on using OSF, GitHub, and scientific tools (if the department doesn’t have such training). Or if resources and time allow, we encourage and support students to attend summer school/workshop/conference, etc.

Responsible and reproducible science

Open science is important and we expect all members of the lab to practice open science. Raw data and analysis code that we generate will be made publicly available, as much as possible, on the Open Science Framework (OSF). Studies will be pre-registered on OSF.