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Twenty-two easy ways to power up your lab meetings
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Laboratory meetings are part and parcel of the research experience. Regularly meeting with your colleagues can foster collaborations, build a sense of community and help with problem-solving.
Every group does things in its own way, but meetings usually involve presentations from one or more team members, discussions of relevant papers and updates from the institution.
Lab meetings don’t always have to be so formulaic, however. We collected 22 tips from researchers about traditions or recurring agenda items that can liven things up.
“We do an improv-style lab meeting in which everyone prepares a few slides from their work and another lab member has to present those slides without having seen them before. It always brings lots of laughs and reveals who the more evil colleagues are (those who bring the hardest slides to present). More importantly, it plugs lab members into each other’s projects and lets people learn how to speak without extensive preparation.” — Holly Jones, restoration ecologist at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois
“In our weekly lab meetings, we start with a ‘flashlight’ round, during which each person briefly shares something from the past week or the week ahead, whether scientific, professional or personal. It gives everyone a voice, helps the group to follow each other’s progress and enables people to share challenges, celebrate small wins or thank colleagues for their support. Over time, this has made our meetings more inclusive, empathetic and connected.” — Johanna Joyce, tumour immunologist at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland
“Sometimes, each term, we move our meeting outdoors to a local park, lakeside or hiking trail. We discuss research progress, career plans and personal goals while walking or sitting in nature. Being outside lightens the mood, encourages quieter members to speak up and creates space to talk openly about work–life balance, future paths and family life.” — Ruijie Yang, chemical engineer at the University of Calgary, Canada
“Getting lab members to post asynchronous threaded comments before a lab meeting (we use Basecamp and Bench) gives introverts, international trainees and anyone uncomfortable asking questions publicly a real way to contribute. Our best scientific ideas consistently come from the comment threads, not the live room, and that happens because people had more time to formulate their thinking.” — Matthew Hirschey, cellular biologist at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina
“We are a very interdisciplinary lab, from cell biologists to software engineers, computer scientists and microbiologists. All of our lab meetings begin with the main presenter doing ten minutes of teaching about something from their background. Notable examples include cell culture techniques, Western blotting, molecular bonds, free energy, entropy and modular cloning. It’s a great way to get a bit more perspective about other people’s expertise.” — Harriet Smith, cell biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London
“Instead of having each presenter walk the group through their work from scratch, we circulate a detailed progress note in a shared document beforehand — what they’ve found so far and at which points they’re still stuck. Everyone arrives having already read it, which frees up the meeting for real discussion rather than passive listening, and pushes students to engage with each other’s work, not just their own. Over time, these notes have also become a searchable record that new members can learn from.” — Zhang-Ren Chen, hospital pharmacist and researcher at the First Affiliated Hospital of Jiangxi Medical College, Nanchang University, China