After celebrating, you’ll have a chance to get wheels in motion for selected things that will benefit from some early action. Two things are useful to consider tackling first: (1) So that incoming graduate students and undergraduate students will see your new lab as a possibility, get yourself added to your new department’s and/or graduate program’s website; build your own lab’s website; and use social media to announce your lab. (2) Request demos of large pieces of equipment, like microscopes, from companies. Companies can generally offer to demo equipment on site at your postdoc lab. If you make decisions on big pieces of equipment early, this accommodates lead time often necessary to get the equipment delivered to your new lab so that your first rotation students can start in the lab without too much delay. Large pieces of equipment can sometimes have specific parts on backorder, and any resulting delays can create problems. For example, the microscope you need will feel like a useless doorstop until the most critical lens arrives. Some institutions will allow you to spend some start-up funds before you arrive, so that you can begin to place orders early. If support from equipment company representatives is important after purchase, as it can be for microscopes (a rep that can loan parts that need repair can save a lot of headaches), then be sure to ask your future colleagues about the effectiveness of reps for different companies before making major purchasing decisions.
Sometimes another lab is closing down or moving and leaving glassware, pipettors, and equipment behind. Once you’ve accepted a job offer, it’s a good idea to ask the chair if this is anticipated, and plan to scavenge useful items with permission when they become available.
Before you arrive in your new position, you might consider hiring a short-term personnel to start when you do, or even earlier, to help with purchasing and unpacking. In general, hiring people is governed by more defined rules than is buying materials, because hiring is regulated by employment laws. These laws can require openly posting positions, which can help you get a larger and more diverse set of applicants than you might otherwise. You can further grow and diversify the applicant pool by encouraging people to apply, soliciting recommendations for such people from other new PIs through New PI Slack [20], Twitter, and from colleagues, especially junior faculty at your new institution. You may also consider recent graduates or gap year students. You can also hire work-study students at your new institution to help with setting up the lab. Your new department’s human resources specialists can advise you on navigating hiring requirements.
Equipment and supply purchases are sometimes governed by contracts negotiated between vendors and the university. Your department’s accountants can explain any equipment and supply purchase rules and whether you are required to complete any training to make purchases. Product representatives from multiple suppliers may reach out to you as new PIs often make many purchases at once. New investigators can sometimes negotiate discounts. While not all of the lab startup deals from suppliers are in fact a deal, some significant discounts are possible when buying in bulk. Ask other labs what they pay for frequently-used services like DNA sequencing and for ordering primers so that you can be aware of discounts to request from your sales reps. Some institutions allow purchases from Amazon, or eBay for used equipment. As you begin purchasing equipment and supplies for the lab, you will spend some time trying to cut costs on big purchases and frequent purchases. It will take some practice to minimize the time you spend researching economical purchases. At some point, you may delegate the supplies purchasing role to a technician or assistant that you hire, or have each person in the lab make their own supplies purchases as needed, but it will be useful for you to learn the ropes at first so that you can be aware of any unanticipated issues.
Some newly hired PIs will get a start on writing their first grant proposal, or even submit one, before arriving. Grant writing strategies are covered in a separate article [1]; here, we review just selected matters that may help with envisioning the process in advance. Once you have a suitable funding source (like NIH) identified, it can be helpful to email a program officer there that handles grants in your subfield to ask for a short phone or video meeting. Program officers can evaluate whether the aims you plan to propose are suitable for a specific funding mechanism or review panel, and sometimes they will share other advice. You can also start to collect a list of awards specific to junior faculty such as Pew and Searle Scholars programs and ask your new chair about being nominated for ones that only accept limited numbers of proposals from each institution; some applicants will ask about being nominated for these before accepting a job offer. Some institutions keep especially useful resources of funding opportunities that anyone can access online, including funding opportunities reserved for early-career faculty and underrepresented minority researchers [22, 23]. Other junior faculty may share lists of grants they have applied for, and they may share successful proposals to use as models as you prepare your own. For all grant proposals that you plan to write, be sure to contact your new institution’s office that handles grant submission (commonly called a Sponsored Projects office or a Sponsored Research office) as well as the administrative people handling grant proposals in your department to find out what they will need. Within-institution deadlines are commonly a few days to a week before a funding agency’s deadline, because they will need to check proposal paperwork for problems and sign off on proposals. Administrative people within your own department can sometimes help with preparing budgets and other paperwork parts of proposals; it’s a good idea to ask faculty in your new department about the help that department administrators can typically provide.
Upon arriving in your new position, you’ll start to build a team. For many new PIs, building a strong team can become one of their most satisfying new roles in science. Building a strong team can also be challenging, and it can be critical to your success as a PI. You will want to consider the extent to which you will micromanage lab members’ work and/or encourage and support independence, and for people to work independently vs. in teams, to promote both your scientific goals and your lab members’ career development. Even in labs where each lab member has a completely independent project, the group of people has the potential to interact in healthy ways that can help everyone. People may have skills and interests that complement each other (like the old Super Friends cartoons — Wonder Woman stops the bullets, the Wonder Twins transform into useful forms, and Aquaman takes care of underwater tasks, or teaches others how to do so). It can be helpful to seek lab members with these criteria in mind. Diversity in multiple senses can help contribute to a strong team [24, 25]. For this reason, it is important to fight the urge to look for clones of yourself in prospective hires. And it can be helpful to consider your own goals, as you framed them in your job talk(s) or in grant proposals that you are envisioning. Sometimes lab members with specific interests can help relieve demands on your time; for example, a lab member interested in microscopy might be happy to serve as a second point person for interacting with microscope companies.
As you’re considering taking on new lab members, keep in mind whether potential lab members have emotional maturity too. A strong experimentalist who cannot interact well with a diverse team and respect others (often described as a “dominant negative” lab member) can harm team dynamics and/or slow other people’s research progress. Interviews and rotations can be an opportunity to look for healthy interactions between people. There may be a temptation to avoid conflict or hang on too long to a poor fit, but all lab members contribute to the collective environment, and a PI’s inaction often can be damaging. And a group with healthy interactions will contribute strongly to their own team building atmosphere. It can be helpful to watch for natural team-building initiative among lab members and to encourage it.
You’ll want to make your lab a welcoming place for potential lab members both in terms of the atmosphere among lab members and in terms of how the lab space is organized. As your salary will generally jump up in the transition from postdoc to PI, it may be helpful to consider the last $1000 or so of your annual PI salary as for the lab — for a lab coffee machine, bluetooth speakers, a food fridge, and in the longer term, for lab dinners and other social events. You’ll thank yourself later! Also remember that such perks are not a substitute for the culture you’ll seek to build: it’s even more important for lab members to feel nurtured and supported. If you’re naturally shy, develop regular habits to be in the lab interacting with people. In general, people in the lab will appreciate when their opinions are solicited and considered, for example when you are considering adding new lab members or making major purchases. You may not always agree with the feedback you get. You may even overrule the feedback for important reasons, but listening and understanding the perspectives of those who will be interacting most frequently with new people and equipment is invaluable [26, 27].
It’s wise to give yourself plenty of chances to interact with potential rotation students: interview as many prospective grad students visiting your department or graduate program each spring as possible, seek opportunities to meet the new grad students who arrive each fall. In your first couple of years, consider volunteering for the admissions committee that reviews graduate school applications for your program. Become aware, though, of the time you would be committing first. It’s a good idea to try to limit your committee work before you have your first grant supporting the lab’s research (and chairs and colleagues will generally respect this need, assigning you to a light load of select committees at first), but the admissions committee can be a valuable one to join when you’re seeking graduate students if the time required is not too burdensome at your institution. For campuses with large numbers of partially overlapping departments and programs, you might also explore whether you can be affiliated with multiple graduate programs on your campus, to recruit from multiple pools of incoming graduate students each year. Having access to multiple pools of graduate students may aid in your goal to find graduate students who are good fits for your lab.
The graduate students who start in your first year or two will have incentives well aligned with your own goals toward tenure: making discoveries and reporting them in publications in your pre-tenure years (hence the advice above about setting yourself up to take rotation students into a fully functioning lab as early as possible). In general, when your own incentives and the incentives of the people in your lab are well aligned, this can help many things in your lab go smoothly. For this reason, and because you’ll be working toward healthy relationships with the people in your new lab, it’s a good idea to get to know what motivates the people in your lab both as you’re considering taking people on and as their goals evolve over time [28]. Do they have enough freedom to encourage their own creative thinking and for them to grow as independent scientists? Having an atmosphere where people feel comfortable taking some risks and also talking about their motivations can help. It is especially important to consider the challenges and circumstances of those who may come from a different background than you. You can encourage lab members to complete any of several types of individual developmental plans, for example MyIDP [29], at least annually, as an opportunity to review their long-term career goals and to review whether they’re working toward those goals. Graduate students and postdocs have diverse career interests and skills they’re seeking to develop [30,31,32,33]. They will need to spend some of their time exploring options for their continued careers, for example by attending workshops, gaining teaching experience and experience in scientific outreach. Your support toward their own goals will be appreciated. Often, time spent cultivating one’s soft skills, career path, and network will energize, refocus, and motivate their science as well [34].
Recruiting postdocs when you’re a junior faculty member can be difficult because you will be less well known than many of your senior colleagues. Some new PIs work on developing an online presence, for example on Twitter, to help students and colleagues become aware of their work. Twitter can be a great place to share what you do, solicit feedback, and work on community building. Opportunities to interact with graduate students at other institutions — for example giving invited seminars, contributing a little to courses that students travel to, or meeting graduate students at conferences — can also contribute to recruitment of postdocs to your lab. These opportunities also serve the reason that most of us do science in the first place, i.e. to make discoveries and to share the discoveries with each other. Sometimes these opportunities can seem hard to come by as a new faculty member, but consider adding your name to lists of seminar speakers at New PI Slack or other initiatives that serve to increase speaking opportunities for early career or underrepresented groups. Once you have postdoc applicants, it’s a good idea to talk to their PhD advisor directly, because conversations often produce more candid evaluations of strengths and weaknesses than a letter will.
Undergraduate students can also contribute to a lab environment. Training undergraduates has the potential to contribute to both your graduate students’ and postdocs’ career development. From large undergraduate student populations, there is a great potential to recruit ethnically and racially diverse undergraduates, who can contribute to strengthening your lab and the scientific field more generally by bringing diverse perspectives. Use your colleagues’ input on how to recruit undergraduate researchers at your institution and how to structure the undergraduate research experience to support benefits to both the student and the lab’s research goals.
These days, PIs often generate an onboarding document that outlines lab policies and expectations — what you expect from lab members, and what they can expect from you [35, 36]. These documents can save time and reduce miscommunication. It is helpful to spend considerable reflective time envisioning the type of lab dynamics and culture that you want to build. Create a prioritized list of the character traits, work ethics, diversity, and professional behaviors that you envision in your group, considering expert advice [9, 24, 25], and use these to build a mission statement for the document. Once you have members in the lab, it can be useful to rebuild this document on occasion with everyone’s input, to help make the document more useful and to increase everyone’s genuine support for a useful set of expectations. As you gain lab members, you will likely want to improve your ability as a mentor; online resources can help [37,38,39], and some institutions offer local training workshops.
Maintain a professional relationship with your lab members. Being a new PI can be lonely at times, and it can be tempting to put yourself on equal footing as one of the group. But keep in mind that there is an inevitable power dynamic: they will generally be aware that you have a great deal of control over their ability to succeed [40, 41]. Ignoring the existing power dynamics can lead to issues down the road. To promote a healthy environment, it can be useful to encourage lab members to cultivate broad networks of peers and additional PIs to give them input, to acknowledge that you and members of the lab may have interpersonal conflicts at times, and to start off relationships stating that you are committed to working through any conflicts that do arise.
In a position now where you have some responsibility for others (mentoring, teaching, serving on admissions committees, etc.), you should consider with some care not just what you’re doing but also what you’re not doing. In positions of responsibility, people are reasonably held responsible for both, which can be an equally daunting and exciting challenge to aim to meet. Take some time to read and/or discuss with colleagues issues that are important to the practice of science — for example, diversity issues and inclusive environments, unconscious bias, mental health issues, and ethical conduct.
There are many ways to be a successful independent scientist. For example, some PIs choose to work at the bench their entire career with a small number of PhD students. Some prefer challenging themselves to run effectively as big a lab as possible. Some prefer a lab of mostly postdocs, or mostly PhD students, or undergraduate students. Some choose to focus on developing new techniques for a field. Some keep research topics continuous from each lab member to the next, and others prefer to try new lines of research frequently. Keep in mind that you don’t need to be all of these things. Your colleagues in your institution and your field provide you a variety of useful models to consider as you shape your own ideas of the kind of scientist you’d like to be.