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Welker Lab Core Values

Respect for All

We strive to treat all others with humanity, courtesy, understanding, kindness and compassion, regardless of their identity. We commit to making the time and space to empathize with other points of view. In any interaction, we seek to put a good interpretation on others’ statements rather than to assume bad intent.

We recognize that lab members come from different backgrounds, both professionally and personally. We do not look down on anyone for not understanding a “basic” technique; we instead see it as a learning and teaching opportunity.

Accountability

We acknowledge that no one is perfect, and we should be accountable to ourselves and our team in our strengths and weaknesses. We welcome feedback (including corrective feedback) without prejudice. This principle holds for our scientific goals, as well as any issues that arise when individuals feel that they are not being respected as outlined above.

If group members witness disrespectful behavior or feel that any of the principles above are not being followed, they are encouraged to try to resolve the issue amongst themselves, and then notify Dr. Welker if the issue persists. As employees of ��������Ƶ Boulder, we are obligated to  to a Title IX officer.

Collaboration and Communication

We believe that collaboration both within and outside of the lab is important. Within the lab, it is important that all lab members work together to achieve our goals. All graduate students in the lab will be given a lab job and are also encouraged to work together on research projects.

While working with people in other fields can bring about new ideas, successful collaboration also requires successful communication. We strive to be open and honest from the start of any collaboration and discuss issues like authorship and research scope early on.

Open Science and Outreach

Our success in science and engineering is limited unless the work is accessible and shared. Manuscript pre-prints should be made available at the time of submission on arXiv or BioRxiv, unless there is a compelling reason not to do so. Code and databases should be appropriately commented and made available to members within and outside of our group via Github or other open-source databases. Scientific success is not defined by positive results; negative results can be just as valuable to present to the community to further knowledge.

Part of sharing our work is distributing it outside of the scientific community as well. Because of this, outreach events are an important part of what we do. All graduate students are required to participate in at least two outreach events per year in order to achieve these goals. 

Celebration

We promote a culture of celebration. Doing research and getting a PhD is inherently difficult – you are developing new knowledge that no one has shown before! Many aspects of academia are also drawn out over a long period of time – manuscripts are submitted and usually go through multiple revisions, grants are rejected and resubmitted, and getting approval for your PhD has multiple components. Because of this, we believe it is important to celebrate all points in this process.