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Leaving the laboratory to take up a position elsewhere is an exciting milestone for many young scientists. But sorting through years’ worth of samples and data while preparing for your next career stage — and often a move to a different city or even a different country — can be overwhelming.
Here are seven tips to smooth the transition and make future lab members’ lives easier.
Communicate early
Pip Coen, a neuroscientist at University College London, established his lab in 2023. Although he hopes that none of his four PhD students and postdocs leaves any time soon, he already has a plan for when they do.
No matter the reason for the person’s departure, Coen says, “I’d still much rather [they] told me as soon as possible, so we can prepare.”
For postdocs preparing to launch an independent research career, it’s especially important to know well in advance which ideas, materials and data you can take with you, so that you have time to propose a solid research plan and secure funding before applying for faculty positions, says Walter Chen, a neonatologist at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. Begin this conversation when you start your postdoc, he suggests, and revisit it when submitting your first major paper. Otherwise, there can be “unpleasant surprises” — such as learning that your principal investigator (PI) plans to continue the project you thought you were taking with you.
Document as you go
In the technology world, rigorous and consistent documentation is part of the job. But in academia it can slip through the cracks, with people sometimes feeling that they must choose between staying organized and doing another experiment, says Stefanie Seltmann, who is head of research data management at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin.
Finding this balance is tough but can “save a lot of headaches for you in the future”, says Maria Akopyan, an evolutionary genomics researcher who will be starting her own lab at Rice University in Houston, Texas, this year. Akopyan’s philosophy is to “document things as if someone’s always watching” — that is, so that anybody could look at her lab notebook at any time and understand what was going on.
For those whose documentation practices are less rigorous, Seltmann recommends starting at least six weeks before the move to get your records in order. But many people need considerably more time than that, she warns.
Clean up
Before leaving, Chen recommends a bit of spring cleaning to clear out expired reagents and samples that are no longer worth keeping.
If you have chemicals that are unidentified or that you don’t know how to deal with, get your institution’s environmental health and safety department involved, says Craig Merlic, executive director of the University of California Center for Laboratory Safety in Los Angeles. That can “help properly manage things so that you don’t have accidents”. When in doubt, he says, always treat unknown chemicals as hazardous.
Merlic recalls one incident in which a new graduate student was clearing out chemicals left behind by a previous lab member. As the student emptied a small, unlabelled tube of grey powder, it burst into flames, burnt through their flame-resistant lab coat and caused serious injury. The powder turned out to be lithium aluminium hydride, a highly reactive material.
And don’t neglect radioactive and biohazardous reagents. Create a plan to safely store or dispose of those, too, Merlic says. Your lab manager will thank you for it.
Label and organize
For samples and reagents that are staying in the lab, proper storage, labelling and documentation of their location can save your PI the time and cost of replacing them — and could prevent someone’s work from being thrown off course in the future.
Christina Termini, a cell biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington, recalls the fate of poorly labelled reagents in her previous labs. “People would leave and there would be entire boxes of antibodies that nobody used,” she says, because nobody knew what they were or where they had come from. With a single tube of antibody costing at least US$200, such practices can mean thousands of wasted dollars, she says.
Plasmids, cell lines and transgenic animal lines you develop should almost always stay in the lab, says Chen. Animal lines can be maintained long-term by freezing embryos or sperm, he notes, but this requires coordination with the institution’s vivarium staff. Whenever practical, says Chen, outsource your materials to companies that specialize in reagent storage and management, to save your colleagues the trouble of fielding requests from other researchers. Popular options that operate internationally include Addgene (for plasmids), ATCC (cell lines) and Jackson Labs (transgenic mice).
Sort your data
Seltmann has co-authored a data-management checklist for researchers to work through as they prepare to leave the lab. Start by transferring all project data from personal devices into a centralized, institutional storage location and transferring access rights to the PI, she says. Then, for particularly thorny data needs, consult resources and experts at your institution, such as data stewards and data librarians.
Whatever your field of study, one general principle that Seltmann suggests is to save everything in open file formats rather than proprietary ones — as comma-separated values (CSV) rather than Microsoft Excel files, for instance. Open-source formats make your data accessible to all future users, no matter what software they have. Termini asks her lab members to make separate folders for each project, with subfolders for each type of experiment, such as flow cytometry or quantitative PCR. Nested in those are individual experiment folders that contain the protocol, raw data, analysed data and any visualizations. She suggests labelling each experiment folder with the date, the type of experiment and a brief description of its purpose.
For computational work, Jay Goldberg, an evolutionary geneticist at Arizona State University in Tempe, reminds researchers always to annotate their code and make note of version numbers, so that someone will be able to understand what you did and reproduce it. Goldberg also recommends providing comprehensive notes in a README file that is stored alongside your program files.
Preserve institutional knowledge
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