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Author: Christophe Dessimoz •
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The new academic year brings a big change to our lab. I am moving to the
University of Lausanne, Switzerland, on a professorship
grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. The
generous funding will enable us to expand our activities on computational
methods dealing with mixtures of phylogenetic
histories. Lausanne is a hub
for life sciences and bioinformatics so we will feel right at home there—indeed
we have already been collaborating with several
groups
there. I
join the Center for Integrative Genomics and the
Department of Ecology and Evolution. I also look
forward to reintegrating the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. At a personal
level, this marks a return to a region in which I grew up, after 16 years in
exile.
However, I keep a joint appointment at UCL, where part
of the lab remains. I’ll be flying back regularly and keep some of my
teaching
activities. UCL is a very special place—one which would be too hard for me to leave
entirely. For all the cynicism we hear about universities-as-businesses, the
overriding priority at UCL clearly remains on outstanding scholarship. My
departments (Genetics, Evolution, Environment and
Computer Science) are both highly collegial and
supportive. Compared to the previous institutions I have worked for, the
organisational culture at UCL is very much bottom-up. The pervasive chaos is
perceived as a shortcoming by some, but it’s actually a huge competitive
advantage—one that leaves ample room for initiative and flexibility. One
colleague once told me that I could build a nuclear reactor in my lab and no
one would ask a question—provided I secure the funding for it of course…
So how are we going to manage working in two different sites? Well, the
situation is not new. We have had a distributed lab for several years and have
developed a system for remote collaboration. Currently, we have lab members
primarily based in London, Zurich, Ghent, and Cambridge. Our weekly lab
meeting and monthly journal club are done via videoconference (with
GoToMeeting). I try to have at least fortnightly 1:1
meetings with all remote members. During the day, the lab stays in touch via
instant messaging (using HipChat). We have shared code
(git) and data (sshfs) repositories. We tend to write collaborative papers
using Google Docs (with Paperpile as reference
manager). Importantly, we have a lab retreat every four months where we meet
in person, reflect on our work, and
have
fun. We
supplement this with collaborative visits as needed. The system is not
perfect—please share your experience if you’ve found other good ways of
collaborating remotely—but overall it’s working quite well.