About Dice, Bouldering, and Team Empowerment: Running the CompOmics Group at VIB and Ghent University, Belgium

Starting up a new lab is of a course a great challenge, but few young PIs will realize that getting started is the easy part. Indeed, once the lab is up and running, and hopefully doing very well, a whole new set of challenges emerges on top of the typical ones like fund raising and paper publication. Perhaps most dauntingly, you’ll be expected to manage the different people in your group, building on and developing the strengths of each individual while simultaneously forging a close-knit team that can collectively tackle the toughest tasks you give them. Obviously, most scientists, including me, are poorly trained for management, and figuring out how to run a lab is typically very much a trial-and-error process. In order to make this process a little less hit-and-miss, I’ll here provide some potentially useful pointers by exploring the way I run my own lab.