Question: 12 is quite a big group! In school we rarely work in groups bigger than 3 (so everybody is involved and nobody is slacking!). Does everybody have a very different job to do? Are you in the lab doing similar work so you just share ideas or are you all working on the same big project? Is there a team leader who makes sure that everything gets organised in a way that all work gets done?

Melissa Brereton answered on 11 Mar 2013:

Working in a lab is a bit like a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid is our boss, she is a Professor and is in charge of us and makes sure she can get enough money from charities such as Diabetes UK or British Heart Foundation so that we can perform our research. At the bottom of the pyramid are the technicians who run the lab on a day-to-day basis. They make sure we have all the correct equipment and help us on our experiments- without them we wouldn’t be ab;e to function!!! The above the technicians are the PhD students. These are people who have been to university and finished their undergraduate degree in Biology for instance but want to continue to perform research and learn so they undertake a PhD. This usually takes 3-4 years and at the end of it you have to write a 50000 word thesis and defend your work in front of two examiners. At the end of it you can call yourself a Doctor! Above the PhD student you have the postdocs (like me) who have finished their PhD but want to continue with research and eventually become a Professor and run their own lab. Both the PhD students and the postdocs have their own project. This is usually decided by the Professor but it up to the individual to decide what experiments they want to perform and what questions they want to ask. We usually have monthly meetings with our Professor to show her our data and discuss what to do next. The whole group works on a big project for instance, trying to understand what happens to insulin secretion in diabetes, then we all try and answer this using different approaches. Some might be working with diabetic mice, trying to understand what happens to the whole body when you become diabetic, others might be looking at individual cells and DNA. There is so many ways to answer a question but we all work together, discussing each others work and trying to see how our project can help our team mates. On a daily basis, I regularly work with perhaps 3 people, a couple of PhD students and a technician!