Summer 2026 Workshop/Challenges of Lab Operations

Workshop session
End Datetime	2026-07-30T11:30:00.000Z
Attendee	Jonny, Samara
Description	Introduce the major topic areas of what lab technologies exist and what is needed
Title	Challenges in Research Lab Operations
Led By	Samara
Part Of	Summer 2026 Workshop
Session Type	Discussion
Start Datetime	2026-07-30T10:15:00.000Z

Slides

Decisions made implicitly/without people who need to be involved
- "Where is this document, where is this supposed to go"
- Location of documents as a boundary and point of negotiation.
- Lack of clarity about whose role is supposed to handle
- e.g. two people with the same role, one person is delegated into "just admin" and the other isn't, so unclear who does what, and maybe there is a differential in prestige or status
Re: clinical trials -- there are existing structures that need to be abided by, unfamiliar to newcomers.
- Followup - Mandated folder structure for clinical trials
- UCLA research go ebinders
Every new project, reinvent the wheel.
Secrecy and sharing
- Wanting to protect my "secret sauce"
- Not sure what people will think about it
- "Don't put it out there unless you have to" because there's no benefit and a potential risk

Open source is fundamentally resource constrained - we are always at a disadvantage compared to for-profit tools, so we need collaboration as the countervailing force to development
Need to be directly responsive to the challenges people face and how they can be used.

Excel trackers
Box
- Full of e.g. word documents
- Seems like the overwhelmingly common option
Drive
ELN
Email
Physical lab notebook
Lab share server
- IT requirements for this are a little bonkers.
- Managed by UCLA
- Need to go through IT to get admin
Notion?
Internal/External SaaS systems
- Protocols.io
- IACUC
- SPARC

(notes organized into Requirements Gathering)