Welcome to our Lab Guide

Welcome to the lab guide for the Doss-Gollin lab in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University. If you’re looking for our group’s homepage, please find it here.

This document codifies lab practices and expectations for new and existing group members and is divided into three main sections:

  1. Lab Expectations clarifies the expectations we have for ourselves and for one another.
  2. Lab resources provides some how-to information and resources for lab members.
  3. Join Us guides prospective group members through the process of joining.
Contribute

This is intended to be a living document and remains a work in progress. Lab and community members are strongly encouraged to contribute to this document! See here for instructions.

Mission

Our mission is to support the social, environmental, and financial resilience of communities around the world by creatively informing the design and management of infrastructure systems. Through mission-oriented basic research guided by community engagement, we develop tools and methods to accurately, transparently, and collaboratively link decisions, outcomes, and preferences.

Core values

  1. Creativity. As academics, we enjoy the luxuries of freedom and space that allow us to question the status quo and explore new ideas. With this privilege comes a responsibility to imagine new possibilities and speak uncomfortable truths.
  2. Equity. We recognize the burdens of systemic inequality and seek to promote fairness and justice.
  3. Excellence. We strive for excellence in all our activities and aim to be role models in all that we do. We seek to do what is right, not what is easy, and acknowledge when we fall short.
  4. Humility. We understand the limitations of our expertise and celebrate the academic and community partners with whom we coproduce knowledge. We overcome our limitations by actively seeking out diverse perspectives and challenging our preexisting assumptions.
  5. Open Science. Our research is accessible to all levels of society. We approach complex problems with a collaborative mindset. When we make mistakes, we recognize them and do our best to fix them.
Credit

The organization and framing of this document borrows heavily from lab guides written by Lab Carpentry, the Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles group at UIUC, the Andersen Lab at Northwestern, the Computer-Oriented Geoscience Lab at University of Liverpool, the Ocean Transport Group at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the Aly lab at Columbia, the Srikrishnan Lab at Cornell, and the Keller Lab Group at Dartmouth. We thank Jordy Padilla and Yash Amonkar for constructive suggestions.