Onboarding International Scholars: A Practical Checklist

Onboarding International Scholars: A Practical Checklist

A tenure-track researcher accepts an offer in March. Her start date is set for August, timed to a grant’s fiscal year. Then the paperwork stalls — a missing form, a visa category nobody double-checked, a Form I-983 sitting unsigned somewhere in a departmental...
What STEM Principal Investigators Get Wrong About HR Compliance

What STEM Principal Investigators Get Wrong About HR Compliance

Most principal investigators are excellent scientists and, understandably, reluctant HR administrators. A lab often starts small enough that hiring feels informal — a verbal offer to a promising graduate student, a postdoc brought on because a paper needs another set...
Building an Employee Experience Program Inside a University Lab

Building an Employee Experience Program Inside a University Lab

Most employee experience playbooks assume a fairly standard shape: a defined manager, a career ladder, an annual engagement survey, maybe a recognition program tied to performance reviews. Bring that playbook into a university research lab and most of it stops...