Laboratory Website Awards

The Laboratory Website and Video Awards by the Scientist!

What does a good laboratory homepage look like? Show me at least one!

In life sciences the basic, functional unit of cooperation and research is a LAB.

Now am I alone with my opinion that most academic laboratory web pages simply do not meet any advanced, current, dynamic web standards, although this would be crucial for them?

What information should a good laboratory homepage offer, and what design would be desirable? What is the proper balance of design and functionality? Considering content: principal investigator and lab members, research interests, publications, available positions, contact infos, grants, methods, setup, tools, cooperative partners, awards, multimedia files, audios, videos, blogs, news, media coverages, interviews? In contrast, many lab pages say that they were last updated in 2004. Unthinkable. I got a one sentence theory on why many academic web pages suck today: scientists (dominantly physicists and mathematicians) were out of the first inhabitants of the word wide web, and most academic web pages were made by scientist-turned web geeks in the 1.0 era. But that era is clearly over, the 90′s has gone, and what we are seeing today is often not enough.

As I am more tempted to immerse in positive criticism, I link here 3 lab homepages in alphabetical order in my beloved stem cell and mitochondria field, which are quite good and I’d like to ask my readers which of them is the best and why? Also, I’d like to start a unofficial competition for the best laboratory web page on the Internets, so please readers, place your bets and suggest your nominees. List of the other nominees can be found at the end of the post.

Bernstein lab (look at the video)

Nunnari lab

Teitell lab

Update: Readers also suggested the following ones:

Refinetti lab, University of South Carolina from Coturnix.

Jessell lab of Columbia Univ. from Alvin.

Redfield lab from Dr. Rosemary Redfield.“It’s not slick, but it’s open science. We post our grant proposals as soon as they’re submitted, and the page has links to our blogs about our research-in-progress.”

Gregory lab from Professor Ryan Gregory.

Kissinger’s lab from Nandita Mullapudi. “I like ours because it is fancy-free, clean and slick. It has links to websites that are research based as well as daily-use websites like the university system, etc, making it convenient for a homepage.“

Hui lab from Zachary Moore.

Laboratory of Tree Ring Research from Jim Swetnam, although it is more of a research institute than a distinct laboratory.

Purvis Lab at Imperial College, UK from Dave Hone.

Leander lab, Roger lab, Archibald lab, Waller lab, Patterson lab from Opisthokont.

Ramaswamy lab from Matt.

Rissler lab from Kathryn Perez.

Evans Group from suchire.

Zhang’s Lab of Molecular and Genomic Evolution from TR Gregory.

Stagljar Lab from Eva.

Ruthazer lab from Jeff.

Mullin’s lab from peretz.

Wolpert lab Cambridge University from Ah.

Duffy lab University of Connecticut from John.

Pielak lab at UNC Chapel Hill from Gary Pielak. Simplicity. Also saying where students end up.

John Plane’s lab in Leeds from JD.

Conklin lab from Natalie.

Wilkinson lab from Pierre based on the semantic web and RDF graphs. Not bench science but bioinformatics.