Lab Director: Aaron Newman

aka PI (Principal Investigator)

Aaron runs the lab. This means he does the following things:

• Writes (and, on a good day, successfully obtains) the grants that provide funding to pay lab staff salaries, graduate student stipends, and direct costs of research such as for equipment, disposable supplies, subject reimbursement, IT services, etc.

• Determines the research projects that the lab will conduct. This is largely constrained by the grants we hold, since we need to conduct the research proposed in those grants. However, we often initiate projects without funding, and use small amounts of other grants to seed new projects. This is standard practice in science, since successfully obtaining a grant depends on demonstrating the feasibility of the project, which is helped a lot by pilot data.

• Provides overall supervision of lab staff and students. This includes determining who is a lab member.

• Carries ultimate responsibility that research and other lab activities, and lab members, adhere to the principles of research ethics (notably the TCPS-2 guidelines), and Dalhousie University policies.

• Oversees conduct of research to ensure compliance with research ethics and other policies.

• Occasionally has the time to actually conduct research. In practice, this is a little bit of data collection (mostly overseeing new researchers and new projects), a reasonable amount of data analysis, oversight/checking of others' data collection and analysis, some writing of manuscripts/journal articles, and a lot of editing of manuscripts/journal articles.

• Manages server accounts for lab members.

• Oversees and manages lab hardware, IT services, and other infrastructure.

In addition to running NCIL, Aaron has a number of other duties that compete for his time. For reference, Dalhousie's Faculty of Science expects faculty members to allocate their time as 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% service (administration). Aaron doesn't really track time spent that closely, nor does he limit his work-related hours to 40 hours/week - though he is a firm believer in work-life balance and tries to do very little Dalhousie-related work on weekends (his other activities include parenting/family life, cooking, cycling and running, playing music, and making beer. Aaron's other Dalhousie-related duties include:

• Teaching SCIE 4701/4702/5701 Science & Technology Innovation, Commercialization, & Entrepreneurship

• Director of SURGE Science Innovation Sandbox. This includes planning delivering events, building and maintaining partnerships with other organizations, overseeing administration, running internship and residency programs.

• Chair of the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience. This includes overseeing 27+ faculty members and ~12 staff; overseeing all departmental committees; determining which classes are offered and who teaches them; overseeing the structure of our undergraduate and graduate programs; reviewing faculty members' activities and teaching reviews; managing the department budget; hiring new faculty members; representing the department to upper level sof administration and the public.

• Editor for the journals PLoS ONE, Frontiers in Neuroscience, and Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology.

• Reviewer for various granting agencies in Canada and abroad. From 2023-2025 sitting on the NSERC Discovery Grants review panel, which means that the first 6 weeks of the calendar year are crazy-busy.

• Member of the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Management Committee.

• Member of the national I-INC entrepreneurship training network.