Nowhere Lab

We are Nowhere Lab. Anyone from any field is welcome to join who doesn’t have a lab but would like the lab meeting experience. Target audience includes but is absolutely not limited to:

• New faculty who have no one in their lab yet
• Ex-academics who now work in industry
• Freelance sci-commers/consultants
• People who are in a toxic lab
• People between jobs
• Keen undergrads

To join, email priyasilverstein@gmail.com

Origin story

Nowhere Lab was started in 2020 as an online lab community. When Priya moved from a traditional lab-based postdoc to two alt-ac (alternative academia) roles, they missed having a lab community, and thought others might feel the same. Nowhere Lab now has over 200 members, so clearly others did!

Our name is inspired by the Beatles song Nowhere Man. From the film Yellow Submarine, the song refers to the character Jeremy Hillary Boob, PhD. — a self-described “eminent physicist, polyglot classicist, prize-winning botanist, hard-biting satirist, talented pianist, good dentist too”. Reviewing his own works, he states “it’s (his own) policy to never read them”. Jeremy is always busy with multiple projects: “so little time, so much to know”!

You can read more about Nowhere Lab in this Educator’s Corner post for FORRT (a Nowhere Lab partner).

Weekly meetings

We hold two meetings a week, at different times to accommodate members in different time zones. Meetings are currently held Tuesdays at 9am (UK) and Thursdays at 4pm (UK) and are catch-up and co-work only, lasting approximately 1 hour. Members can set up other activities, such as practising a talk, by reaching out to our community on Slack.

Slack channel

We have a Slack channel which is the base for our community — somewhere members can interact even if they’re unable to attend meetings. Here we share resources, memes, support, and more.

Resources

• PhD Survival Guide — collected advice from Nowhere Lab members for anyone considering or starting a PhD.