Email the Author
You can use this page to email Kevin Hamill about Life in the Lab, the essential guide to becoming a researcher.
About the Book
My goal for this book was to create a useful resource for people embarking on a research career. The one book that every supervisor would hope their team would have read. As such, I have included all the different aspects of life as a researcher from before you begin right through to publishing high-quality papers. The content should be deep enough to be useful but accessible and entertaining enough for it not to be boring or hard to read. That was my intention, whether I managed to achieve that goal is something you will discover shortly (I would also like feedback so it can be improved).
The contents of this book are intended to lay sound foundations for all the main aspects of being a successful scientist. However, one guide book can’t tell you everything. Your supervisors, lab mates, mentors and lecturers will all build on the foundations. You will also need to go deeper into your project-specific areas but, hopefully, by reading this book everything else should be a bit easier to learn. If I have done a good job, those massive statistics, experimental design or other complicated textbooks will all be less painful
This is the pre-print version. Buy it now, before the price goes up.
About the Author
Dr Kevin Hamill is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool in England where he teaches Laboratory Skills to Masters students, Experimental Design to PhD students, and runs writing courses for Postgraduate students. In addition to teaching, he runs a molecular biology research lab focused on cell to extracellular matrix interactions (LaNts and laminins). He currently has five PhD students working in his lab and each year supervises three to four undergraduate and four to five Masters-level project students. The Hamill lab's work encompasses a range of scales from whole organism work on human disease samples and transgenic animals, to ex vivo, 2D and 3D cell cultures, and molecular or protein biochemistry studies measuring alternative splicing and protein-protein interactions in vitro. As an established researcher, Dr Hamill has written and reviewed many papers and serves as an associate editor on research journals within his field. Before moving to the University of Liverpool, Kevin was a post-doctoral researcher and then Research Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, Chicago, after obtaining a PhD in Molecular Genetics from the University of Dundee, Scotland.