Welcome Package
Introduction
Welcome to the Cavender-Bares Lab at the University of Minnesota! Below are details that hopefully will help you get settled! If you have any questions, please contact:
Lab manager: Cathleen Lapadat at nguye618 [at] umn.edu
or Jeannine at 612.624.6337 or cavender [at] umn.edu
For new students and employees, submit the new employee form here.
Departmental Resources
Please see this link for more information.
Ucard
If you’re a student or staff and have been entered into the University system, you can receive your Ucard with proper government-issued photo ID at Coffman Union (East Bank - Minneapolis). St. Paul Student Center only handles replacement cards.
Lab Access
Lab is located in Ecology building (1987 Upper Buford Circle, St. Paul, MN 55108), room 240. For lab access after receiving your Ucard, submit a request here.
Office Access
To get access to the Cargill lab office space, you can email Annie Yetter (ayetter [at] umn.edu) a photo of both the front and back of your UCard and say you need access to room 205 (the office space) because you’re part of ASCEND/part of Jeannine’s lab.
Cedar Creek Code and Keys Access
Both Lindeman and Lawrence labs and the north gate of East Bethel Blvd (wide dirt road through CC site) are open at ~8am-4pm during the Weekdays, Monday-Friday. If you need access outside of these hours/days or access to locked gates, please contact Jim Krueger (krue0043 [at] umn.edu) for door codes and keys.
CC Check-in
When conducting research at Cedar Creek, please check in on this webpage.
Lab Etiquette
Please be mindful that our lab is a shared space with each other and with other labs. Try your best to keep your space clean and organized.
Your data and analysis are both valuable to yourself and the whole lab. Please well document storage of your data and work through “data management”. More details below.
Please use the equipment calendar to reserve equipment use. This is especially important during field season.
Lab Safety
- Always label containers/beakers even if it only contains water.
- Always keep chemicals enclosed in containers or beakers (covered with parafilm or aluminum foil).
- Please don’t cause any fires or explosions.
- The lab should ALWAYS be audit ready.
To enter the lab, you are required to take several training courses prior to access. You must enroll and take the following courses: Introduction to Research Safety, Chemical Safety, and Chemical Waste Management.
Hazardous Waste Management
- Always keep liquid hazardous waste in secondary containment with label “Hazardous waste.
- Make sure your hazardous waste chemicals are compatible with each other.
- Always keep your hazardous waste bottles labeled and enclosed.
- Please do not use Nalgene bottles as hazardous waste bottles. These are expensive. Use an empty (rinsed out) chemical bottle.
- Please dispose sharps in sharps waste container. DO NOT leave it out.
To request hazardous waste pickup, click here.
For unknown chemicals, click here.
If you have any questions on disposal, contact DEHS at 612.626.1604 or hazwaste [at] umn.edu.
Purchasing
UMarket
Ideally, if you can, complete your purchases on Umarket.
- Contact umarket [at] umn.edu to get access to Umarket as a purchaser.
- When you are ready for checkout:
- Click on “Checkout”
- Under “General” section and “codes”. Choose “non-capitol”, “lab and medical supplies”, and “laboratory supplies”.
- Fill out the description (brief title).
- Be detailed in your justification and include the chartstring. Copy the justification and chartstring info as you will need it later. Click “save changes”.
- Then click on “assign cart”. Paste your justification and chartstring and assign the cart to Tori Lafky (lafky004).
- Your items, by default, will be shipped to lab 240. If you would like to ship it to Cargill or Cedar Creek, please specify in the justification section.
Notes:
- Do not “favorite” items. Save catalog numbers through an excel sheet. Favoriting items will lock in the price and will cause problems/delays later if prices change.
- Order well ahead of time. Depending on the item and supply, it may take several weeks for shipment.
ChromeRiver
If your item is not on Umarket, you may purchase with your personal credit card and get reimbursed through ChromeRiver. For instructions on submission, there are instructions and videos on the main page under “Job Aids”.
Purchase Orders
If you’re making a large purchase (purchase order is required when item(s) are >$2k) and/or a purchase order is an option, fill out a form here.
If you have questions or none of these options are applicable, please contact Cathleen for purchasing help.
Data Storage and Management
To help keep the lab’s data and documentation of data organized and up-to-date, please follow the lab’s structure detailed below on data storage and organization. This will greatly help any future lab work!
University Shared Drive
Data should be stored in the lab’s university shared drive. Please document the location of your data in the lab github webpage under “Data Management”. Please include both raw data and data work. Include README text files when necessary.
- If your data is too large to store in the university shared drive, please refer to MSI Tier 2 storage for details. Documentation on location is key.
Shared Drive Access
To access shared drive, submit your form here. The path of the shared drive:
-
Mac users: cifs://files.umn.edu/CBS/Groups/LAB-cavender
-
Windows users: \files.umn.edu\CBS\Groups\LAB-cavender
Mapping Shared Drive
To connect/map the shared drive, follow the instructions here.
University VPN
If you are off-campus, you must be connected to the University VPN, to connect to the shared drive. Instructions to download, install and connect are here.
Google Shared Drive
The google shared drive will be home to documentation linked from the github webpage, e.g.lab products, templates, maps. Please do not store your data here. If you were not added onto the google shared drive when you started, please contact Cathleen to be added to the lab’s google shared drive.
Metadata
README Text Files
Please include the following information in README text files regarding your data:
- What type of data is it?
- Who collected the data?
- When was this data collected?
- How was the data collected? Reference protocols when necessary.
- Why was the data collected?
- What type of analyses will this data be used for? Reference to analyses when necessary.
Spectra
- For leaf level measurements, include information in this template.
Cedar Creek Data
To access Cedar Creek data, follow this link.
If you collected data at Cedar Creek, please submit your data to Susan Barrott (barro023 [at] umn.edu) and/or Dan Bahauddin (danbaha [at] umn.edu). Please follow this template for submission.
For more information on data management, please refer to this webpage.
Fulcrum App
Fulcrum App is a data collection platform designed to access via mobile phone ideal for field work. Create and design apps through the webpage.
Fulcrum user login and password
MSI
To be added to the MSI group, contact either Cathleen or Jeannine. We are limited to 20TB for our lab group primary storage. If you are finished processing your data, please remove your files to leave space for other lab members and save your files to either the University shared drive or MSI Tier 2 Storage.
Documentation and Tutorials
Please refer to this link for MSI help.
MSI Tier 2 Storage
If you need to transfer your data to the Tier 2 Storage, use the instructions to transfer via Globus (Recommended by MSI).
To access files stored in tier 2, refer to this link.