Use case
Onboard PhD students with answers cited to lab sources
Give new lab members a place to ask about prior work, protocols, project history, and reading context before they interrupt senior researchers.
Who it is for
PIs, postdocs, and lab managers onboarding new PhD students into active research projects.
Why this matters
A new student often receives a folder, a reading list, and a set of informal explanations. The context is hard to preserve and harder to verify.
What it helps with
Shorten ramp-up by making the lab's own context searchable.
Teach new members to verify answers against original documents from the start.
Reduce repeated background and methods questions for senior team members.
How a pilot would use it
- Create a starter workspace with papers, theses, protocol notes, and project retrospectives.
- Have new members ask background questions and open the cited evidence.
- Use refusal states to identify missing onboarding documents.
Example question
Why did the group stop using the first fixture design?
The group abandoned the first fixture after repeated alignment drift during thermal cycling. The later thesis chapter records the redesigned clamp geometry as the corrective change.
Trust and controls
- Students see where each answer comes from.
- Access can be scoped by workspace and role.
- Sensitive documents can be handled through BYO-key or local/self-hosted deployment paths.
Current Early Access limits and provider-mode disclosures are documented on the known limitations page.
Start with a focused lab corpus
The strongest pilot starts with documents your lab already trusts: protocols, core papers, theses, project notes, and recurring questions.