The Globe ran a cute story yesterday about Jon and Christine Seidman, Harvard Medical School researchers who are married and together lead a genetics lab. The article gets into how they met and how they work together.

There are plenty of married couples who work at the same university, and even in the same department. But I’m particularly interested in the dynamics of couples who work in and run the same lab. Back when I was working for Naturejobs, I published an article about Neal Copeland and Nancy Jenkins, molecular biologists who recently moved from the Jackson Lab in Maine to Singapore. They have lived and worked together for more than 20 years. How do they do it?

I met a cell biologist in the spring who runs the lab with his wife. He said the lab dynamics often mirrored those of an actual family, with his wife taking on a motherly role at times and he the fatherly role. Their daughter came to the lab a lot as a child after school and practically grew up alongside the grad students and postdocs.

I wonder how having a happily married couple as your co-PIs would affect the atmosphere of the lab. Would it be more nurturing, family-like?