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PI (Principal Investigator)

A PI is a per-user role. It is an account flagged with account_type === 'lab_head' that gains a small superset of affordances over a regular member. PI is not a separate user pool, it is a property on a normal account. One or more lab members fill this role. The role unlocks the lab-wide People, Lab data, and Supplies views, the audit trail, the announcement composer, and the user-archiving controls. A lab head reads every member's records. Flag for review and task assignment work on the lab head's own records, and changes to a member's own records are coming in a later release.

The PI is pinned to the top of the user picker and carries a small role badge.

What a PI actually is

The role is a single flag on a user's metadata. That flag is account_type, with values "member" (the default) or "lab_head". A lab folder can have one or more accounts flagged as PI, and co-PI labs set the flag on every PI. A PI is otherwise a normal account, with their own projects, tasks, and notes. The role does not replace any of that. It adds a layer of cross-lab affordances on top.

PI-only surfaces

A lab head has access to several surfaces that are not visible to members.

  • People, Lab data, and Supplies. The Lab lens. Opening the old /lab-overview address now takes you to People, and Lab data and Supplies sit beside it. Purchases are a transparent shared ledger, so there is no approval queue. See People, Lab data, and Supplies.
  • People at /people. The lab roster as a mentorship space. Pick a member to open your 1:1 with them, the goals you share, and the latest meeting write-up. Lab announcements and member management live here too.
  • Lab data at /lab-data. The notes members have shared with the lab, searchable and read only. It took over from the older Browse lab notes view. The lab-wide list of every member's experiments was retired, so you follow a member's work through People and your 1:1s.
  • Audit trail. Opened from the Audit trail button, or per record from the right-click menu. Shows per-field edit history across member records, read only. See Audit log.

The six phases of the PI feature

The PI role shipped in six tracked phases, with a capability revamp that landed in June 2026.

  1. Account type and comment attribution. Introduced account_type, the picker badge, and the "posted by PI" styling on comment rows.
  2. Comment threading and @-mentions. Built out the comment surface across tasks, notes, and purchases, with one-level threading and the denormalized mentions index. See Comments.
  3. Soft-write actions. Flag-for-review and task assignment controls, which work on your own records today and are paused on a member's records. See Soft-write actions.
  4. Cross-lab metrics. The phase that first rolled member workload, recent activity, and burn rate into one lab-wide dashboard. That dashboard has since been dissolved. Spending against each grant now sits on Supplies, and you follow a member's work through People and your 1:1s.
  5. Audit log. Every soft-write field change appends to _pi_audit.json. An older PI password gate was removed in June 2026. See Edit as lab head and Audit log.
  6. User archiving. Remove a former member from active views while preserving their data. See User archiving.

What a PI can do on a record

What you can do depends on whose record it is.

  • Your own records. Flag for review, Clear flag, and Assign to member work as they always have, and you edit the record like any member would.
  • A member's records. You can read the record, view its audit trail, comment on it, and co-edit it live when the member has shared the note with you to edit. The flag, assign, and edit controls are paused there, because a change made that way did not reach the member.

Changes to a member's own records are coming in a later release. Until then, comments and check-ins are the way to raise something with a member. See Soft-write actions and Edit as lab head.

Picker badge and sort-to-top

On the user picker, the PI shows up with a small badge and is pinned to the top of the list regardless of which account is set as the main user. This makes it easy to find the PI account on a shared lab laptop. The badge is also visible on comment rows so members can tell when feedback is coming from the PI versus another member.

When to use it

Set one account as the PI in these cases.

  • Your lab has more than two or three people and you want a single person who can read across the whole lab's work and spending.
  • You need a forensic trail of who changed which field on which record.
  • You want the People, Lab data, and Supplies views of the whole lab instead of only your own home page.

Skip the PI (every account stays "member") in these cases.

  • The lab is a single person, or two people who trust each other to manage their own purchases.
  • You do not need the audit log or the lab-wide views.

Where to go next