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We interviewed several Yale faculty members, noted both for their scientific expertise and their success as mentors and advisors. They provided nuggets of wisdom and advice for new scientists beginning to pursue careers in research. These interviews focused mostly on the postdoctoral stage of a research career, but the ideas are relevant to graduate students and junior faculty as well. These videos contain key excerpts from each interview.
Scroll through the transcripts below, or jump to a particular one: Richard Bribiescas; Priyamvada Natarajan; Marina Picciotto; Laurie Santos; Paul Turner; Meg Urry.
Dr. Richard Gutierrez Bribiescas
Dr. Richard Bribiescas, Professor of Biological Anthropology, discusses building confidence. He cautions against self-censorship. Positive collaborative relationships permit researchers to share their ideas without judgment. He also recommends getting to know potential advisors before choosing a research position.
Transcript
BRIBIESCAS: Well, I’m Richard Bribiescas. I am a professor of anthropology. I’m also chair of the anthropology department. My research focuses mainly on human evolutionary biology. So, traditionally in biological anthropology, people think about paleontology and fossils and primatology and things like that, but there’s a really vibrant scholarly community within biological anthropology that actually looks at living, breathing human beings to get a sense of a whole range of human diversity – in terms of how we grow, how we deal with disease, how we reproduce, how we deal with stress.
TITLE: What barriers are there to reaching one’s potential?
BRIBIESCAS: I think the biggest barrier is your own confidence. People come in – and you’re dealing with people who have more years being in academia – and you think, well, this idea’s been knocking around in my head. It’s a wacky idea - it doesn’t deserve to see the light of day. But as an advisor, you want to bring that out. And not every idea is going to be good, but at the same time, you don’t want to edit yourself too much. So I think it’s just an idea of giving them the confidence to say look, this is your idea – it has merit – let’s talk about it. And in terms of building that confidence, I think there’s nothing better than presenting your idea to a group. So one of the most powerful tools that we have is to have lab group meetings. And it’s a very unique and just really valuable atmosphere because it allows you to share and develop ideas with virtually no cost. There’s no job on the line, you’re not going to be laughed at by people who are maybe vetting you for other jobs. You’re colleagues who are going to give you honest feedback.
TITLE: Engaging your advisor, and seeking help when you need it…
BRIBIESCAS: Well first of all in terms of choosing an advisor – get to know them. Communicate with them. I’m surprised how often postdocs go into a situation without really making an attempt to talk to an advisor, and it’s important. So I think that, initially, is the most important thing. And then afterwards, I think it’s a matter of again continuing to engage with your advisor. Schedule regular meetings. It sounds like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how often it doesn’t happen. Schedule regular meetings to say, look, this is what’s going on in my life, this is what’s going on with my project, these are the problems that are going on. And some of those problems can go away very quickly, because there’s information that your advisor has that you may not have, so you may be spinning your wheels when you don’t really need to. So really it’s about engagement. It’s about engagement both at the front end, the middle, and the back end. If you don’t do that, then it can be a less than constructive experience.
Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan
Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan, Professor of Astronomy & Physics, discusses developing a sense of independence as a researcher. Early career scientists should be able to take intellectual risks and pursue original ideas in order to grow as scholars.
Transcript
NATARAJAN: I’m a professor in the department of astronomy and physics at Yale. I’m a theoretical astrophysicist, and I’ve been working most actively in terms of research on two particular areas in cosmology. One is trying to understand the nature of dark matter, which constitutes the bulk of the matter in the universe, but whose nature is elusive still. I work on trying to map it using the bending of light in the universe, to try to see if we can get some clues to what it might be made of.
TITLE: What advice do you have for postdocs?
NATARAJAN: So I think the first thing one doesn’t realize is that the postdoc phase is actually one of the most amazing phases of an academic, partly because it’s the stage where you’re sort of coming into your own. You have to come up – figure out – free yourself from your PhD years of actually having someone – an advisor or someone – who is actively involved in your work – to one in which you have to forge your own way and become independent. I really like them – and I encourage them – to become creative and independent – and actually to take an intellectual risk – to come up with a new idea and to learn to have the confidence to pursue it, no matter what – how it turns out. You have that latitude – you have that freedom during that stage – to actually take a risk and see if it pans out and also to understand the process of what it means to take an intellectual risk. Because what I really value about being an academic and being an astrophysicist is about ideas – is to come up with new ideas that push the field – that may have difficulty getting accepted in the beginning, but that’s the fun. That’s the real fun. On the practical side, I often spend a lot of time mentoring my postdocs, trying to help them understand the virtue of time management. I know from my experience – I kind of skipped the postdoc stage myself, which was wonderful, however what it meant is that immediately I was thrust from having been a graduate student, doing my work, into suddenly being responsible for being a great undergraduate teacher, a research mentor for undergraduates, graduate students, the whole shebang – administrative responsibilities, grant-writing responsibilities… So I try to get my postdocs [to] have a flavor for the kinds of tasks, and how to learn to parcel your time, manage it efficiently and also figure out how one should prioritize.
Dr. Marina Picciotto
Dr. Marina Picciotto discusses the value of internal motivation. Highly successful researchers have lives and relationships outside of the lab, and being an excellent parent is entirely compatible with being an excellent researcher. Excessive pressure to work constantly can undermine careful and efficient research decisions. Scientists should expect their ideas and experiments to fail, and understand that the endeavor is worthwhile regardless.
Transcript
PICCIOTTO: My name is Marina Picciotto. I am the Charles B. G. Murphy professor in psychiatry; I’m also professor in the departments of neurobiology and pharmacology, and I serve as deputy chair of the department of psychiatry for basic science research.
TITLE: What makes a postdoc successful?
PICCIOTTO: I’ve learned that there is obviously a correlation between how seriously you take science and how much effort and mental work you want to put into it. Obviously the more serious you are the more successful you can be – but there isn’t necessarily a correlation between hours in the lab, efficiency, and good science. I’ve had graduate students in my lab with children who have to be very efficient because they have to get all of their experiments done by the time they have to go home, pick up their kids from daycare or from the babysitter, and those students have often been the most effective. So it’s not time that matters, it’s focus, and it’s understanding what the important questions are to ask and how to ask them and answer them effectively. So as a mentor I now look for that, rather than “Hey, are you here on a Sunday evening?” – because I’m not there on a Sunday evening. I have a daughter; I think it’s very important to be home and to spend time with her while I can – she’s going to go off to college one day and I’m going to miss her.
TITLE: What advice do you have for postdocs?
PICCIOTTO: By the time you’re a postdoc you have to be self-motivated. If you have to go to a lab where someone’s sitting on top of you saying, “Hey, did you do this? Did you do this? Are you here? Are you getting it done?” – then in fact you’re not going to be very effective as a junior faculty member. So having a certain internal motivation – not getting your motivation from the PI or from others in the lab – is very important. I think that you also have to know that you are going to fail and likely fail often.
TITLE: Why is it important for postdocs to be comfortable with failure?
PICCIOTTO: You come in with one idea, and as the data come out, that idea turns out to be wrong, or at least partially wrong. And some people have the feeling that, “I have to complete what I said I was going to do – I have to keep going,” and that’s absolutely not the way that you should be in a postdoc. Especially in a postdoc, you need to follow the data, and you also need to talk to people when you have data that’s unexpected, so that you can get new ideas, and get input about new directions. For most of us, when we take up a scientific problem or scientific question, we feel real attachment to it – there’s a personal investment in that idea. Having it fail is often a real blow. I remember sitting in front of the X-Omat – it’s a machine that develops X-ray film – when I was looking for DNA sequences as an undergraduate, and every time I put my DNA sequence into that machine, my heart would start to pound, and it was because, if the answer that came out the other side was what I was expecting or something interesting, I had a finding, and if it didn’t come out the way I thought or if it was blank, which happened more often than not, then I would have to go back, start over, do the experiment again, find new ways to make mistakes – because you have to make every mistake until you get it right – and that feeling of excitement is what drives you forward but that also makes you very vulnerable to feeling discouraged when you fail. That resilience to being able to pick yourself back up and say “It’s not me – I’m not a failure – an experiment failed,” is really critical to being able to stay in science, and the answer to success in science is sticking around.
Dr. Laurie Santos
Dr. Laurie Santos, Professor of Psychology, discusses the formation of effective work habits. She suggests selecting a few academic tasks at a time and taking steps to make these tasks more habitual and less intentional, making it easier to maintain a high degree of productivity long-term.
Transcript
TITLE: Tell us about your research?
SANTOS: There’s a couple goals for the work. One is we learn a lot about human cognition and how humans learn, and that has all kinds of relevance for thinking about things like education and how to teach children. The other thing that we learn is how best to train animals. We have thousands of service dogs working to help our military; we have dogs in clinical training programs working as therapy dogs – by understanding even just how dogs make sense of the world, we learn all kinds of important things about how to help both dogs and how to help humans too.
TITLE: What can be developed in postdoc years that will help later?
SANTOS: When I think about training my own postdocs and the kinds of things I wish I had had time to develop myself, I think the best thing to think about is this issue of time management: how are you going to put the right skills and the right habits in place that you’ll take with you from your postdoctoral years into being an assistant professor? And this is a little bit related to some of the work that I study as a psychologist – this question of, “how do you make things easy for yourself?” If you’re constantly juggling review papers and, “When do I spend time working on my lectures?” and things – if every one of those is a complex decision, it gets really hard. And what we as psychologists know is that if you could put habits in place you can make your life a lot easier. It’s kind of like brushing your teeth – you don’t have to think and make a decision: “Well, when am I going to brush my teeth, when am I going to squeeze it in?” You just know to do it, because you do it all the time. And so the question for postdocs is, “What can you put in place now, that you get good at, that becomes like brushing your teeth – that you do all the time, that you won’t have to think about when you go to the next level?”
INTERVIEWER: Give us an example.
SANTOS: One example of a habit I think it’d be great for postdocs to put in place early is the habit of carving time to do your writing. Ultimately, in whatever field you’re in, your success as an academic is going to be defined by the papers that you put out – the papers that wind up on your CV – and somehow you have to find time to write those. Unlike other kinds of jobs you face as an assistant professor, nobody’s going to be needling you to do that. It’s not going to be like undergrads that email for their grades or a committee that’s scheduling you into a particular time in your schedule. You have to find time to do that, and if you’re constantly picking specific times or trying to squeeze it in, it’s just not going to work. So my advice is to try to create the good habit of scheduling writing time early on in your postdoc – and as psychologists we know that means doing it every day, at a specific time, no matter what. Find time in your much more flexible postdoc schedule to get this in and just make it something that you get good at doing every day. You don’t have to be great at it every day, you just have to do it – and then slowly it’ll become like brushing your teeth. And, you know, hopefully when you move from your postdoc to an assistant professor, you’ll continue brushing your teeth in your life – the idea is, maybe you’ll do the same thing with your writing. It’ll just make it much, much easier.
Dr. Paul Eugene Turner
Dr. Paul Turner, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, discusses structuring time with lab members in order to maintain a functioning research group. He recommends having a weekly meeting of the whole group as well as one-on-one meetings every week with each member.
Transcript
TURNER: I’m Paul Turner, I’ve been at Yale for probably 15 years – I came here in 2001 as an assistant professor and stayed – and my lab group is interested in all aspects of what could be called microbial ecology and evolution – so we’re interested in how microbes interact with their environment and with other organisms – and mostly from the standpoint of viruses. We’re very interested in how viruses make a living on the planet.
TITLE: Please describe the highlights of your postdoctoral experiences
TURNER: I think that the growth as an independent thinker and scientist was happening the whole time. People were encouraging me, as my mentors, they were encouraging me to think creatively and independently and drive my own research projects, which I think is very, very important. I did get a taste for more of top-down management when I was at NIH, which is necessarily much more focused, driven, and you have to stay to task with certain projects and not deviate – so basically I benefited from that experience but I really do enjoy more of the ability to do exactly what I wanted to do, and by the time I finished that third postdoc I was pretty certain that I was ready to be an independent PI.
TITLE: What is important to you as a mentor?
TURNER: I’m a big proponent of having a weekly lab meeting, where – very different format from week to week, maybe discussing ongoing projects, maybe reading papers, hearing presentations from one another is a great way to go – but doing that on a regular basis is a great way to just stay broadly up to speed on what everybody is doing. But also it’s important to meet with people one-on-one. So some researchers need more hand-holding, so to speak, than others – and that’s fine – and others will be so independent that you may never see them, and you don’t really know from the get-go who sort of gravitates to which side. So it’s important, I think, to have weekly individual meetings with everybody in your group one-on-one. And, through time, that kind of time commitment can be reduced as people are more familiar to you and you are very familiar with their projects – you could do something like biweekly meetings.
Dr. Meg Urry
Dr. Meg Urry, Professor of Physics, discusses learning from one’s advisor how to effectively run a lab and paying attention to the actions of people at a more advanced career stage to help plan one’s own approach. Career success also depends on maintaining relationships with peers and exchanging ideas, and learning to present oneself and one’s work confidently.
Transcript
URRY: I’m Meg Urry; I’m a professor of physics and astronomy. I work on supermassive black holes, which are at the – supermassive black hole means a black hole that has a mass of a million to a billion times the mass of our sun.
TITLE: What is your past experience with mentors?
URRY: I had great mentors, both in graduate school and as a postdoc, and maybe the best example is when I went to MIT as a postdoc. In retrospect, I didn’t have a clue about how anything worked – how universities worked, how faculty hiring worked, anything – and I kind of learned from my advisor, “How do you run a research group – and how do you keep projects going – and what’s the right level of inquiry and interest?” and so on.
TITLE: Are mentors and allies important?
URRY: Yeah, especially for people who are pioneers in a way – maybe they’re the first woman in a physics department, or maybe they’re the first in their family to be in college. People who are pioneers sometimes don’t have automatic allies in their career path. And it’s very important to find those allies and network with them, not because they’ll give you a specific piece of information or advice, but because you need a place to go to talk things out. When I was a graduate student and a postdoc, I didn’t have any time for women in science groups – I wasn’t ready, I didn’t need it, I didn’t think it was necessary – it’s kind of sad to think that 30 years ago I didn’t think it was necessary and now I think it’s really necessary – but anyway, finding other women in science, few though they were, even in other departments or whatever, later became very important. So that’s an example of the kind of networking, but I can imagine many different axes of commonality among students or postdocs. Those people will be sources of information, support, and ultimately success. You can’t really – I don’t know many people who succeed on their own. I know plenty of people who think they succeeded on their own, but they had lots of advice and help and support along the way. So people shouldn’t be shy about looking for that.
TITLE: How can you make sure others find your work interesting?
URRY: People take you – they judge you on how you present yourself. If you present yourself as a confident, accomplished person who’s done really interesting work, that has a very different impression than the identical work presented in a nonchalant or poor way. And by the way, people who give terrible talks can improve them. I mean, it’s not something you’re born with or not born with – you can learn how to do it well. So I think the most important thing is to present yourself with authority – not obnoxiously, but with authority and confidence – and be obviously interested in communicating the work you’ve done.