Creating pioneering work
With Dr Amy Wong
Dr Amy Wong worked for many years as a research scientist before becoming a Principal Investigator. From the start, she had a transparent, honest and open relationship with her own PI. She was able to discuss freely what she wanted to explore. Conversations about research ideas, research directions and ownership were regular occurrences and as a result were not daunting. She revisited these conversations when she moved to becoming a PI herself and checked whether she and her PI still agreed.
Do you want to know more about Amy:
https://lmp.utoronto.ca/faculty/amy-wong or https://lab.research.sickkids.ca/wong/
Listening to our conversation will prompt your thinking:
How “time off” could give you the thinking space to identify and clarify the research niche you want to build for yourself.
How informal supervision and building relationships as a Postdoc can fast track the recruitment of your research team when you become a PI
How the simple practice of a morning focused tasks check list become your multitasking best formula
Some reflections to ponder based on my discussion with Amy
Getting people to join your new research group
When you are transitioning from working as a Postdoc/ research scientist to becoming a Principal Investigator, the recruitment of your research team is going to be one of the most crucial assets for your success as a PI.
As Amy had been working for a long time as a Senior Research Scientist, she had had plenty time, where she had been able to build relationships with students and technicians. This meant that when she received her funding to set up her research group, she had already in place a group of people who were keen to work with her.
Postdocs may not even think that the relationships they build with undergraduates or Masters students may ever contribute to helping them recruit a great team (when they eventually get to set up their own research group!). In the case of Amy, it feels like it certainly helped her early on.
I remember a newly appointed academic who had shared with me how they took great care in the way they interacted with prospective PhD students. They were very deliberate in the attention they took to hear from students about what they were really interested in doing for their PhD. Sharing their enthusiasm had been significant in how it had motivated people to work with them, even though they were just a newly appointed PI. They did not have a big lab and were not a big name, but the way they interacted with students was key in their recruitment approach.
Interestingly for Amy, being a woman from Chinese origin in Canada, running her own lab has started to attract the attention of Asian female students. Amy is fully aware of all the challenges in bringing more diversity to the research environment. Being an Asian woman researcher and being perceived as a role model has attracted the attention of potential trainees.
Words of wisdom:
o When there is an opportunity to share the work of the group, who is best placed to go and give a talk? Who will it serve best? Instead of you as the PI giving the talk, could you encourage someone else from the team to present?
o We owe our professional successes to many people who have helped us along the way. It is never just our own hard work, even though we may think it is. Even if our career transition has been really challenging, there are always people who have helped us at some point. In my view, we don’t say thank you enough to all these informal mentors, we have had along our careers. Occasionally reaching out and thanking some of these mentors would not be a bad thing!
o Learning to set boundaries in our work life is critical in research careers. Many research leaders only get to realise this too late when they reach burnout. The excitement of doing research and the competitive nature of this type of career can stop early career researchers build the disciplines needed to become boundaries masters. It is probably one of the key learning for PhD students at the start of their research career. As a PI helping your graduate students to build effective working habits will include getting them to learn how to create boundaries. It will be one of your many challenges. You may feel it is not your responsibility. Observing the many unsustainable ways of working in research environments and the status quo of mental health in academia, you may want to consider that in the long term, your team is likely to be much more effective through better balance and boundaries.
Creating slow work moments
I often have conversations with Postdocs and research fellows about what being strategic could look like in their research careers. There is a tendency in research and many other professional environments, that you should constantly be in motion: next research idea, next grant, next paper, next promotion, next position.
I liked the story that Amy shared about a period at the end of her Master where she did not jump straight into a graduate programme. She took some “time off”. When she said that, I thought she would be referring to a long trip or holiday, but she was not! It was just it seemed a period where she was just in the lab doing work, helping a research fellow learn some techniques. It seemed it was not a period of angst and stress about what to do next (well, maybe it was but this did not appear in our discussion). It felt like a period of deep reflection and exposure to other topics, opening the flood gate of ideas and possibilities. Thriving in research and being a research pioneer is likely to need these periods of “slow work” that allow important research questions to emerge.
With the intensity of academic life, many research leaders may feel they do not have the luxury of having enough of these moments of slow work to be as creative as they would want to be.
Thriving in research, whilst maintaining a resemblance of a balanced life means engineering these moments of slow work.
One academic I know organises regular ski trips with his research group. Everyone gives a talk at some point during the trip away, people cook and eat together, some also ski together. Maybe this is a form of slow work. Unlike conferences, where too many presentations are packed into a crazy schedule, this type of away time from a research site creates closer relationships between researchers; research and other conversations take place over several days from breakfast to late nights. The intensity of academic life seems to have relegated to the past these types of away days. Some may say that this way of building research relationships may not be equitable in terms of accessibility, as not everyone is able to go away from home and not everyone wants to spend a week in a mountain. I get that.
Still finding ways for research teams to have more of this slower approach to building relationships, where research ideas are mulled over together in the informality of doing something else together. Maybe this is a romantic view of what the research environment could look like. Still, it is the type of environment I would want to belong to.
o What opportunity could you engineer to bring your research team together to spend quality time together to facilitate different kind of conversations and interactions, where “slow work” can appear?
o What thinking space are you creating for yourself each week, each month, each year, so that you get an easiness in letting your innovative ideas flourish?
o How is your team doing when it comes to building relationships that facilitate easy interactions, trust and depth of ideas exchanges?
“I think having good mentors who led you shine and not take your stage is very important.”
