Vol. 11 - My group's research interests are not (only) my own
Research interests should have complementarity, not overlap, to foster collaboration and excitement in group projects.
Research topics that are interesting, and research topics that I find interesting, do not overlap entirely.
Every once in a while, we do a little lab-wide exercise where we map the different projects, connect them to keywords, and come up with a diagram of who we are, collectively. And every time we attempted this, it was obvious that although this network of shared interests had no project (or person!) that was isolated, it also had a lot of complementarity.
I think this is not a bug but a feature, and I think it makes research in a group more exciting.
The most striking result was that some of my research interests were uniquely my own, and that some research interests of group members were uniquely their own, too. And I am brought back to a question that a soon-to-be colleague asked me during my job interview, “can you think of one lesson of biodiversity that you can apply to research?”. My response at the time was that too much overlap and too much disconnection are equally counter-productive, and that a system is probably at its best when we have strong complementarity.
I still stand by this answer, and it largely shaped the way I think about which project to start next.
A lot of grad school pressure is due to perceived (and to some extant, actual) competition. Having projects that are too close to one another can lead students down the path of comparison, which is really, really counterproductive. By contrast, establishing different lines of research encourages students to find commonality, and shifts the mentality towards collaboration. Most of my close collaborators do things I don't fully grasp; not in the sense that I do not understand it, but in the sense that I do not necessarily get excited by all of it (and I don't expect them to care about what I find exciting either!). But when we find the point of overlap that gets all of us excited?
This is where the fun begins.
There are downsides to this, of course. Like when I'm asked what my research group does. I don't know! I know we're on-brand, I'm just not always sure what the brand is. Biodiversity. Numbers. Diseases. Models. Networks. Landscapes. Machine Learning. All of this is true, collectively, but each of us is broader, and narrower, than that. Maybe all of this is a consequence of being an in silico (it's Latin for indoorsy) shop, and of the fact that we design questions in a way that is not quite as, uhh, grounded in reality.
Over the years, I realized that I was bringing some of this with me when teaching. I am always straightforward with students when I teach something that is not exciting to me. It helps them process the fact that not all the content needs to be exciting to them, either. But I am always careful to remind students that what we are reading was, at some point, the most exciting science ever to someone. That something is not exciting does not make it less valuable or less worthy.
Cultivating the sense that knowledge is made of things that call to us, and things that call to others, but that we have to engage with both, is important.
And with all that said, stay tuned for Vol. 12 next week, for a discussion on designing grading rubrics that help students prioritize learning objectives.