Picture the last big conference you attended. Somewhere around the second coffee break, you found yourself scanning the room for a familiar face, someone from your research group, your program, your last institution, anyone who could give you an excuse not to walk up to a stranger. Maybe you found one and spent the break catching up with someone you … Read More
Maintaining Focus and Momentum Toward Your Goals
No doubt you’ve been here before: You start chasing a new goal with real energy. Maybe it’s a unique grant opportunity you’ve been eyeing for months, a manuscript you finally have time to draft, or a new research direction you’ve been meaning to pursue since a conference talk lit something up in you. The first few weeks go well: you’re … Read More
Surmounting the Post-Tenure Slump: The Power of Freedom Plus Vision
The tenure letter arrives, and for a few weeks, everything feels different. Oh, the relief of hitting this milestone. But then a strange thing happens to many newly tenured faculty: the momentum that carried them through the tenure review doesn’t carry over into what comes next. In fact, it’s not even clear what comes next. After years of being told … Read More
What to Do When Teaching, Clinical, or Other Duties Pull You Away From Research
The semester starts, and the research plans you sketched out over winter break slowly but surely start slipping. Fielding student questions eats the mornings you’d blocked for writing. Clinic days run long, and the analysis you meant to get to gets pushed to “next week” for the third week running. Committee assignments land in your inbox with no memory of … Read More
When Your Trainees Aren’t Meeting Deadlines (and Other Leadership Challenges)
A deadline passes. Then another. You mentioned it once, assumed it was understood, and moved on to the dozen other things competing for your attention. Yet you find yourself increasingly frustrated… There may not be a hard due date for this manuscript, but you want it out sooner rather than later. Or, your graduate student needs to submit their dissertation … Read More
Staying Focused When the Research Environment Feels Unstable
If you’ve been finding it harder than usual to focus because there is too much happening externally to you, you’re not alone. It’s like trying to do serious cognitive work inside of a jungle gym full of kids. The background hum of uncertainty creates a distracting environment that makes it difficult to sit down and think deeply, to write the … Read More
Can You Be a Successful PI and Have a Life?
Many research environments revolve around a not-always-unspoken belief: that the most serious scientists are the ones who are always working. Because research is often viewed as a “passion” career, this translates to an expectation that the passion pursuit should dominate one’s life: the PI who responds to emails at midnight. The postdoc who skips conferences because they can’t afford to … Read More
Building a Research Niche Without Getting Boxed In
If you have spent time on the academic research career path, and particularly in mentoring programs, faculty workshops, or conversations with trusted advisors, you have heard some version of the advice: Find your niche. Carve out a space that is distinctly yours. Become the person known for that thing. It is guidance that gets repeated so often it starts to feel … Read More
The PI Energy Audit: Reclaim Your Focus and Reignite Your Spark
You chose research because you care about discovery, ideas, and helping others grow. What you probably didn’t choose: the steady stream of administrative tasks, packed calendars, and the low-grade sense that your best thinking time keeps getting chipped away. This is at best a recipe for frustration and dissatisfaction; at worst, it’s a catalyst for burnout. Leading research today is … Read More
Navigating Impostor Syndrome in Academia: You’re Not Alone
The feeling is a familiar—if unwelcome—companion for many research professionals. It might show up when we receive a glowing peer review and our first reaction is relief that we’ve somehow “snuck by” again. It whispers while we’re preparing a talk for a major conference, convincing us that we’ll be exposed as the one person in the room who doesn’t belong. … Read More