学术采访UW-Madison的Tom Yin教授

 

 

Dr. Yin: I think the biggest difference is that faculty now spend much more time writing grant proposals than I did. Of course the reason for that is the present prolonged period of tight funding compared to when I started out. Funding has usually been rather cyclical with up and down cycles but the present 5-10 year severe depression is very worrisome, especially as there is no end in sight. During most of my research career, one expected to get funded when applying to NIH. Nowadays, it seems like the hope is not to be triaged! As a consequence I only wrote about 10 grant proposals during that 38 year period. Nowadays, PIs are writing that many proposals in 2 or 3 years!! I couldn’t possibly come up so many ideas for grants.

 

 

Dr. Yin: One of the irritating aspects of present NIH funding is that there are quite a few very large laboratories that have multiple NIH grants. I personally know several labs with 8 and 9 R01 grants. I believe NIH is now implementing a policy to prevent this from happening, but I would strongly recommend that some reasonable cap (two or three) be implemented on the number of NIH grants to any given P.I. Obviously some policy on collaborative grants needs to be included in such a rule.

 

 

Dr. Yin: No, I just have a difficult time throwing anything away so the old equipment stays in the lab.

 

 

Dr. Yin: I think the biggest problem in brain research, not just auditory, is to understand how the nervous system integrates information from individual neurons to produce perception, action, decisions, and other higher order functions. We now know a lot about how individual neurons respond to different stimuli or to produce different actions, and under different behavioral conditions but we understand very little about how the responses of many neurons are integrated to generate behavior. In visual research this is often referred to as the binding problem: how does the CNS take information about the shape, color, orientation, 3D form, etc. of an object which appears to be encoded by different visual areas and put it all together to give us a percept of a person running, for example.

 

 

Dr. Yin: There are a number of important considerations that departments generally have when looking to hire new faculty. Among them are the following: the faculty member has a history of productive research as judged by publications during the graduate and post-doctoral years, that he/she is doing interesting and important research that has a high likelihood of getting funded in the future, sometimes departments are looking for faculty working in specific areas, indications that the faculty member will be a good colleague within the department and school with interest in collaboration with existing labs, and the faculty member will be a good mentor and teacher.

 

Dr. Yin: No, I don’t think I ever asked a student if they were interested in an academic career, at least not when they applied to work in the lab so this was not a way to screen potential students. I think I was lucky to find students and postdocs who were really talented and hardworking and also really liked doing science and just wanted that to be their career. Having a productive graduate and postgraduate experience also helps.

 

 

Dr. Yin: I always tell students who are considering a research career that the most important thing to me is that you be excited about doing research. It’s unlikely that you will become rich or famous in academia, so what has to drive you during the inevitable hard times when experiments aren’t working or funding is tight or reviewers are obstinate is the love of the science. So if you aren’t excited about coming into the lab in the morning, then try to work on a problem that will get you excited.