What is the purpose of your research program?

This science stuff is a lot of work. We put ourselves through a lot just to be able to be wherever we are. Some go through a lot more than others.

What keeps you going, why do you keep doing what you’re doing? You could be in grad school, or in some industry or NGO job, or faculty, or in administration, or whatnot. You have a lot of latitude over what and how you do. Other than the fact that it’s a paycheck1, what drives the decisions that you make?

I think it’s really easy to get trapped into the tactics of being a scientist without developing a clear vision of what you want to do with the science, and why you want to do those things. I think this isn’t trivial.

We all want to do good science, we all want to succeed, we all want to be valued and respected. And all that. But those aren’t necessarily our purposes, are they? What is the purpose of your research program?

In other words, do have a mission statement for your agenda?

Some people are working to make tangible scientific contributions towards addressing a critical need for society, whether it be resilience to a warming planet, protecting the safety of drinking water, making cities more livable, helping more people survive cancer, and so on. Not all of us have this use-inspired aspect to our work, and that’s okay.

Others are excited about doing research that advances basic understanding of how the world works. Why is there more biodiversity in some places rather than others? What causes gravity? What’s up with chemicals, how do they work? Good on ya. Some of us are more driven by basic questions than others, and that’s okay.

Some of us explicitly are about doing science as a way of helping create social change and social mobility by being intentional about who we do science with, how it happens, and our impact on the scientific community. Some folks in my department, for example, are very explicit about the primary purpose of the work is to provide more opportunities for students. While I’m hoping that we all have some reflexivity about this aspect of our work, if this isn’t one of your major reasons for doing your science, I get that.

But let’s be honest. Some people doing science with less constructive motives. I know some folks whose goal and endgame is simply to be a Grand Great Mind and have a theory or two named after them. Not that different is wanting to be a person with a lot of authority or power, for the sake of itself because it feels good. Some folks just want to be important by bringing in lots of grant money and producing lots of papers, or having produced lots of students who also succeed in the field. That cachet of being a professor at a prestigious university, and all that. Some just want to be extremely popular for their science, either in the scientific community or more broadly. Most people in science aren’t like this, I suspect, if only because so many of us are far away from that situation becoming attainable. But the existence of this ethos has a disproportionate effect on our community because it ends up harming so many people who end up being cogs trapped in the gears of their machinery. Is it possible to identify a toxic lab based on their stated mission, by what they might include or might exclude?

And some people just want to have fun and enjoy making discoveries and getting by with other people. Which can be pretty cool.

We all arrive into this game with a bit range of different priorities. Many conflicts are caused by people having different priorities. We seem to rarely ever speak openly about our priorities with one another, and some folks have trouble being honest with themselves or others about those priorities. Putting those priorities about how and why we are doing science on the table for everybody to know is a good way to preventing conflicts before they start. For example, if one lab is all about maximizing prestigious publications, and a trainee is more focused on gaining research skills and communicating to specific target audience, then this is a conflict that can be avoided. Likewise, if a lab prioritizes equity and representation and walks the walk with culturally responsive mentoring, and someone might want to join the lab aren’t on board with those mentoring practices joins that lab who isn’t on board with that approach, that’s a bullet that can be dodged.

I bet if you ask members of a lab what the mission of the overall lab has, as signaled by its leadership, they could reach some kind of consensus while talking about it. But if you were to ask the person in charge of the lab if that was done by design — or even if that’s their agenda — how often would this match up? I think there’s a lot to be said for approaching this mission of your lab with some intentionality.

You know how you go to the website of a non-profit organization, or a business, and they have a mission statement? How many research labs have mission statements that are explicitly stated? (Looking at some colleagues, some actually do! But most do not. Most folks say something like “These are the things that we do, these are the questions we work on” but rarely does the why really get to the a central motivation or mission?

Why does having that mission matter? Aside from being able to help make progress towards fulfilling that mission, this is what everybody who chooses to join the lab will be signing up for and having an actual shared sense of mission makes a huge difference.

My lab website doesn’t say this, but I suppose I should. What is the mission of the work that I do in my lab and my academic work in general? I think it’s a few things, that are all compatible with one another. I want to make progress on scientific questions in ecology and entomology that support resilience to climate change and value biodiversity, and do this all in ways that work to rectify the gendered and racialized inequities that are harmour community. How’s that sound. I’ll workshop it for a bit longer, I’m in no rush.

I think I’m slow on the uptake for this because it’s been a long time for me in this career to even be in a place where I can choose to sit back and have such a broad perspective, of: “Well, now why am I doing what I’m doing?” Because for so long I’ve been focused on barely getting by.

My purposes have really changed over the years. In grad school, I was balancing two things: learning and having fun doing science, and struggling for the chance to end up with something resembling financial stability while doing something that I enjoyed. That was it. I saw that I liked doing science and working with students, and that if I managed to get in a tenure-track position, that then I’d have access to a rare kind of stability that was really attractive to me. So that meant my science was aimed at doing the stuff that would allow me to wind up in that position. So I was working to do science that would end up with high-enough profile papers, and big-enough ideas, so that I could make my home in the scientific community with a job that would give me tenure. I was excited about the science, yes, and that was a reason for it, but hand in hand with that excitement was the practicality of having a stable job.

At the time I could have built a narrative that the science I was doing at the time was to understand the biology of non-native species, to address important questions that affect human welfare, biodiversity, and so on. And that wouldn’t be necessarily incorrect, but was that really the mission of my work? No, the mission of my work was simply to establish myself in science because I felt so entirely unestablished and way about that unestablishedness. A lot of folks feel like that they can’t admit this because we’re allegedly doing this for the passion and as a calling, rather than as a job that pays the bills. But let’s be honest here, those of us from working class backgrounds are never going to forget the transactional nature of this job. That’s why I was doing this, and I knew it. And I was lucky enough to be able to do science I absolutely enjoyed at the same time.

Is it possible to be struggling to get by and also working to pursue a mission that is bigger than oneself? I think that it can work at times but ultimately these things will bump against one another. Choosing where to publish, which student to recruit into your lab, what grants you submit and which ones you never write, whether you choose the low-hanging fruit that looks impressive but doesn’t serve your mission, or if you choose the harder thing that might not impress others but it does serve your mission. At our university, we’re big on our Basic Needs Initiative. We realize that students can’t learn and achieve their academic and career goals without having basic needs met, with a stable place to sleep, knowing where your next meal is coming from, and son on. I’ve come to realize that it took about fifteen years in my academic career before I felt my own basic needs (confidence that in the long run I would have a place to sleep, be able to feed myself and my family, etc) were being met. It’s kind of hard to work on big picture science when you’re not feeling stable. Considering the widespread lack of stability for grad students and postdocs, who are the ones who do most of the science in academic labs, it’s kind of amazing how well we manage to discover what we are trying to discover.

So as a junior faculty member, what structured my decisions about the science we were doing? I simply wanted to have the chance to answer questions that were curious to me. I saw nature as a big unsolved puzzle, and I wanted to grab a tiny corner of that big puzzle and try to figure out how some of the pieces fit. It would be nice, if, in the process, I ended up having some kind of scientific impact but really I just wanted to be able to work on questions that I thought were cool2. The biodiversity of rainforest continued to blow my fricking mind after a decade of working there and I wanted to have the latitude to latch onto new questions and answer them. As my curiosity evolved, I wanted the work that I was doing to evolve with that curiosity. This makes for an extremely poor elevator pitch for the purpose of my work. I can understand how that would make my science unimpressive to some, but I just wanted to be able to occupy my own little corners of science and have fun solving puzzles with students and help them move on to their next steps. That actually worked out quite well for me, in the sense that my research progress wasn’t perceived as a negative and it helped me advance my career towards more stability that I was aiming for.

So now that I’m in a financial and personal place where I’m not anxious about my next paycheck and my ego’s been adequate satisfied so I don’t need to build any particular kind of reputation for myself, I have this absolutely luxury of decision what what work I want to do with my lab. How many of us can be in a situation where we can opt out of so many aspects of this game and just choose to pursue our mission?

Because some of the most impactful people I know are very early career scientists who are clearly mission-driven and are somehow doing this is helping them to meet their basic needs. I think being explicitly mission-driven brings a lot of value to the scientific community, if only because explicitly “branding” (ugh) with that purpose can help build community. How long do you have to be in a STEM career before you decide for yourself, “These things - this right here — it’s exactly where I want to make impact!” I think the answer is that it can happen immediately for some, and while it took me to have an absurd amount of personal stability to choose in that direction, it doesn’t have to be that way.

You can change this whenever you want. Evolving your priorities is expected and natural, and I think what would be really weird is to have the same mission at age 60 than you had when you’re 25.

It might sound overly aspirational to say, “I’m working to cure cancer,” or, “I’m working to make science more equitable,” or “I’m working to understand how communities assemble as the climate warms,” or whatnot. But if that’s your mission, then it’s good to say so, right? And if you don’t have such a mission for your science, it’s good to recognize that in yourself.