You know that you've been invited into that room for a reason, so just show up and be
your authentic self.
You're only going to do great science if you're really happy and if it fits in your life.
It's also good to learn from the other people that you're working with.
In the long run it's very satisfying, but it is an uphill battle and the only thing
that sort of keeps you going is the mentors and allies and friends and collaborators that
you meet along the way.
What's your advice to a young graduate student charting a path for themselves?
Be honest to yourself and know whether you really love what you're doing.
Nothing good comes out of doing something for an outcome, for the PhD, for the MD, for
this or that.
If you love the doing of it, the process, it will never feel hard, even if that reward
at the end gets to be a moving target, which usually it is.
If you love the doing of it, if you walk into your lab or to your office and you sit down
thinking something good is going to happen today or I have to get through this so that
I can do something else that I'm really looking forward to.
If you are honest to yourself and you don't force yourself to do something because you
or somebody else has an expectation of you to behave or perform or do something else,
you're going to be happy and it will come with a lot of good things.
I got advice from an old mentor long ago who said if you're really interested in something
like neuroscience, you should do something outside of neuroscience to see if you like
it, right?
So I did that.
In orthopedics, it was unusual, I was like, oh, you know, I would be interested in the
bone, you know, I'll do orthopedics.
And it actually turned out to work out really well.
When maybe you and I were coming up through the system, you became an expert in a very
specific domain and that today we really try, you really have to start to work across disciplines.
Yeah, it's harder for sure.
And in neuroscience now in particular, because what you could possibly do with the range
of tools that has emerged, the expectation for a high profile paper is that it's going
to have a little bit of everything.
And how could you do all that?
So I think it becomes more important to work as a team and to have different people in
the group that you see more co-first author or even three co-all gave the same amount
of effort to the paper going on.
But it's also good to learn from the other people that you're working with.
The thing I try to do is just always like, know your stuff, you know, like bring some
scholarship along, but just look at it with really open eyes, you know, curiosity, look
at it for what's out there, you know, is this question everything.
So I think, you know, I don't, it doesn't always work, but it kind of helps you getting,
you know, stuck in like, you know, fashion corners of the field.
Yeah, absolutely.
So and then projecting out, like if you were giving some advice to the younger, obviously
you do this all the time with your graduate students and trainees and that, you know,
what do you say to them about that?
Like getting on stock or framing out the questions in a way that will make them meaningful and
important?
Yeah, I sometimes feel for people in my lab because, you know, I really push them hard
to make their own decisions and really to think like, is this really interesting to
you?
Do you care about this?
Do you, you know, what do you think is going to, you know, how is this going to change
the way you think about things?
Is this going to change our understanding?
I really try to operate at that very basic low level where I think things are really
important.
So I really try and I think, you know, there are many ways to be a successful mentor, but
sort of my approach is really to try to help each individual find meaning and joy and their
own, you know, pathway of the balance of productivity for themselves.
So I try not, you know, I'm not one of those things like everyone has to do this every
month and here we do, you know, it's all very more organic, kind of intense and organic.
Working on personhood as well as just like, you know, this is a great project.
And not just the person as a scientist, but the whole person, you know, like, I mean,
I think you're only going to do great science if you're really happy and if it fits in your
life.
You've had a, you know, an extraordinary career.
I mean, you really, really have and, you know, looking back on the things that happened and
the people that you met, has it given you a sense for the path to success?
And, you know, if you were to take that and turn it into advice for a youngster today,
you have some pearls of wisdom.
We always ask this question.
Yes.
Well, the world is changing dramatically, so I feel like I'm a bit dated already.
Serendipity has been a big part of this.
I started my lab out of graduate school from UCSF, went back to Japan.
It was not something that I had imagined doing, but they were launching a new institute, the
Riken Brain Science Institute.
And the goal was to create something more Western, not the traditional hierarchical
system of Japanese university.
And I thought, well, who am I?
I'm just starting out, you know, and I had a lot of interesting ideas, I thought, for
the research, but was just untested.
But I felt that I could bring the kind of Western infrastructure or ecosystem to a new
institution.
And in that way, felt like I could contribute right away in addition to eventually science.
That was a very, very lucky break.
I was, of course, anxious about doing that, but excited at the same time.
It was an institution that had no tenure.
It was on a five-year review cycle.
And the challenge was there.
The moving far from the familiar.
But chances come around very rarely.
And so I think my advice would be if a young person had an opportunity, they shouldn't
be afraid.
Yeah.
Seize the day.
Right.
For youngsters up and coming, you know, you've traveled a certain path, you know, from an
immigrant family, other humanities, and so on.
When you turn around and you talk to your graduate students or even if you're out in
the school system, what do you say to youngsters?
What do you say about, you know, do you have some nuggets tips for life?
For life?
Oh, wow.
Or the academy.
It's interesting because I was not by any means a traditional success story.
I think it took a long time for me to get off the ground.
I mean, in terms of, you know, I was a postdoc for something like seven years, which may
be more typical nowadays, just a larger commentary on academia in general.
But you know, I didn't think that I would succeed in this career path.
There was no indication I would for many, many years.
I struggled.
I didn't get my first faculty position until, you know, about 10 years ago.
It's a lot of investment that you put in, not sort of knowing what will come out the
other end.
But, you know, and people will give you all kinds of advice, but it's kind of the survivorship
bias.
And that's for me, that doesn't necessarily mean it'll work for anybody else.
But one thing that I found that I couldn't move away from was this kind of like, I have
a unique perspective and I'm just going to keep doing the thing that I think needs to
be done, whether it's looking at spontaneous brain activity when nobody else cared about
that or, you know, whether it's looking at certain populations using certain approaches.
I have a unique perspective and I'm going to be here and I'm going to bring that perspective
to academia, whether they want it or not.
It turns out eventually they do want it because, you know, sometimes if you're not from the
majority group, you don't see anyone else that looks like you.
You think, well, I'm the odd one out.
I must be wrong.
But the truth is, you know, that as we've talked about, you know, the diversity is what
like drives the innovation in science.
And so when you, you know, you stick it out, you stick to your, you know, try to bring
people along, I guess, to your perspectives, in the long run, it's very satisfying, but
it is a uphill battle.
And the only thing that sort of keeps you going is the mentors and allies and friends
and collaborators that you meet along the way who support you in that path.
So there's the both sort of don't lose your hope, even though it sometimes looks bleak,
but also like rely on those friends and connections and collaborations because that's what makes
it all possible and worthwhile.
A lot of our PhD graduates now, choosing not the academic route, choosing to walk away
from the research enterprise.
And of course, there's a big sucking sound as the big data firms, the Googles, the Facebooks,
take the PhD students that would formerly have gone down that route into their more
corporate world.
Are you worried about that?
And what would you say to a youngster looking at that fork in the road and saying, you know,
I could go over into this corporate world and make a lot of money, let's face it, or
should I stay in the academic track?
Is there something that we should be saying to somebody to say, look, you know, stay the
course, it's worthwhile.
Academic research, you know, is fantastic.
Who can have a better job than what we do, right?
I mean, we wake up every morning and our goal is to just to come and think about, you know,
what are the next questions we want to.
So there's no other job that offers you this.
So that's one, so I think personally what I feel is that what I tell students is that
if you have the, if you feel that this is something critical for you and you have this
drive inside yourself, you don't have, you know, to come and then, oh, what do I do today?
I don't know where I'm going.
So if you come, you know, every day and you get to the lab and you get, and you have this,
all this thing driving you, that means that you have something inside you that is, you
know, that is done for science, right?
That's one thing where you should, because you need to have that.
If you don't have that, probably you're not at the right place because you need that because
it's, we know, we know what the cons are, right?
It's competitive.
There is a lot of people, there is a lot of very, a lot of ton of people who would want
to go after the same, you know, funding that you will be doing, but there is place for
you if you have that.
And then of course, after that, you know, you need to take this and take advantage of
that.
Take your career, you need to take your career in your hands and move in forward.
You know, you need to take the lead on your career and go with it positively and find
with it, surround yourself with a good team of people, taking advantage of the resources
that your graduate program offers you, taking, making a network, you know, talking with people.
You need to develop network.
So you need a lot of things that you need to, yourself, to take care of.
But if you do that, people will be pleased, you know, and excited to give you and train
you and help you advancing that.
But you need to take the lead on your own career and you need to have this motivation.
If you have that, there's no reason why you should not, you know, you should not succeed.
There is place for you in research.
I mean, that would be my thing.
Have you picked up a specific mentoring style yourself?
Is there something that you bring or that you'd say this is a key component?
I think, you know, thus far in my experience, you know, so I've been at Yale for 14 years
or so.
Every student is different, right?
You know, and I don't, I think if I have a mentoring style, it might be mostly centered
around being very patient, you know, very, trying to be very, very tolerant of the differences
between other people, how their styles might, might interact with others in the lab group
or with me.
You know, I, I try not to impose too many of my own, the expectations I had for myself,
I try not to impose them on my students because their style and their, their learning style
might be different from mine or their goals in life might be different from mine.
So yeah, I love that answer.
And I often get asked the same thing.
And I say like, you know, people in the lab are just human beings, like the human beings
in your world, in your life, and they come in all shapes and sizes and you have to figure
out a way to fit around that.
Yeah, everybody has a real life too.
You know, it isn't, it isn't science 100% of the time, although sometimes it is, like,
I have trouble turning off the science in my head.
But you know, people come to the lab and they have had a bad day or they have, you know,
a family crisis or, you know, or something else is more important that day than, you
know, this one experiment.
And you know, that's, that's a real thing.
It's not just science, it's also everybody's real life too.
You've had an amazing life really, you know, you've reached the absolute pinnacle of the
Academy from a small town in Virginia.
When you talk to your graduate students or youngsters in the schools, and they say like,
you know, what do I, how do I do it?
How do I, how do I do what Brian Boyd did?
Do you have, do you have some pearls of wisdom for them?
Yeah, yeah, I guess two pieces of advice.
For me, and I think for other people in the field that I've interacted with as well, I
think, you know, mentors are really important.
You know, find your supportive mentoring network.
And sometimes you need mentors for different reasons.
Sometimes it's not just about the science.
Sometimes it's just about navigating academia.
When I was in my doctoral program, one of my mentors was a Latina woman.
And I talked to her about what it's like being a minority in the Academy.
And those are the conversations we had.
But they were really important for my career.
So find your mentoring network, that support.
The other I would say to people, and I often hear this from students who are from marginalized
backgrounds, this whole concept of imposter syndrome.
And I feel like an imposter.
And I would say that, again, most people I've talked to in the Academy, at some point in
their career, felt like an imposter.
So know that you've been invited into that room for a reason.
So just show up and be your authentic self.
So those are my two pieces of advice.
As somebody who's really had a fantastic career, what's that one pearl of wisdom?
What do you say to them?
What's going to get them through?
Yeah.
So single pearls are always a problem for me.
We have one minute.
You can do five.
And I think one might be to identify not a problem right this moment that you want to
attack that's important, but what would give your entire career in its inevitable arc meaning
and importance so that if you got there, you would have felt fulfilled.
And to some of us, that has some sort of highfalutin kinds of words like changing the world or
discovering things that will help large classes.
To some people, it might be equally important, but to answer this question that's always
been unknown, and if you have that, I think the complexities of life become just steps
toward that fascinating goal.
And that might be toward human health, toward the betterment of the world, or maybe just
discovering the subatomic forces that explain black holes.
Just that.
Thank you.