After two extremely informative session on Motility and Cytoskeleton chaired by Dr. Michael Previs and Dr. Ahmet Yildiz, the subgroup met for dinner at The Smoking Gun in the Gaslamp District of San Diego. This gathering stood out to me because I saw Professors reaching out to students and actively interacting with students and sharing ideas rather than the other way round. I asked a few of them what is one piece of advice they would give to graduate students and here is what I learned.
Dr. Sakthivel Sadayappan from University of Cincinnati who is a leading researcher on the role of myosin binding protein-C regulation and its function in the heart, and also a founder of Red Saree Inc, an organization dedicated to improve the heart health awareness in South Asian communities in the United States, shared his approach to research. While emphasizing the importance of collaboration, he advised to spend serious effort in finding the important problem first and then take a bottom down approach to solve it by finding best people to collaborate. He told us that since we cannot solve everything by ourselves, it is very important to identify the correct resources and collaborate with people who can help us reach the solution. Reiterating the importance of working on the impactful problems he said, "if I go home and tell my family that I am working on finding a cure for heart diseases, they understand".
Dr. Ahmet Yildiz, a leading biophysicist at UC Berkeley who has made numerous seminal contributions in understanding of intracellular transportation, said, "I always ask my graduate students to consider their PhD as their first start-up". I felt that it was an incredibly astute piece of advice because it emphasizes all the key aspects like collaboration, funding, creativity, hard work etc. required for successful graduation all at once in one terse sentence.
I asked Dr. Justin Molloy from Francis Crick Institute, London, who is a pioneer in several single molecule methods to study how biological molecules work both in vitro and within living cells, about his advice to graduate students. Reminiscing about his experience and with a jolly smile he said, "Trust your Data". Giving examples from his student's work in the past whom I befriended during the dinner, he smiled at us and further told us that if you see any abnormality in the data, it does not necessarily mean that the experiment is wrong. It could be a discovery.