Students who aspire to solve big problems should be exposed to big problems, diverse approaches, available technologies, and chewy intellectual challenges early in their training to keep them from becoming locked into a traditional discipline-focused worldview. That theme was one of many to emerge from a meeting of leadership from the Institutional Program Unifying Population and Laboratory Based Sciences (PUP) at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund in Research Triangle Park. Directors from the Population-Laboratory Courses at Baylor, Emory, UCLA, and the University of Texas-Houston Health Science Center met with program administrators on February 8, 2012 to discuss the opportunities and challenges of training researchers at the intersection of bench and population sciences.  

Opportunities  

Moving beyond models. Science should be exposing Ph.D. trainees to the big medical challenges and environmental questions that are ahead and helping them develop a taste for which problems are solvable using available and nearly-available technologies.  Students are almost afraid to do work on human problems. Research needs to be moving from the mouse to the human, not stopping at the model.  Working backward from a patient to the factors that stimulated a shift from healthiness to disease would be a revolutionary approach to human health, but the high throughput environmental tools needed to take on this kind of problem have not yet been invented. This generation of students will invent them.  

Training independent thinkers. How can research move more readily across the spectrum of population, clinical, and bench sciences? Advisors tend to funnel students into niches based on the advisor’s work (and the advisor’s NIH grant’s specific aims). BWF’s support unlinks students from R01 funding, allowing them to truly act as trainees and not as employees. Students freed of these constraints should be trained to get things done, to think more broadly, to expand their perspectives, and to take on a range of experiences. They should have the time to expand their minds. There are huge discoveries to be made, and population-laboratory courses should ignite trainees with the excitement of coming possibilities.  

Following industry’s example. This isn’t just a challenge at the training level: the NIH funding system rewards narrow focus, niche development, and incremental science. Making a living on R01 specific aims is confining. Academic science has not learned to do what industry is good at: developing long term problem-focused studies carried out by fluid interdisciplinary working teams that change depending on the needs of the project. For team science to thrive, early career scientists have to see that people are rewarded as the project moves along, even if the big problem isn’t solved quickly, and that there is great reward in the long run from having accomplished something real.   

Challenges  

Valuing interdisciplinary work. There is still resistance from departments when it comes to hiring researchers trained across disciplines.  For this kind of training to translate into faculty jobs, it will have to be supported by departments and deans. Students learn by example, so exposure to dual mentorship is key to growing scientists who are acceptable to the disciplines they bridge.  The BWF wants to train people to identify great questions, but also to understand how to find colleagues who can help them answer them. The PUP program is aimed at teaching students to think and speak in “both languages,” and this is going to be important: a thought leader who is also a “translator” between research cultures can communicate broadly and make new things happen.  

Tackling the hard questions. These students have to learn how to identify problems worth solving and focus on defining high impact questions. Trainees should be exposed to problems that reflect good scientific taste, so that they will gain extensive experience in taking on worthwhile challenges. They should be taught in a way that gives them plenty of chances to fail so that they can get in the habit of regrouping, re-evaluating their ideas, and dealing with the challenges that emerge on the way to solving big problems. They should learn to pick up new tools as the problem requires them, not to consider themselves as attached to particular technologies or approaches.  

Developing social skills.  Developing a set of social skills is a byproduct when students develop their own project and learn how and where to apply their own skill sets.  Students should be trained in a way that lets them understand how they fit into a scientific environment that will include many different types of thinkers. They will grow to understand the added value that they bring and learn that there is a role for individual insight and individual discovery in team science. They will have to be resilient, confident people, because if this kind of training is successful, these trainees will be a pain in someone’s neck.  They will be forcing institutions to change their culture and change the way they do research.  Training programs need to find ways to give them independence early and to get them confident early. Networking is of critical importance for students who are going to have interdisciplinary careers. Extraversion is a teachable skill and should be taught: business schools already teach it. They will be pushed again toward familiar niches as postdocs. They should leave graduate school ready to resist that pressure and ready to develop transdiciplinary connections as postdocs.    

Based on a meeting summary by Victoria McGovern, Ph.D., Senior Program Officer