Gerry starts HHMI Freeman Hrabowski Scholarship as an Associate Professor at Princeton University

As of September 1, I started my new position as an Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. After a year-long delay, I am also finally starting my Freeman Hrabowski Scholarship with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Both of these new positions come with a huge amount of support for new science and growing my lab. This transition is the most incredible moment of my academic career, and I hope it leads to an exciting future for my scientific life. Over my first few days at Princeton, I’ve become enamored with this marvellous university, the beautiful campus, the well-resourced infrastructure, and all the brilliant, dedicated, kind, and supportive people here.

I am buzzing with excitement. I am also feeling extremely lucky. It’s mind-boggling to reflect on the privileged situation in which I find myself. Of all the possible lives I might have lived, I pulled this winning lottery ticket: on a trajectory to spend the rest of my life at one of the most intellectually stimulating places in the world, with access to all the resources necessary to do whatever scientific work is most meaningful and important. My kids, just one and three years old, will go to excellent public schools. It’s hard to appreciate this amount of good fortune and privilege. It’s not something I ever expected for myself or my life, and I feel overwhelming gratitude for all the people in my life who helped me and made this happen. As I read about the history of these institutions, I am also grateful to the vision and hard work of the people who helped created the places and programs that support me.

Most of us in ecology and evolution are at heart, mere “nature-lovers” who have chosen a path that is fundamentally about understanding the natural world, to help us all to appreciate and conserve it. We draw strength and inspiration from the ‘tangled bank’, and from the ‘grandeur in this view of life’ and ‘of endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful’. I feel gratitude for having a job that can bring me close to wild things and natural places (albeit not as often as I would like), and a job that gives me the chance to share that love of nature with others.

How do I make the most of this exceptional gift of time and money that has been invested in me? I feel such a deep sense of responsibility. Science to me has always been curiosity-driven, intellectually stimulating, and fun; but a publicly funded scientist is also a public servant. I am cognizant of the significant investment that governments make in science, with the promise that our research will result in innovations and discoveries that improve the world. Ultimately though, every bit of return on that investment comes down to a single individual scientist doing their job well day after day.  Science used to be so simple: collecting data, analysing it, and writing it up. Now it is all about managing people and money, and making impossible decisions of how to allocate limited time and money across too many projects. It is easy to follow faulty incentives and lose focus on our real mission. Scientists are pressured by academia to be ‘productive’ and ‘influential’ but the real goal of science is to make increasingly correct and useful models of how nature works. Although all academics are storytellers, the promise (and challenge) of being an academic scientist is telling stories that are as true as currently possible. The ever-inspirational Richard McElreath describes it this way:

“Other researchers are out there writing books about the wonder of science, capturing the imagination of the public, inspiring the thinkers that will secure our species’ just and sustainable future. Meanwhile, I am telling anyone who will listen that, if we are very careful and try very hard, we might not completely mislead ourselves.”

Being “very careful” and trying “very hard” is what scientists call “rigor”. The hardest thing about rigor is that it is a moving target. The sad thing about rigor is that a surprising number of people care about your conclusions more than how you reached them. Anyone can turn more money into more papers, the real question is: How do I convert money into more rigor? How do I transform not just the quantity of my lab’s research, but scale of our datasets and evidence and the quality of our statistical inferences? How do I recruit people who love and care about science as much as I do? How do I teach academics to be ethical idealists that care about discovering what is true more than they care about career self-promotion? How do I become a better mentor? How do I help to improve the norms of our scientific community? How do I participate more in efforts to better align the career goals of academics with the goals of science? And how do I balance all that and also respond to the deluge of emails and paperwork? How do I squeeze the most out of every day?

Standby– I’m sure I will figure this all out next week.