Adam E. Cohen, PhD, is a full professor at Harvard University and an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Cohen holds PhD degrees from Cambridge (UK) in theoretical physics and from Stanford in experimental biophysics. He works at the interface of physics, chemistry and biology.
Dr. Cohen shared his experience as an early career investigator, providing a unique perspective based for young scientists.
What motivated you to choose this career in successfully applying physical tools in biomedical science?
I really loved studying physics when I was in school because it showed how a few simple principles could explain so much of the world around us. But as an area to study, I found biology really compelling: there is so much of the biological world that still needs an explanation!
You have been very successful in your career trajectory. What are some key skills that helped you succeed in your career?
I don’t feel successful, since so many of the things my students and I try don’t work. But nobody hears about these failures—people only hear about the few rare successes. Maybe a tolerance for failure and a perpetual optimism are important.
It’s also super important to be really careful in choosing a research topic: almost anybody can learn the skills to carry out any research project. Any of us could probably do a Nobel Prize-winning experiment. The key is to pick a topic which is sufficiently unusual and important that if you succeed, people will really raise their eyebrows.
Do you have any specific career advice for graduate students, who are about to start their biomedical sciences career?
A famous mathematician, Richard Hamming, gave a talk called “You and Your Research” on the topic of what distinguishes the most successful scientists. It’s full of great advice. There’s a transcript online. I encourage everybody to look it up and to read it.
As evidenced by your lab website, you are an experienced mentor to several postdocs and graduate students. What are some tips that you have for us regarding how to be a successful mentor to trainee scientists?
It took me a while to learn this, but everybody is very different: the management style that works well with one person might totally backfire with another. So it’s important to get to know the people you work with. The long hours and ups and downs of research make it a very personal business, so it’s important to be supportive of people even when experiments don’t work out.
Looking back over the years of job experience in your field, what do you think you should have done differently?
I would have said "no" to more things. There are a lot of events and activities that take time and give you short-term positive feedback. There’s no social credit for sitting by yourself and thinking or writing, but these are the things that ultimately lead to long-term impact.
What is your opinion about current funding situation and any specific advice for young scientists to acquire better funding support?
Getting funding is difficult. It’s important to remember that everybody else has the same information about funding that you have. If there’s an announcement of a big new funding initiative, many people will rush to apply and often the success rate goes way down. Sometimes it can be better to avoid the "hot topics" and to work in an area that isn’t (yet) trending!
It is crucial but challenging to have good optical tools in biological sciences. What do you think is most challenging part of your job and how do you keep yourself (and your group) motivated?
The intellectually hardest part of my job is figuring out what we should do! There are so many possible projects, and for each project there are so many possible approaches, it can be very challenging to chart a path. These decisions rely on intuition and guesswork, so it’s easy to be wrong!
What are the current challenges that the optopatch technology faces that may limit a more widespread use of it, and where do you see the optopatch technology going over the next few years?
The biggest challenges are to disseminate hardware and software that will make it easy for people to use these tools in cultured neurons for disease modeling. The molecular tools work quite well, when used properly. For instance, my startup company, Q-State Biosciences, has developed many high-throughput Optopatch screens to search for treatments for various nervous system disorders. But it’s challenging for an individual academic lab, even my own, to take similar kinds of data.
There are also challenges to making the technology work robustly in live animals. We can use Optopatch to record from near-surface neurons in mice, but to image deeper will require development of voltage indicators which can be imaged using 2-photon microscopy. Deeper imaging in vivo will also require advances in optical instrumentation.
What were some of the challenges you encountered while transitioning from postdoc to a faculty position?
As a grad student and postdoc, I got very good at setting up experiments, taking data, and analyzing data. As a faculty member, I suddenly had to manage a group of people, pay attention to the budget, get funding, and set research priorities. This was all totally new to me, and I felt quite unprepared at the beginning.
Describe the interview process that you went through for your current position. Approximately how many faculty positions did you apply for and how many did you interview for?
There was nothing surprising about the interviews: people wanted to know about what I had done and what I planned to do next. People cared not just about whether it would work, but also about how important it was. My advice to students and postdocs in my lab is to focus on doing first-class science and on developing a research vision. The interviews then become an afterthought.
This interview is part of the Career Corner Interview series that focuses on the experiences of successful early-career scientists in different fields.