I was originally hired onto the TT at Big State U based on my postdoctoral track record in a particular field using a certain technique. I was pretty much a one-trick pony. Don't get me wrong. This was not a bad thing at the time. It netted me a slew of publications that are to this day reasonably well cited. And it landed me my position. And got my research program here off to a good start.
Although my current research program is in a somewhat related area to my postdoctoral work, I no longer use that original technique. In fact I haven't for 6-7 years now. I can't say I'm an "expert" in any technique now. I, or more correctly my lab peeps, use a whole slew of them. Various spectroscopic techniques (fluorescence, CD etc.), mass spec, nmr etc. We're dabbling with crystallography and collaborating with a computational group. I'm considering trying some SAXS.*
I've evolved from being a one-trick pony into a jack-of-all-trades.**
One-trick pony PI's still exist. Some things are complicated or expensive enough that they may never become routine lab tools (e.g. x-ray crystallography and nmr). But even for those PI's, relying on a single technique has become dangerous. As a crystallographer colleague has said on more than one occasion, "simply" solving structures will not keep you funded.
And that brings me to today's message: One should be willing to go where the research is taking you, and that can often mean learning new approaches and techniques. And/or striking up collaborations with people who can do things you can't.
Flexibility is a good trait to possess.
______
* Get your minds out of the gutter. SAXS = small-angle x-ray scattering.
** And master of none?
YEP!
Yup. Whut he sed. All of it.
couldn't agree more (with both Odyssey and DM)
This is why we have academic freedom. We shouldn't forget that we are very fortunate to have the chance to do research that we never could have predicted we'd end up publishing papers on. So that you can, in the immortal words of Toucan Sam, follow your nose.
One of my own stories along these lines:
http://neurodojo.blogspot.com/2011/03/potential-invasions-and-new-horizons.html
And I have another "I never expected to have a paper on THAT" story to tell in the not to distant future.
A bit scary though, when people in your lab are using techniques you couldn't do on your own.
That just provides additional incentive to remain funded so you can have a continuous "lab memory".
Definitely really bizarre to have people work for me that can do techniques that I don't understand very well. Well, understanding on the conceptual level is completely different than understanding the details and nuances of the experiment itself. But it seems that letting go of the small details is part of the process.
It's a big part of the process. Once you have your own group it's simply not possible to be able to do all the lab stuff and your other responsibilities. It's essential you have a lab group you can trust to figure out the right way to do things. Often that involves approaches you, the PI, have no experience with.
[...] my lab personnel do. If your lab is limited to a particular set of techniques and is not constantly evolving, you're [...]