Establishing Your Area of Expertise Posted on January 9, 2008 Megan R. Gunnar (bio) advises early career investigators to pursue extensive knowledge in a particular area.

And I think that may be the thing that the person who's moving into interdisciplinary, collaborative team research needs to keep in mind: have they established a deep expertise in a particular thing that they are then capable of sharing elements of as they work in collaboration?

I don’t think it would be unwise for a young person to have collaborative work and individual work going on at the same time, because, for example, if you’re working as part of a team, you’re the memory expert. You’re bringing the tools of understanding how to assess and understand the development of children’s memory, say, to a research project where they’re interested in the impact of trauma on children’s memory and the kinds of things you can do to avoid PTS. I’m just playing out, right?

Where you might have social workers, you might have the memory workers, stress researchers, and you have to form the interdisciplinary team. Well, your area in this is memory and the development of children’s memory, and so your work on that should be continuing to go on while you share and become part of this collaborative team. What you’re learning on that should feed back to your basic questions about children’s memory, and then ten years down the line, you will still be a highly valued person.

People will say, “What does she do? Oh, she does wonderful work on memory, and she’s studied it in many different interesting contexts. But she can tell a story that’s not a story of, 'Well, we learned this here, and that there, and this other thing here, and actually I’m not quite sure what we really truly learned.‘”

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