The Heart of Research Training Posted on January 14, 2008 The path to being a successful researcher, says F. Xavier Castellanos (bio), involves extending your training and establishing your expertise.

Research is, by its very definition, the most difficult thing we can be doing because it's always asking questions about matters that we don't know, that we're profoundly uncertain about, and we don't know how to ask the question. If we did, we'd go ahead and do it and just have it over and done with. So in order to get to the point where one can really contribute, you first have to learn everything that's been learned before, find out where the boundary is between what's known and what's not, and then how to start bridging and crossing from the known to the unknown. And that takes time and it takes real mentorship and learning by participating in work that is ongoing.

And so part of the challenge is that training is so long that by the time someone has finished college, medical school, residency, to think about more training at quite low rates of salary versus going out and becoming a high-earning physician is a real values crunch. And yet that's essentially what's required, is to be able to dedicate further time as a full-time trainee.

One of the points that I think needs to be made — and it's one that I've borrowed or stolen from Jane Costello — is that a young researcher needs to really work on getting their T-shirt. And what she means by that is that as a young investigator, it's critically important to have a very specific identification so that when senior people in the field see that person's name, they immediately think, "Oh, that person does this kind of work." It's two or three words, fits on a t-shirt.

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