Obstacles to Collaboration Posted on March 1, 2006 John B. Reid (bio) talks about a university's emphasis on individual achievement.

I can very clearly, I think, remember what led to my decision to leave university. It was a very good university and very much known for scholarly and research contributions, but like so many other universities, it valued individual achievement. And so that as a young assistant professor, my mentors said basically you need to publish and publish a lot.

You need to publish solely authored papers, and some mentors even said avoid publishing with your graduate students, because we get such good students here that people will question who was the brains of the outfit, you or your student. The emphasis was on individual achievement.

The questions that I'm interested in cannot be solved by individual researchers no matter how competent, well trained, bright they are because they're just too complex. The work I do requires a close collaboration with biostatisticians, psychologists, educators, more and more now with neurobiologists, geneticists. You just can't do the kind of comprehensive work unless you have a collaborative setting.

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