Developing your research programAs a research faculty member or on tenure track at a research university1Postdoctoral experience•One postdoc is probably a good idea; two may be; three are probably too many. •Goals •Published papers, not just data or manuscripts •Sources of recommendation letters and other fruits of networking •New skills within your field or to give a chance to switch fields2Networking in your field•Identify of order 10 people who are your most likely reviewers for manuscripts and grant proposals. Seek them out at meetings, and see if their other associates also belong in the group who deserve particular networking attention. •Figure out what organization holds the meetings that are most relevant to this topic and join it. •Submit to and help organize special sessions at national meetings — that include these people. •Send them your reprints3Interviewing•Do your homework. Study the CVs of researchers in the unit that you would be in. •Be prepared to say what directions you will go in if you are chosen. A balance of collaboration and independence is the ideal. Where will you take them that they can’t go now, and where will they take you? •Don’t be at a loss for words. Prepare questions that you would like to ask of each interviewer. Everyone likes to respond to intelligent and genuine questions about their research.4Negotiating•Don’t start negotiation before job is offered. Be honest during the interview if asked about your startup needs, but don’t be the one to bring them up or demand them before you get an offer. Do ask to be shown the space that the successful applicant will likely get, if that is feasible. It will help formulate your later questions. Make sure to talk with some recent hires at your level; find out what they got. •If offered the job, don’t be shy about asking for the minimum that you need, in terms of lab space and equipment, to make your proposals succeed. Be reasonable in requests beyond that minimum. Be aware that there is tremendous variation among institutions in what is offered as startup, including some summer salary for the first year or two. Some institutions simply offer a fixed dollar amount that you can spend in any fashion, but find out whether benefits must also be paid from that sum if it is used for salary. •Ask whether the unit has a policy of reduced teaching during startup and, if so, whether it extends one year or two. Is there any institutional support for graduate students you will recruit or bring with you? •Asking for an extension of 1-2 wk for a decision is not unreasonable. Pushing to a month or beyond puts the institution in jeopardy of losing its second and third choices, so is less reasonable. •Your leverage vanishes when you accept. Get the offer in writing. If that gets awkward, send a letter with a detailed listing of your understanding of what is being offered, requesting that the chair confirm.5•Publication early and often is essential to your success; < 2 papers per year is dangerous; your first work can’t take a decade to fruit. •In general, you won’t be able to support a technician and graduate students plus your summer salary on one grant. Two related but explicably distinct research areas are safer than one. •By having a collaborator who also writes grants, you may achieve some economies of scale in supporting equipment and people. •Two big grants are much easier to care for than four small ones. •Have a clear explanation for yourself and your program managers how the work you do for them differs from the work you do on other grants. •One approach is to maintain work in a broad theme area over the long term plus make opportunistic forays into nearby areas for which new research funding becomes available; a slight variant is to pursue what you most want plus what you think is easiest to get, given your skills. •Continually ask yourself what is the most important problem you could work on, given your current and achievable skills. Ability to choose good problems improves greatly with experience.Developing “a” research program6Technicians•Provide continuity in expertise, especially with regard to methods that each new lab member needs to learn •Keep labs organized in the face of highly diffusive students; duties include chemical hygiene plans and other safety requirements that will otherwise take up PI time •Have no other seriously competing demands during working hours •Can best provide a “background,” steady rate of output from your lab7Postdocs•In principle are ready to hit the ground running •In practice may not come up to your standards, and you may not have time to fix the problem •Need to get publications out fast, which is an advantage to you, but the problem needs to be appropriate to their time scale8Grad students•The M.S. student who is motivated can get you one solid publication in 2 yr but more typically in 3. •A Ph.D. student for the same amount of your intellectual investment will deliver 3 - 4 publications in 5 yr. •For sheer output (number of papers per time per dollar), students don’t make a lot of sense vs. technicians and postdocs •But they are the fountain of youth, the challenge to conventional thinking, and the new directions.9How to start a student•You will have proposed and recruited in a general area. Get a list of order 6 projects that fit in this general area and that the student likes, and 6 that they don’t like. •Try to understand the reasons behind the groupings. Test your understanding by adding suggestions to the groupings and modifying the project descriptions toward ones that you think would be more productive (papers per dollar per time). •When you have this understanding, ask the student to prioritize the list of liked projects. •Given what you know about the field and the project, negotiate a starting project and get the student started. •Hold weekly meetings on progress. They can be your overall lab meetings. If it is not working well, assess the reasons and admit the possibility of moving to the second priority. Make it clear that moving to a third priority is highly unlikely. The goal is not to choose the ideal project but to make good progress on a good project.!10•M.S. students are not expected to come up with their own research problems. Without experience, how would they know how much work is enough for a useful publication?