I recently had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Po-Shen Loh of Carnegie Mellon to speak at an event. In his talk, one of the most striking pieces of advice centered upon Terrance Tao. The most important quality that Tao possesses on top of his talent is an unending desire to continually learn and explore new fields of math. Dr. Loh noted that it was as if he was doing a new PhD, mastering a field of math, every 5 years.
As an undergraduate, this is still unfathomably far away. I haven’t spent even a month learning deeply about a topic, let alone even doing a PhD. Yet, the spirit of continuous learning in a wide range of fields is still incredibly attractive. The thesis has to be that learning additional fields isn’t additive, but multiplicative. It is a common mantra that diversity of thought promotes innovation and iteratively improves upon one’s ‘learning rate’. Still, researchers tend to stick to a single domain of expertise, perhaps intimidated or discouraged from attempting to become an expert in multiple domains.
The research ecosystem is filled with those who are able to focus deeply on a specific topic; the incentives of the research environment select for such people. Commercialization (until recently) has been frowned upon, and the journal peer review system has further encouraged people to stay in their lane in order to advance career wise. I think this is scaring some of the smartest people out of the industry. Research and specifically in the biomedical sciences needs to develop a level of excitement to poach top talent from careers in quantitative trading, investment banking, and management consulting. To do this, the future leaders in science need to stress two defining characteristics: 1. The intellectual flexibility to explore multiple parallel scientific fields and ideas at once, and 2. The opportunity to impact the world by commercializing and bringing research findings to market.
There are countless exciting fields with huge impact if biological problems can be solved. Science will be the answer to almost all 21st century problems. For housekeeping, the following are fields that even a dumb 20 year old thinks are interesting and worth spending time in ones career mastering (mix and match for exciting research collaborations):