A Conversation with Early Career Researchers #ECRchat @OHBM

y David Mehler
As we impatiently wait for the upcoming OHBM meeting in Rome, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the awesome experience from previous years. One aspect about OHBM that makes it so exciting and with which many will agree is that it lives from its vibrant community. Early Career Researchers (ECRs) play a big role in this and certainly have a lot to say and share with the community. At the last two meetings in Vancouver (2017) and Singapore (2018) we reached out to some of them to find out about their motivation to become neuroimagers and their vision for the field that they study.  

Welcome our interviewee ECRs. Top row: Méadhbh Brosnan, Martin Hebart, James Kolasinski. Bottom row: Michael Lührs, Natalia Bielczyk, Martin Grund.

Being an ECR neuroscientist, what gets you up in the morning?

Méadhbh Brosnan, Monash University, Australia and Trinity College Dublin, Ireland    
I’m really passionate about understanding how we can preserve high levels of cognitive function and help prevent dementia in our ageing population. In particular, I am intrigued by the potential for the prefrontal cortex to support adaptive compensatory processes in the face of age-related neuropathology. There are many aspects of this research that I enjoy, but the day-to-day variety is particularly great!  We now have so many different techniques to look at the brain, and it’s a continuous challenge to keep up to date with emerging advances. I really appreciate working with people from a variety of backgrounds and it’s a pleasure to have a great bunch of colleagues and mentors all over the world. Although, admittedly, coffee was my immediate response to this question, working with older adults is something I really love. I’ve met some extraordinary individuals through our research whose positivity & resilience, often in the face of challenging conditions, has been really inspiring!

Martin Hebart, National Institutes of Mental Health, U.S.A
When I studied psychology, I took a course on cognitive neuropsychology, during which we were allowed to interact with stroke patients. I was fascinated by the effects of visuospatial neglect, where a patient may be able perceive the world around them but can only attend to the right side of objects. The phenomena we observed were so unintuitive, but so telling about the function of the brain. What really fascinates me today is how our visual processing is affected by top-down influences, and more generally how these influences shape our conscious perception of the world. My interest in developing and assessing data analysis methods derives from a desire to attain the best tools to address those questions.     

James Kolasinski, Cardiff University, U.K.
I’m sure it’s a common answer, but my motivation really comes from my love of problem solving and a desire to understand how things work. The times in my working week when I’m most satisfied are when I crack a particularly challenging task and gain some new insight, however incremental it might be in terms of the overall question. On a more practical note: maintaining motivation is really important to me as an ECR. I find organisation is the key here: trying to keep the big picture in mind, but maintaining focus on the constituent parts of my research to ensure I get things done. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the magnitude and scale of the projects we all take on: being organised maintains my progress and keeps me just as motivated as does my excitement about the big questions.

Michael Lührs, Maastricht University, The Netherlands
Usually the alarm clock followed by a good cup of coffee. Although as a neuroscientist it is clear to me that enjoying your first cup of coffee later would be a more beneficial use of caffeine. In general, I’m really motivated by the fact that there are still so many open questions in neuroscience and that we have the possibility to gain new insights into how the human brain works and how everything is connected.

Natalia Bielczyk, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands
For me these days, it is more about neuroscientists than neuroscience itself: at some point, I realised how much there needs to be done on behalf of improving mentoring programmes within the neuroscientific community, and helping researchers in successfully shifting between academia and industry. Researchers just deserve a better starting package while sailing away into the free job market. This does not mean that science is not exciting for me anymore; I still read and review research papers and have a few manuscripts in the pipeline myself. But I also feel that my life is slowly changing at the moment; I recognise that there are a lot of smart people in my research domain (connectomic research) and it will be doing well without my involvement, while some other areas definitely still need any pair of hands. Would be nice to be asked exactly the same question in a year or two in order to see some personal development :)

Martin Grund, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
Fixing the bug or figuring out why there is a bug. Before my PhD, I did not expect that I will be able to tell someone how the settings of a parallel port can be controlled. Furthermore, we lose a lot of research potential due to the way academia works. I would like to unleash more of this potential by making the quiet ones heard and bringing the knowledge that is not headline-grabbing to the attention of the media and policy makers. On top of this, I am still fascinated by my research questions. How does the brain create these impressive subjective sensory experiences? How do humans make decisions based on very limited information? Particularly, being active in science policy, I am often surprised about the percepts that people can have.

What’s your vision for the field you are working in?

Méadhbh Brosnan, Monash University, Australia and Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Investigating the neural basis by which lifestyle factors can cultivate resilience against neuropathology is an avenue of research which is, in my view, equally as important as the development of interventions (e.g. pharmacology, brain stimulation, neurofeedback, and cognitive training) to remediate clinical deficits. With regards to ageing, there have been repeated and compelling observations that cognitively stimulating activities, such as professional occupations, education, and leisure activities, lead to a neuroprotective buffer against cognitive decline in the face of neurodegenerative conditions, such as Alzheimer’s Disease. Researching the neural underpinnings of these sorts of effects are not only of scientific interest for understanding how environmental factors induce plasticity, but are also informative for public health interventions and thereby provide an opportunity for direct translational societal benefits. It is my hope that ambitious, large-scale longitudinal neuroimaging studies, encompassing several broad disciplines including psychology, computer science, neurology, public health, and neuroscience will be carried out across the globe. This would greatly aid our understanding of how lifestyle changes might be implemented to optimally harness brain plasticity and improve neuro-cognitive health.

Martin Hebart, National Institutes of Mental Health, U.S.A.
I believe our thinking about the brain is still strongly embedded in the idea of isolated cognitive processes acting on representations that are derived from sensory input or from memory. This idea might work for basic sensory processing, but I am not sure whether in the long run it will allow us to understand higher cognition. There is a lot of variability in higher cognitive processing, and the results that reproduce across trials or subjects may only provide restricted access to the processes we are trying to understand. I hope that in the long run, we will focus more strongly on the computational principles that govern our brain, and that we will perceive the brain more as a neural network that tries optimizing our interaction with the world. Luckily, there are a lot of great developments in computational neuroscience, so I'm confident that this vision will take shape in the near future.

James Kolasinski, Cardiff University, U.K.
I have recently relocated to the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC), where we are very fortunate to house a really impressive array of methods and expertise. Housing 3T, 7T & Connectome MRI systems in the same building as MEG, brain stimulation, and EEG is really a dream come true for me as a neuroscientist. I guess my vision for the field is a more multimodal approach to the work we all do. I am increasingly thinking about the science I want to be doing in terms of a range of complementary methods, rather than focusing on a single method where I have prior expertise. I’d like to see an increasing focus on this multimodal approach across the field more broadly.  I’m very fortunate to be pursuing multimodal work at CUBRIC!

Michael Lührs, Maastricht University, The Netherlands
My vision is to develop and establish a new form of treatment for various psychiatric diseases without the use of medications and thus side effects.

Natalia Bielczyk, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands
What concerns me the most is the job market for ECRs: we all know it is harsh, and depending on the discipline, 2-15% of PhDs have a chance for a faculty position. What is rarely mentioned though, is that the odds of becoming successful are equally low in any area of the free job market: 75-90% of start-ups fail, 90% of traders lose money, only 2% of published books pay themselves back. In every area, the free market competition is brutal. In my view it is thus absolutely necessary to teach ECRs how to develop some core skills, get well connected and self-aware as this will have a crucial impact on them regardless of whether or not they decide to stay in academia. Another problem is that the mechanisms to bridge labor between academia and industry are seriously underdeveloped at the moment. For this reason, I have set up a private foundation, Stichting Solaris Onderzoek en Ontwikkeling in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. We are just starting to research this subject and develop some first solutions. If you are interested and planning to attend OHBM 2019 in Rome, I would be very happy to grab a coffee and chat!

Martin Grund, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
One of the founding reasons for OHBM was to integrate the results across brain imaging methods. However, there are still large gaps between the modalities - from intracranial EEG via MRI to NIRS. Each community sells their method at its best. Fair enough. But hey, all methods have their pros and cons. We should work out which one serves best to answer the question at hand and collectively join forces to merge the modalities. This is inherently linked to the publication system. We should find ways beyond A4-PDFs to share what we tried and learnt. We need a system that integrates data across experimental paradigms and imaging methods. Particularly for perception research, we need a language that allows to merge the results of different sensory modalities instead of picturing them as silos.
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Thanks to all interviewees for sharing their careful thoughts and vision with us. I personally feel spoiled with food for thought now. And it reminds me how inspiring and motivating #ECRchatting is, learning why people are passionate about what they do, and where they see challenges and opportunities for ECR progression. OHBM is committed to support ECRs on their way and it’s worth checking out the activities run by the Special Interest Group (SIG) for Students and Post-docs. If you would like to share your story with us, reach out at the upcoming OHBM2019 meeting in Rome!