Episode 15 – Dr. Brunie Felding On The Importance Of Peer Networks

Patrick Yurick

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All of this feedback leads somewhere, to a better understanding of your own work and how you communicate it to others. And if you haven’t figured it out by now, Brunie doesn’t take this topic lightly.

EPISODE CREDITS

Guest Starring Dr. Brunie Felding – Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research

Produced & Hosted by Adam Greenfield

Executive Produced by Patrick Yurick, Instructional Designer – MIT OGE

Executive Produced by Heather Konar, Communication Director – MIT OGE

Special thanks to the following editors who provided us invaluable feedback that aided in the development of this show:

Christopher O’Keeffe, Co-Founder of Podcation

Kristy Bennet, Manager – MIT Women’s League

Jennifer Cherone, Phd Candidate – MIT Burge Laboratory

Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC

The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.

MUSIC & SOUNDS

“All The Best Fakers” by Nick Jaina is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org)

“Vittoro” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License

“The Summit” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License

“Deliberate Thought” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

EPISODE SCRIPT

ADAM GREENFIELD

Welcome to The Great Communicators Podcast presented by The MIT Office of Graduate Education, a professional development podcast expressly designed to bring lessons from the field to our graduate student researchers.

My name is Adam Greenfield and there’s an old proverb that says, “It takes a village to raise a child.” No, this episode isn’t about child rearing. At least not in a literal sense. But it is about the process of creating effective communication through the use of community and peer review.

As you’re about to find out, it goes beyond just the reasoning for effective communication. Going through that process enriches not just you as a scientist and researcher but also the entire field you’re in.

Our guest in this episode, through her own trials and tribulations, has come to find that a support group of peers for evaluation and critique, no matter how honest things get, can really be a boost to personal and professional success.

BRUNIE FELDING

That’s the goal.

ADAM GREENFIELD

And that’s Brunie Felding, an associate professor at Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California and the type of work she does will hopefully one day change the face of medicine and science.

BRUNIE FELDING

I’m a principal investigator in cancer research projects.

ADAM GREENFIELD

I met Professor Felding-

BRUNIE FELDING

You can call me Brunie.

ADAM GREENFIELD

You got it.

I met Brunie at her office in the building that housed the Department of Molecular & Experimental Medicine, less than one mile east of the Torrey Pines Golf Course overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The building itself is a bit unassuming, and after my interview with Brunie, I could tell it was almost preferred.

Now, I say this for a reason, and to Brunie, it’s a very important one. As you’re about to hear, Brunie takes great stock in having a scientific family close by. It’s a nurturing environment that benefits everyone. Having this family around and a part of your growth and failure in not just communication but your development as a whole is almost crucial.

BRUNIE FELDING

There is actually never anything stopping you in your entire career that you also watch out for people whom you can trust and seek advice from. And with that I mean not only the research community in terms of expertise for a certain scientific question but also for making choices. If you are in a crossroads situation where you have to make a choice, either this way, that way, and your moral inner compass or whatever, your knowledge at the time, doesn’t tell you clearly which way to go, it is very, very important to have and be able to rely on certain people whom you can ask for advice. I have such people here at Scripps and it doesn’t take long sometimes to get that advice…. So, I mean, don’t feel you’re out there by yourself but check very carefully for people within your physical environment, really, if you can, or even later on, maybe it would be a distant environment, but your mentors, your academic family is a strong-knit group, usually, and you will find individuals there that you can come back with career questions or any kind of questions in your life and they are willing to help you to the best of their knowledge. I think that’s very important.

ADAM GREENFIELD

Brunie has been a part of many patent requests, grant applications, and publishing research. Through all of that, she worked with her scientific family to shore up the details in order to present it and communicate it in a way that the intended audience would understand. The patent requests only contained language that was yours up until a certain point, at which a patent lawyer got involved and translated for you so the legal audience could understand.

BRUNIE FELDING

What I do is if I would like to throw out the idea that I would seek the opportunity to kind of file for a patent on something, I write what we call a disclosure and the disclosure is more- something like a scientific paper. It’s kind of my style where I present what I have, I make a case for the novelty of what I found in light of the literature that’s out there, the prior art, if you will. So- and I don’t necessarily look at it from that level because, you know, I’m not a lawyer and so for that type of writing you need a lawyer involved, of course. So you write up your disclosure, you make your scientific point, then you meet with a lawyer who will then translate this whole thing into a patent application. Very different from when you write a paper or when you write a grant application.

ADAM GREENFIELD

When it came to the grant applications, though, it seemed there was somewhat of a special affinity for those.

BRUNIE FELDING

That’s something that you start in your mind with your team and then you write it up and it’s your baby from start to finish. And then it gets peer reviewed, you know, with and by people who are in your field and you get feedback. You polish it or you make your stance for what you don’t want to change. Then you throw it out into the peer community, which is basically the group of people who will understand what you write, if you write it in those terms. In a grant application, you really, really work it hard to make everybody understand what you want to do and how valuable it is to want to do a certain thing. The most important documents that I write are scientific papers and grants and they are like, start to finish, in house type of my own stuff with a team, of course, generating the data.

ADAM GREENFIELD

To Brunie, communication in science is a pretty big deal. Because of this, there may be times where you feel overwhelmed with an idea or even an entire career and just aren’t sure what the next step should be. You could ask someone but communicating a jumble of words and ideas may not get you the answer you need. This is where personal reflection is a very useful tool to take advantage of.

BRUNIE FELDING

Realize that communication is a very important aspect of research, of science, of discovery. It really is. And if you feel for a while you have to sit and be by yourself and mull over a certain data set or thought or concept that starts to develop a new mind and you need that time for yourself and with yourself only, do it. Give yourself that time and space. But then reach out and communicate. Expose your new ideas to feedback and be open to whatever feedback comes back and then use the feedback that you can understand and that you think can bring you forward in your research question, in your career advancement, in your personal growth.

ADAM GREENFIELD

All of this feedback leads somewhere, to a better understanding of your own work and how you communicate it to others. And if you haven’t figured it out by now, Brunie doesn’t take this topic lightly.

BRUNIE FELDING

Your success lies in trying to enrich your field, trying to survive as a person, trying to survive as a group leader to have funds, for instance, for your team to build, maintain a team, and to do the work that you like to do. The communication is an absolute must and it has to be effective and it has to be really good. That is something also that you learn with time, that I learned with time, and it is also, you know- communication is one thing, and then the way in which you communicate, then you are- funding agencies, for example, impose on you formats in which you can communicate, and you have to learn to do that effectively within the guidelines given. And so yeah, communication is, next to actually doing the work, the most important, I think.  

ADAM GREENFIELD

The peer review process is surely a familiar process for many of you. But as Brunie pointed out, even just having that community of like-minded individuals around you will be a boon to your career as a researcher and scientist.

Of course, that feedback and growth in your communication also has a much bigger effect on just you as an individual. The entire field benefits. And when that happens, even more opportunities open up for you. It’s a big old circle of progress just because your lines of communication and review were opened up to your peers and community.

Thanks for listening to The Great Communicators Podcast brought to you by The MIT Office of Graduate Education. My name is Adam Greenfield, and feel free to talk amongst yourselves.

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