Interview with Dr. Tom Yin

I’m very excited to have Dr. Yin here, not only because he is my former postdoc adviser, but because during the four years I worked with him, when he was overburdened with administrative duties, we never had a conversation as long as this one.

Fiona: Your independent research began at University of Wisconsin Madison 38 years ago. Over the years, what was the biggest change you have observed in the way people conduct research?

Dr. Yin: I think the biggest difference is that faculty now spend much more time writing grant proposals than I did. Of course the reason for that is the present prolonged period of tight funding compared to when I started out. Funding has usually been rather cyclical with up and down cycles but the present 5-10 year severe depression is very worrisome, especially as there is no end in sight. During most of my research career, one expected to get funded when applying to NIH. Nowadays, it seems like the hope is not to be triaged! As a consequence I only wrote about 10 grant proposals during that 38 year period. Nowadays, PIs are writing that many proposals in 2 or 3 years!! I couldn’t possibly come up so many ideas for grants.

Fiona: As a young investigator, I totally agree. If the overall funding situation remains, could you think of strategies the government may adopt to ease up the competition?

Dr. Yin: One of the irritating aspects of present NIH funding is that there are quite a few very large laboratories that have multiple NIH grants. I personally know several labs with 8 and 9 R01 grants. I believe NIH is now implementing a policy to prevent this from happening, but I would strongly recommend that some reasonable cap (two or three) be implemented on the number of NIH grants to any given P.I. Obviously some policy on collaborative grants needs to be included in such a rule.

Fiona: Your lab is stuffed with equipment my age. Are there advantages of using primitive electronics over the fancy ones made more recently?

Dr. Yin: No, I just have a difficult time throwing anything away so the old equipment stays in the lab.

Fiona: Really? I thought there were old-equipment magic. At the moment, what is the biggest obstacle in the auditory research that hinders further advancement of the field? In other words, what existing problem would you like to be solved first?

Dr. Yin: I think the biggest problem in brain research, not just auditory, is to understand how the nervous system integrates information from individual neurons to produce perception, action, decisions, and other higher order functions. We now know a lot about how individual neurons respond to different stimuli or to produce different actions, and under different behavioral conditions but we understand very little about how the responses of many neurons are integrated to generate behavior. In visual research this is often referred to as the binding problem: how does the CNS take information about the shape, color, orientation, 3D form, etc. of an object which appears to be encoded by different visual areas and put it all together to give us a percept of a person running, for example.

Fiona: When a large department with a long history recruits new faculty, what are the major considerations people tend to have?

Dr. Yin: There are a number of important considerations that departments generally have when looking to hire new faculty. Among them are the following: the faculty member has a history of productive research as judged by publications during the graduate and post-doctoral years, that he/she is doing interesting and important research that has a high likelihood of getting funded in the future, sometimes departments are looking for faculty working in specific areas, indications that the faculty member will be a good colleague within the department and school with interest in collaboration with existing labs, and the faculty member will be a good mentor and teacher.

Fiona: You’ve trained more than a dozen graduate students and postdocs. Despite the escalating competition, all but two successfully landed jobs in academia. Did you only recruit students who were willing to make a commitment, or was there a secret in how you mentored them?

Dr. Yin: No, I don’t think I ever asked a student if they were interested in an academic career, at least not when they applied to work in the lab so this was not a way to screen potential students. I think I was lucky to find students and postdocs who were really talented and hardworking and also really liked doing science and just wanted that to be their career. Having a productive graduate and postgraduate experience also helps.

Fiona: I still think there has to be something more than luck. Would you like to offer some advice to young researchers in their earlier careers?

Dr. Yin: I always tell students who are considering a research career that the most important thing to me is that you be excited about doing research. It’s unlikely that you will become rich or famous in academia, so what has to drive you during the inevitable hard times when experiments aren’t working or funding is tight or reviewers are obstinate is the love of the science. So if you aren’t excited about coming into the lab in the morning, then try to work on a problem that will get you excited.

Fiona: And if we fail in the end, at least we’ve had some wonderful time. That might be too permissive. Let me put it the other way: if we are excited about what we do, we have a better chance of getting the reviewers excited. Okay, thank you so much, my mentor! I wish you a happy retirement (with still more teaching responsibilities, of course)!