10 Lessons from The Power List (Part 1)
We asked The 2024 Power List: what’s the most memorable piece of advice you’ve ever received?
| 3 min read | Discussion
Michael Gonsior: Share freely your ideas, fight your ego as hard as you can and you will be part of pushing the boundary of science.
R. Graham Cooks: “If you worry about tenure then you don’t deserve it.” Said to me by H. C. Brown in 1969/197 when he was visiting Kansas State University where I was an Asst. Prof. of organic chemistry. I was so successful at not worrying that the next year I took a non-tenure track position at another university. By chance, Purdue University.
Frances S. Ligler: “Serendipity happens in the cracks between the disciplines” Joel Schur-circa 1985. The greatest inventions emerge from the cracks between the disciplines. Reading widely and learning broadly is the best way to prepare to “commit invention.” Knowing what your predecessors have accomplished across your field and others can spark a better appreciation of capability gaps and generate new uses for analytical devices employing seemingly unrelated technologies.
Ying Ge: "Always push the boundaries of your research and never settle for less than excellence."
Juergen Popp: The path to becoming a professor and thus conducting independent and free research is often a long and rocky one. I can only say that it has paid off to take this path. What I have learnt and what my doctoral supervisor Prof. Dr Wolfgang Kiefer has also given me along the way is to learn from defeats and frustrations and not to give up. I can give this advice to every young scientist to not give up and to turn frustrations or defeats into the opposite.
Ron Heeren: “You’ve got to stop and think about it, the inconceivable nature of nature.” It’s a quote from Richard Feynman, not really advice, but to me it resonates with the complexity that we are trying to unravel… And how little we still understand…
Gert Desmet: My former supervisor always told me that the best way to build a great academic career is to focus on excellence in science, and stay away from all internal politics. The advice worked well – and ironically even led to the position of vice-Dean of the faculty falling unexpectedly into my lap. Fortunately, when I was asked to move up into the position of Dean, I remembered my supervisor’s advice just in time.
Ruedi Aebersold: Don’t take critique or rejection of your ideas or work personally, do the best to convince the peers and if you do not succeed move on. (Advice from Lee Hood.)
Chad Mirkin: At the start of my journey at MIT as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, I initially was intimidated by the aura of the institution and many of my peers, most of whom had perfect academic pedigrees. I wasn’t certain I could compete, but, as a friend of mine put it, “Everyone here puts their pants on one leg at a time; no one jumps off the dresser!”
David H. Russell: Your abilities to explore and understand what is important and what might be possible is defined by your knowledge of contemporary challenges in the field of chemistry, and that knowledge is obtained by reading/studying the chemical literature.
