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Professor of Chemistry, Columbia University, USA

The secret to a successful interdisciplinary collaboration? Understanding the language and logic of your collaborator as much as possible. Your work is much more efficient if your thoughts are synthesized without a hurdle. I often try to read a collaborator's recent technical papers to absorb their ideas.

Biggest challenge facing the field? Democratizing cutting-edge techniques to make them more accessible. There is still a large gap between the developers and the end user.

Missing from the toolbox? The integration between optical techniques and omics techniques. Though they are well developed in separate fields, more value can be generated if this integration can be bridged.