Things Have Changed

A lot. Myself among them.

1.

I’m an academic scientist and professor at the University of Virginia.

It’s hard to overstate how much of my identity is yoked to those roles. Sometimes friends and colleagues ask me why, if I’m so committed to being a scientist, I spend so much time doing a podcast, teaching, making science comics, and now writing this Substack. Why not spend more time in the lab? Submitting more grants? I tend to brush aside such questions because it’s none of their business. But I want to get them off my plate, so I’m going to write about it once. (I’ll be writing something similar about my politics soon, God help me.)

The podcast. The Circle of Willis Podcast has not been a money maker for me and I’ve never tried to make it one. I already have a nice job and, believe it or not, Circle of Willis is part of that, which is to say that I see my podcast as part of my pedagogy, my scholarship, and my community engagement—an integral part of how I’m a professor. It has always benefited from UVA-related offices, people, and programs, which makes it a part of UVA, too. In fact, please join me here in thanking the podcast’s key patrons: WTJU-FM, VQR, and Brown College. I’ll continue to do it as opportunities arise. We’re releasing transcripts now.

Teaching. I love it. I love the students. No apologies. It’s part of how I’m a professor.

Science comics. During and after the pandemic I returned to a hobby that started when I was a kid, which is to make comics. Here and there, in dribs and drabs, I used the medium to interact with friends on Facebook, then to illustrate a theoretical argument here, a particular scientific finding there. Along the way, Paul Reyes, editor of VQR, asked me if I’d do a couple of years’ worth of science comics for him—he called it an “illustrated column.” I said yes and did it. It was delightful work for me, though I cringe at it, as one does when regarding one’s own creative work. It has taken me time to get enough distance from it to see its real value, which isn’t in my artwork, God knows, but in the person—me—who is doing the artwork. There aren’t a lot of illustrated columnists out there who have a background in clinical psychology, behavioral neuroscience, and evolutionary theory. I’m not blowing the lid off comics as a medium, but I’m creating something unique nevertheless, and that’s valuable. These efforts have led to a book contract with Norton, which I am very excited about and working on every day. So writing and drawing comics is part of how I’m a professor.

And then there is this Substack: Guerrilla Scholarship—named by Paul Reyes during an interview he did with me for VQR—which is ideally about the scientific questions that vex and amaze me, but which has gotten somewhat derailed by contemporary social, professional, and political realities, about which I’ll say more soon. This essay is part of my effort to get past that derailment and get back on track—get back to writing about science.

Bottom line so far is this: how I am a professor has changed and is continuing to change.

Characterizing that change has been a challenge for me. I’ve been trying to understand what the core of the change is, what caused it, what it means for my future, and maybe even what it means for the future of academic science, generally.

2.

Let me lay out some key personal facts.

In late 2018 I experienced a heart attack that very nearly killed me. I can’t seem to stop talking about it and am sorry for that. So I’ll just leave it here for now, plunk.

But shortly after, I was asked to box up my very complicated (and productive!) laboratory in the service of a massive psychology building renovation.

This was super painful for me, because, as many colleagues know, one’s lab, especially after evolving incrementally for decades, becomes like an extension of one’s body, like a familiar old bicycle. An old lab contains layers of development, from old equipment to kludge fixes that stuck. Here: a custom built computer. There: outdated but still functional cabling. All over the place: weird patches and in-the-moment solutions that became permanent.

We were moved temporarily to the basement of UVA Hospital’s West Complex—a dreary space that for obvious reasons nobody wants for anything. There are no windows. It smells. It is always damp. Nevertheless, I planned to recreate my lab there as best I could, mostly so my grad students could keep working on their projects.

But can you guess what struck just a couple of months after the move?

Yep—the pandemic. Suddenly we could not set the lab back up, smelly basement or not. We had to avoid public spaces to keep ourselves and everyone else from getting very sick and maybe even dying. The psychology department’s support staff was equally encumbered. We were dead in the water—faculty, staff, graduate students, undergraduates, all. Some of us set up dreary, smelly, windowless personal offices but labs shut down almost completely while, somehow, renovation of the psychology building continued.

By mid-2021, the Trump administration was over, the pandemic was waning and the renovation was completed. We had our new spaces. Our EEG amplifiers and outdated computers and weird custom cables and CRT monitors were schlepped back to something like their original locations.

But by then, almost two years after the initial move, my lab was like a puzzle I couldn’t put back together.

When environments change gradually, there is time to adapt. But between the Psychology building renovation, with its two lab moves, and the pandemic, everything was different suddenly. The evolution was not gradual. And you know the old saying: Adapt or die. Collectively, the years 2019, 2020, and 2021 were like an extinction-level event for my lab. I don’t think it’s going to make a comeback. I don’t have it in me to start all over again, especially in our political climate.

3.

What, then? The answer to that may have started with the pandemic too. For good or bad, I’m a restless guy (cf., heart attack). I don’t like to sit and wait for things like pandemics to be over. I wanted other stuff to do. So I got involved in shaping UVA’s new first year Arts and Sciences curriculum, The Engagements, becoming its co-Director and assuming responsibility for scaling it up from a small, opt-in experiment to a requirement for the entire incoming class of UVA Arts and Sciences undergraduates.

And then I was asked to become Principal of Brown Residential College, which involved moving to the Monroe Hill House on UVA’s grounds and overseeing programs and events for roughly 300 UVA undergrads, staff and resident faculty there. That’s when I was asked by VQR editor Paul Reyes if I’d be interested in creating a new illustrated column for his magazine. I was.

It was a lot, but the new challenges were exciting and my lab was already adrift.

I have no regrets. We accomplished the scaling mission for The Engagements, and at Brown College we did all the usual stuff—hosting I’ve forgotten how many events— but also founded the Brown College Community Media Initiative, which itself birthed the podcast Symposia, a project that won awards in its first year and, through the labor of postdoctoral historian Ben Bernard and Circle of Willis producer Sage Tanguay, acquired a grant for a podcast miniseries called Sister Revolutions.

And I did all of it while becoming a full time single father to two young girls, which is a story I will keep to myself.

4.

I suppose I’ve changed in other ways, too. I’ve never had much patience for the bureaucratic side of academic science—the drop down menus at NIH and NSF, the endless minutiae of the IRB—but now each interaction with that stuff feels like a little bit more than a paper cut. Starting a large new data collection project would be like trying to escape Earth’s atmosphere. It’s too hard now.

And, yes, here is my back in the old days bit: When I started writing grants, I’d write the thing, print out 11 copies or so and send it all to NIH in a big box. IRBs were always a hassle, but the mission creep has made it seem like each lab needs a full time IRB liaison. And the need for grants long ago ceased to prioritize scientific questions, per se, supplanting them with a basic and insatiable institutional hunger for money as an end in itself (got to feed the beast!). This is both demoralizing and demotivating.

I became an academic to engage my mind in scientific and scholarly questions, and to be relevant to the world around me. Chasing money for money’s sake, especially in the context of reproducibility problems and the open science movement, has left me wondering what in the hell I’m even doing. The scientific questions I now find myself burning to answer are smaller and more incremental. It’s harder to get funding for itty bitty incremental steps. Or, at least, I don’t want to go through the acres of dropdown menus and single-line information fields in order to get one.

Circle of Willis, my illustrated columns, working on the undergraduate curriculum, writing my book and Guerrilla Scholarship…these feel like viable ways for me to be a professor now, which is to say they are ways for me to be useful and scholarly.

5.

In one of the more recent episodes of Circle of Willis, I spoke with the physicist and writer Alan Lightman. In it, Lightman talked about how from an early age he was interested in both science and creative writing. He also figured that although scientists can become writers, writers cannot become scientists. If he was going to do both, he’d have to do the physics first, reasoning that all the best work in physics, and in science generally, is done when people are young—often before thirty.

So that's what he did. He started with some really spectacular theoretical physics, applying Einstein's theory of relativity to cosmic plasmas. Then by the time he was thirty-five, he was like, okay, well, I'm sort of toasted in the theoretical physics department and don't think I can keep doing this. It's time to pivot. He wrote Einstein's Dreams, which became a best-selling novel and, more importantly, gave Lightman a new way to express himself. Now he’s a “professor of the practice of the humanities” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—the first ever to hold a joint appointment in the sciences and humanities. Maybe something like what he described in our conversation has been going on with me.

I have spent most of my adult life doing original research. It’s been great. It’s a creative endeavor, which really is something I need, and the norms around writing have been, let’s say relaxed, which made it relatively easy. I enjoy the mathy bits and especially the philosophical ones. Deriving theoretical explanations from empirical phenomena is among the most enjoyable activities I can honestly think of. Graduate school in particular was heavenly. Everything academic came easily to me. I wrote paper after paper and seemed somehow to also be having more fun than everyone else.

I’m extremely grateful for all of this.

6.

I used to think my value as a scientist began and ended with my lab’s productivity—in the number of papers, the size of my grants, the citation counts. And for a long time, I wasn’t wrong. I was productive. I won fellowships and wrote funded grants. I built custom hardware for EEG research and brain imaging and wrangled unruly datasets into models and theories.

But there’s a difference between productivity and sustainability. Somewhere between the pandemic, the moves, the heart attack, the administrative load, a regressive political regime, and full-time single fatherhood, something shifted. Not my drive, exactly. Not my intellect (I don’t think). More the shape of how I contribute.

Professionally, I have much less time left to me than I’ve used. I don’t want to spend much more of it fighting IT systems for admin privileges, running on the grant treadmill, or navigating the bureaucratic tedium that stands between a good idea and the chance to critically examine it.

I want to ask sharp questions and answer them clearly. I want to teach students to think well. I want to support junior colleagues. I want to build comics and produce podcasts that explain hard ideas and tell stories in ways that make science feel alive.

I remain passionate about empirical science. I’m pleased with many of the methodological advances aimed at improving reproducibility. I’m still concerned about my field’s theoretical weaknesses and poor generalizability. In short, I’m still a professor. I’m still a scientist. The lab’s servers are full of data waiting to be written up. We are still submitting them to peer review. God love me, I’m still useful even in that domain. And I’m busier than ever. But I’m not the person I was.

A few years ago, Bob Dylan was on 60 Minutes. The anchor played a clip of one of his old songs and asked how it made him feel. “Well,” Dylan said, “you can’t do something forever. I did it once. I can do other things now but I can’t do that.”

A guy doesn’t get many opportunities to empathize with Bob Dylan. I’ll take this one.