If I've seen further,
it's by standing on the shoulders of giants, right?
And to me, that quote is like the essence of mentorship.
I wouldn’t be here without you, period.
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[Dr. Ramon] Let's get started.
[Nikhil] All right, let's do it.
- Why is it important for students and faculty
to actively seek out mentorship opportunities?
- So that's easy, right.
Your education and academic experience
should not be limited to the classroom.
And of course, the classroom is important, right?
And what you learn there is important.
But at least in my experience,
the relationships that you make with people,
that's what, that’s what makes you who you are, that's how you grow.
And that's how, that’s what you really learn.
- Yeah, I agree a hundred percent.
You know, the way that I envision or vision, you know,
the trajectory in terms of learning information
and then applying it,
is really through a mentorship relationship.
So you take all these core courses,
neurobiology courses if we're talking about neuroscience.
But then how do you implement those?
- Right. - Having a mentor
that's gonna walk you through those things
and show you how you get from A to B to C,
and how you, you know, you get to publish results
using the scientific method, things like that
are really important.
And that's why I think the relationship is very important.
Because if you don't have that,
then you have all this information
that you've learned in courses,
but it's a little harder to implement them
when you go out in the real world,
right? — Absolutely.
— What's the most impressive research or work
the person sitting across from you has done?
(Nikhil laughs) Wow, that's a great question.
- [Nikhil] Our most recent paper,
and that's both of us, this work is definitely,
I mean, it's gotta be the coolest, right?
— The paper that we just published,
my highest, but you know,
impact factor paper
that I have published in my career, right?
So I definitely think it's an area of research
that we wanna, you know, continue to pursue.
I mean, neuroscience is very diverse.
And, you know, it requires, you know,
understandings of genetics, proteomics,
pathology, the brain, etc.
And one of the things that I, you know,
I'm really proud about
is that you've really done a great job
at being able to really implement all these different levels
of analysis in your research.
- With a disease that is as complex as Alzheimer's disease,
right?
Where I like to describe it as like this web of strings,
and when you pull one string
all the others kind of fall too, right?
So it's such a complex disease, that it requires,
like you said, right?
These different multi-dimensional approaches
to really solve it.
- And our goal is to get to the end of that thread.
- Yeah, absolutely.
Where next? - Let's go on
to the next question.
- What is this mentor-mentee relationship giving you
that you didn't expect?
- Well, it's definitely given me a friend, right?
I mean, someone that I feel that honestly I'll know for,
you know, my whole life.
- I see you of course as a boss and a mentor,
but more than either of those, a good, close friend.
- You know for me, I think one thing that's, you know,
that I've learned is that, you know,
I really can actually get information and go to you
when I have questions, right?
You know, as a faculty member, I think, you know,
it's important for those that haven't mentored
to really try to mentor, because you know,
once you mentor your first student
and you really see them grow and succeed
and go out there and become, you know,
future leaders, it's almost like an addiction.
You wanna be able to do that for other students.
That is a reward, that is the incentive there.
- And, and I think from a mentee’s perspective, right?
It's the same thing, the same type of like addiction,
if you will,
but more in the sense that you realize
that there's these people in your life
that have no real reason to invest in you that have,
for some reason, for seven years.
And you know, it's not a bad pressure,
but it's a good pressure that it puts on you to say,
well, you know,
I have reason to succeed far beyond myself, right?
It's to make the people who have invested in me proud.
- The experience that the student has
when they go on to their next venture,
they will take that with them.
And if they have a good, you know,
mentor-mentee relationship,
they will implement that if they do go into, you know,
a field where they have to actually mentor
other individuals, which they likely will.
So I think as I mentioned,
I think that's generational,
and that's why I think it's very important.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- All right. - Next one.
- If you were never going to see this person
sitting across from you again,
what's the one thing you would want them to know?
- Oh, I would first say thank you.
I wouldn’t be here without you, period.
So yeah, I mean, thank you is the biggest thing.
But then I would just ask that you keep doing it,
that you keep doing, you know, what you've done for me,
because you've made such an impact on my life that I would,
you know, it would be a shame
for that to just be limited to me.
One of the biggest problems in academia is that people,
you know, these researchers are not incentivized sometimes
even to mentor students.
But there is no, you know,
sometimes they don't get credit for it.
And I think that, you know,
it's so antithetical to the whole point of science, right?
Science is not a, you know,
you can't come in as a scientist
and cure the world of all diseases and solve every question.
Science – it's a team game, right?
Everyone works together,
and you see, of course there's competition.
But you really do, you stand on the shoulders of giants.
It's working with people,
it's working and building on top
of what other people have done.
And the best way to do that
is to have that transgenerational effect, right?
To go and work with someone who's younger than you,
or work with someone who's older than you,
learn from their experiences,
and then spend your career building on those.
- Yeah, you know, it's being on the shoulders of a giant,
but now you're the giant as well.
And we're both giants,
and now we're gonna be in this fight together.
- Exactly.
- Yeah. So I thank you very much.
You have allowed me to learn what I need to do for,
you know, the students that are in my lab
and will be in my lab in the future.
And I promise you, I will continue to mentor.
I mean, that's my passion,
that's what I like to do, that's what I look for.
- I'm glad that question’s a hypothetical, that would, yeah.
I'm not ready to leave yet.
That's why I'm doing my master’s.
I told him, I was like, hey, I got one more year.
I gotta stay.