There are few straight lines in academic careers anymore. Just look at Kevin Pelphrey's career.
He wanted to be a developmental psychologist, and for his dissertation he developed a system of monitoring infant eye movements. One day a colleague mentioned that his system could be useful in analyzing autistic children. The insight opened a door in Pelphrey's career and, ever since, he's been heading in a different direction, at the intersection of psychology, cognitive neuroscience and imaging.
"Duke wants to find faculty members who will seek out where the action is," said John Simon, vice provost for academic affairs. If the action lies across disciplinary boundaries, so much the better.
It is a distinctive strategy nurtured by Duke's youth. Without the long-standing disciplinary traditions of older elite universities, Duke has found a niche with emerging areas of study that show promise but often fall between the disciplines.
The approach is illustrated by the interests of many of this year's new faculty members. Dialogue brought together three of them to discuss the challenges and rewards of research across the disciplines.
Kevin Pelphrey is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. His initial work in developmental psychology has expanded to focus on the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to understand brain mechanisms underlying cognitive development and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism.
Nimmi Ramanujam is an associate professor of biomedical engineering. She started off as a mechanical engineer, but moved to biomedical engineering as a way to bridge her interests in engineering and clinical medicine. Among her research interests are using lasers in the early detection of breast cancer.
A new hire from Princeton, Warren S. Warren is professor of chemistry with a joint appointment in radiology, and director of the nascent Center for Molecular and Biomolecular Imaging. Early in his career, Warren turned his background in chemistry to the study of tissue imaging, work that influenced scientific understanding of the theoretical foundations for nuclear magnetic resonance. This work led to collaborations with medical imaging specialists on clinical applications of NMRs, lasers and other imaging tools.
Q. Please talk about your career path. How was it that you became interested in what you do?
Nimmi Ramanujam: I started off as a mechanical engineer, but I always wanted to find a link between what I was doing at the time -- engineering and medicine. Biomedical engineering was not necessarily as popular then as it is now. I heard about the topic at a seminar and knew that's what I wanted to try. Shortly after that, I was in graduate school applying engineering principles to solve clinical problems.
Being at the engineering/patient interface is really exciting. It brings a relevance to my research, forcing me to think about how technologies that we develop could be useful in health care. I think that was what sparked my interest.
Warren S. Warren: It's a standard paradigm for a large section of science over the last century that new ideas start off in physics or fundamental physical chemistry, and as they get more sophisticated, they migrate into the study of the chemistry of larger molecules, then eventually into biochemistry and then into clinical practice. That essentially characterizes my own work.
We developed a variety of theoretical and experimental imaging methods to the point where we understood what they could do. When we started looking for applications, it turned out that, in most of these cases, the greatest potential was in tissue imaging. Then, as the technology matured, the smart thing to do was to use it to understand biological processes and as a diagnostic tool.
For many years I collaborated with the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, and it gave me the opportunity to start talking to radiologists and learn the language so I could explain to them the things that I want to do. You have to invest a lot of time to do that. But once you've made that investment, it's very easy to find people who are excited to collaborate with you because if you can offer them something that's a new tool, and if you know enough of their language that they realize they can deal with you, suddenly the options open tremendously.
Kevin Pelphrey: When I was studying to be a developmental psychologist, the focus in that field was to characterize age-related changes. It's straightforward to describe those and to develop techniques to allow you to see those changes over time, but there was very little work on what was actually causing that -- what's the mechanism for the changes? As I was finishing up graduate school, a lot of people were talking about the emerging field of cognitive neuroscience as providing a way of studying the functioning brain as a way to understand change. I thought, 'That might be really interesting to get in involved in that.'
At the same time I went into a tangent with the study of autism, which has ended up defining one of my programs of research. A UNC researcher named Joseph Piven is a leading autism researcher. I had developed a system of monitoring infant eye movements for my dissertation, and he asked me if I wanted to use that system on autistic people.
I'd only heard of autism from movies and news stories, but I was intrigued, so we collaborated on a study. The autistic people we brought in were fascinating because they were people who could carry on a conversation -- they're very high functioning. They could do math and talk to you at length about their interests, but they just didn't get social interactions. We showed them faces, and they didn't know to look at the eyes, which is something a seven week old infant knows. Yet they were holding down jobs.
After that, I was hooked on autism studies. Around the same time, I met [Duke faculty member] Greg McCarthy at a talk he gave on his imaging work on face processing. That got me interested in combining his cognitive neuroscience approach with my work on autism. He helped me get a postdoc position here, which led to my faculty appointment.
Q. To what degree is your disciplinary background still important to your work?
WW: I think you have to realize that classical disciplines -- things like chemistry and physics and biology -- really exist in name only and have done so for decades. Thirty or 40 years from now, the reason you're going to have a chemistry department is to teach a couple of undergraduate courses not as an intellectual core or as a reflection of the things that people in the chemistry department actually do, but just as a starting point.
If you are teaching a class in molecular imaging, for example, chemistry is a critical piece of that, but so is engineering and physics. One of the things Duke has done very well is to develop a large number of interdisciplinary centers to attract faculty members with related interests regardless of discipline. Those centers are a much better definition of intellectual cores than traditional departments are.
One of the problems with teaching freshman chemistry is at the end of the course, if you ask one of these students, 'What do chemists do for research?' they're likely to say something like, 'They find a new acid and measure its pKa.' But that's not what anyone in chemistry is doing. That's one of the reasons why people are turned off by chemistry. We're all working between disciplines precisely because we're working on what's exciting. The disciplinary labels that are often a century or more old just don't make sense.
NR: I agree. In fact, biomedical engineering as a field represents a paradigm shift from traditional disciplines because it crosses disciplines.
KP: If you ask different psychologists, 'what is psychology?' you'll get different answers. Some will talk about the research program as being within psychology. Some of them study the neurophysiology of a particular brain region and its link to behavior. Another will study only the behavior. This is a problem. The one thing that stuck with me during my graduate training wasn't from the psychology department, but from one of the interdisciplinary centers that I was a part of. There I learned the value of looking across levels of analysis to get at mechanisms so you can't just study behavior, you study the brain and behavior and how they give rise to each other. This is essential to understanding any interesting developmental question in the field.
Q. How does this affect graduate education?
WW: Some of my graduate students take some courses in chemistry and some in physics but that's not where most of their education really comes from. It comes from going to seminars, from talking with colleagues and other research groups, and for that it doesn't matter what department those people are in.
Q. And what about education at the undergraduate level?
KP: It's changing undergraduate education in my field as well. You need the psychology majors to know the history of psychology to keep them well grounded. It teaches a sense of the discipline and its history so that you don't spend time re-inventing a lot of the old questions.
So the history is important for the undergraduates but a good education also now has to give them the opportunity to get a broad spectrum of information. If they know they want to be a cognitive neuroscientist, then they need to take engineering courses, chemistry courses and neuroanatomy in addition to psychology so they will be able to compete when they get into graduate school and really become leaders in the field.
NR: One of the things that really attracted me to Duke was that research is pervasive, not just at the graduate level but at the undergraduate level. There are undergraduate students who are doing excellent research and problem-based learning. At a very early point in their undergraduate career, they learn that they need a broad skill set to be able to tackle biomedical problems. That's a very important part of the training process, and the work we're doing between the disciplines is helping to spur that.
WW: I wrote a commonly used honors freshman chemistry textbook and I taught freshman honors chemistry at Princeton for about 15 years. Even at this introductory level, we emphasized the interdisciplinary links. You have to. For example, the textbook includes discussion of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and shows MRI images of brains. That doesn't sound like traditional freshman chemistry, but quantum mechanics looks really dry until you explain to people why this might be interesting. If you can explain to them that this MRI image of soft tissue relies on this very esoteric-looking quantum mechanics and physics, then there's a connection that actually makes sense.
I want to agree with what Nimmi said about undergraduate research here at Duke. I've had a lot of discussions on educational initiatives with people here. I submitted a proposal on Duke's behalf a month after I got here to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for developing an interdisciplinary scholars program at the freshman level. We've already talked a great deal about course development for things like molecular imaging.
Q. What presents challenges in doing this cross-disciplinary research?
WW. Often the same concept is described in completely different languages in different fields. You're talking about exactly the same thing but the language is so different that it takes a long time for students to figure out what the connections are between them. You have to learn enough about the other fields that you can do the translation. And those barriers are sometimes just as difficult as communicating between Aramaic and Greek.
NR: About collaborations at Duke: One thing that I've noticed here is people are very proactive about wanting to collaborate. When I was about to come here, I had a number of faculty in the medical sciences contact me about wanting to collaborate. So far, I have several ongoing projects in collaboration with Duke faculty in the clinical and biological sciences.
Q: Kevin, as an assistant professor are you concerned what affect your cross-disciplinary work might have on your efforts to gain tenure?
KP: I think the jury's still out on that. Universities in general are still wrestling with how to consider that as you're going through tenure. We're still exploring the question of 'what is a department' versus 'what does it mean to be part of a multidisciplinary center?' The question may look very different from the point of view of a new assistant professor versus a tenured faculty member.
Q. To follow up on something Professor Ramanujam said, why did you think Duke would be a good fit for this kind of work across disciplines?
WW: You can't imagine how refreshing it is, having been at two universities that are 260 years old, to be at a place that gives the feeling they really want to try something new, that is trying very hard to improve in a wide variety of different directions. There's an excitement on this campus that I don't see matched any place else that I've been. You can just feel people pulling together and saying, 'OK, because it's a young university, we've got to do things differently than they do in the Ivy League.' It's much easier to pull together the groups across school and get support from the administration.
KP: In looking around the country for a place to start my program of research, the thing that attracted me was I kept getting the message here, 'We want you to succeed and build a novel program of research and take risks and make Duke the best in the world at developmental cognitive neuroscience.' They are willing to take a gamble on a new field and allow that to set up.