How much does your PhD topic/type matter?

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I am about to start my M2 year, and I spent my summer in a rotation that I really liked. The PI understands that I can't be there forever and there is a project that we both think I can probably start to get good results on in less than a year, so we will be able to tell if we need to completely change directions fairly early. The one downside, for me, is that it is classical bench research.

I guess my question is, will doing a bench science thesis make it harder to get into translational/clinical research later?

I want my eventual career to involve patients in my research. Should I find a lab doing that now for my PhD, or is it okay to spend my PhD characterizing proteins? Also, this lab researches infections diseases, which is what I want to study as my clinical specialty. All of the translational medicine research at my school seems to be cancer or neurologically related. Does topic matter? Would research in these fields help me by being transational/clinical in nature even if they have nothing to do with infectious diseases?

Thanks for the advice.

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Tough call - two different skill sets - however, you never know where one will lead you and how much cross over you will get later on in the research project. In doubt, talk with your mentor about research directions.
 
It doesn't matter. What you need most from a PhD project is for the process of pursuing it to teach you how to think like a scientist.
In fact, many PIs say they prefer PhDs that work in a different field to bring in fresh perspectives and skill sets. By the time you are done with residency, you will have to start over literature-wise, anyway. Work with someone you click with on a project you truly like. Good luck!

mdpdgirl said:
I am about to start my M2 year, and I spent my summer in a rotation that I really liked. The PI understands that I can't be there forever and there is a project that we both think I can probably start to get good results on in less than a year, so we will be able to tell if we need to completely change directions fairly early. The one downside, for me, is that it is classical bench research.

I guess my question is, will doing a bench science thesis make it harder to get into translational/clinical research later?

I want my eventual career to involve patients in my research. Should I find a lab doing that now for my PhD, or is it okay to spend my PhD characterizing proteins? Also, this lab researches infections diseases, which is what I want to study as my clinical specialty. All of the translational medicine research at my school seems to be cancer or neurologically related. Does topic matter? Would research in these fields help me by being transational/clinical in nature even if they have nothing to do with infectious diseases?

Thanks for the advice.
 
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mdpdgirl said:
I am about to start my M2 year, and I spent my summer in a rotation that I really liked. The PI understands that I can't be there forever and there is a project that we both think I can probably start to get good results on in less than a year, so we will be able to tell if we need to completely change directions fairly early. The one downside, for me, is that it is classical bench research.

I guess my question is, will doing a bench science thesis make it harder to get into translational/clinical research later?

I want my eventual career to involve patients in my research. Should I find a lab doing that now for my PhD, or is it okay to spend my PhD characterizing proteins? Also, this lab researches infections diseases, which is what I want to study as my clinical specialty. All of the translational medicine research at my school seems to be cancer or neurologically related. Does topic matter? Would research in these fields help me by being transational/clinical in nature even if they have nothing to do with infectious diseases?

Thanks for the advice.


Frankly I think you are better off getting the extra hard-core bench research now. It is not the subject matter of the kind of research that really matters. What you get out of a PhD is the ability to critically think about a problem and analyze it. Pull out the CVs of Professors at some universities. Their PhD work has nothing to do with either of their postdocs or their current research a lot of the time. I have seen plasma and applied laser physicists turn into genomics and lipid researchers. Why? This is how the system is designed. At each step you broaden your perspective and experience.

As an MD/PhD your journey is longer and you have more time *ahem* to establish a greater experience base. In your residency or even the end of medical school, you could get involved in a clinical research study.

Academic careers are difficult to plan for. So for now, go for what looks promising and what interests you because you never know what will come in the future.
 
hawkeey said:
I have seen plasma and applied laser physicists turn into genomics and lipid researchers. Why?

I found this part interesting. How about the converse--genomics and lipid researchers turning into plasma and applied laser physicists? I am willing to swear that this has never happened.
 
Nuel said:
I found this part interesting. How about the converse--genomics and lipid researchers turning into plasma and applied laser physicists? I am willing to swear that this has never happened.

Well here are the specific examples I was citing:

Laser phycisist -> lipid biophysical chemist
http://leelab.uchicago.edu/lee.html

Plasma, nuclear phycisist -> genomics, other crazy biology stuff
http://www.utsouthwestern.edu/findfac/professional/0,2356,12465,00.html
http://innovation.swmed.edu/

I agree that going the other way would be difficult, but it is just the way things are a right now. Biology these days is more of a topic rather than a distinct discipline.
 
hawkeey said:
Well here are the specific examples I was citing:

Laser phycisist -> lipid biophysical chemist
http://leelab.uchicago.edu/lee.html

Plasma, nuclear phycisist -> genomics, other crazy biology stuff
http://www.utsouthwestern.edu/findfac/professional/0,2356,12465,00.html
http://innovation.swmed.edu/

I agree that going the other way would be difficult, but it is just the way things are a right now. Biology these days is more of a topic rather than a distinct discipline.

You didn't need to cite any data. I wasn't contending. It's been common to see people from the more technical-quantitative sciences merge into biology e.g three classical exampes--Francis Crick, Walter Gilbert and Carl Woese. My point was that the other way round was largely unheard of.
 
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