Context: Academic researchers look at transitioning institutions for a range of reasons – to immerse in a different research culture, to decrease distance of their team to vital research instrumentation, to follow their partner who is taking a new position, etc. A transition that is good in the long term can nonetheless cause a dip in publication output and even lead to the upheaval of well-functioning research group.
To talk about such transitions, I reached out to Prof. Dilpuneet ‘DP’ Aidhy about his recent experience transitioning his research group between institutions. He is a material scientist who utilizes computational experimentation (molecular dynamics simulations) to understand defects in alloys and oxides. He has held positions outside of higher education, working both at IBM (Bangalore, India) and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a post-doctoral researcher. He established his academic group in 2015 as an assistant professor within the University of Wyoming mechanical engineering department.
As you will read shortly, he did not agree with my assumption that transitioning institutions would be a time sink. He was surprisingly blasé about it.
Interview Summary:
Moving an academic team and your personal life seems like it would require a lot of energy. How was the process?
Because we are a computational group, our move was not that difficult. All we needed to ensure was that we transferred our data carefully. Additionally, we only needed to move a few laptops which was very easy. All it required was working with the IT department. While initially, I also wanted to move some computational cluster nodes, but I quickly realized that it was not the best approach. Rather, we simply got access to the computer cluster to continue our research (thank you, University of Wyoming!). Overall, we consider ourselves to be lucky. Things may not always be that easy, especially for faculty with experimental laboratories with heavy or sensitive equipment. One has to work with the previous and future institutions, which can be stressful. I have heard all sorts of stories.
Personally, we were able to sell and buy the house quickly! There was also a lot of excitement due to the many new things to do. I had an open discussion with my students about the transition. Some of them graduated before the transition, one decided they did not want to move and finished their MS after I left, and one student was excited to join me and continue their PhD.
How long did it take you to fully transition your research team between institutions? What did that look like from signing paperwork to your whole team being on campus?
Because our group is only computational, my largest concern was our data. We wanted to ensure that we did not lose any data and had access to it at least for a year on UW’s computer cluster. I made sure that we had three different copies of data all stored on different devices, both on cloud and personal hard drives. As an employee, often upon leaving an institution, the email and related credentials are terminated the very next day or within a week at most. We ensured that I worked with UW HPC’s team well in advance such that we had access to the date once we left UW.
I am fortunate that all my prior and current students remain in regular contact. That helps with finishing up papers and continuing research initiatives between students. Most of our data was often categorized by each graduate student individually. Before making the move, I ensured all my students (current and prior) would either retain access to their data stored at my first institution or were able to obtain an exact copy of the data. This approach allowed my new students to ask any questions from the alumni.
When considering transitioning academic appointment, where there any things that impacted your decision that you did not consider when accepting your first academic appointment?
I knew what I needed during my first academic appointment – to get tenure in the allotted time. There was a lot of clarity on what that would take – publications, external funding, good teaching skills, and matriculating graduate students to graduation.
Here at Clemson, I am more focused on amplifying the impact of my work. When I decided to move, I only considered institutions where I felt the environment would allow me to collaborate and work on cross-disciplinary challenges. Second, I only considered institutions with graduate level courses that aligned with my research field such that my students are fundamentally prepared for their research. Finally, you want to grow with a growing culture, where people are excited about the future. Clemson provided that home to us!
In addition, I was careful of the smaller details such as the flexibility of the start-up spending. I would think that experimental faculty would be also sensitive to their proximity to unique research equipment (say driving distance to a national laboratory user facility or ensuring a wide range of characterization equipment on their campus).
Moving involves personal lives in addition to professional considerations. We also were looking for a place with warmer weather.
Was there any difference in your research group structure at your first faculty appointment (2015) versus your second faculty appointment (2022)?
During my first appointment (2015), I was a new assistant professor. The size of a research group was dictated by the startup funding for the first few years. But there were internal grants available which I managed to procure until the outside funding started to arrive. At a given time, my group consisted of three graduate students, one postdoc and a few undergraduate students.
As a new faculty, it is really helpful if they can can recruit a student during their first semester. That is usually uncommon for a couple of reasons:
- your department may not have a pool of students for you to choose from, unless you have signed an offer letter a good few months before you start, and
- you will likely have no experience recruiting, which is a skill.
At my second appointment (2022), one student transitioned with me and I hired two through my new institution within the first semester. Now we have a group of 4 graduate students, 1 postdoc and 2-3 undergraduate students.
Graduate students in your group will need to undertake both physical and emotional effort during the move. What did you do to help students or post docs with this process? What are some options the PI (principal investigator) should be aware of? (How did the research members of your team react to the news? Was it uniform and expected?)
This is an important aspect of transitioning between institutions. While the transfer is often exciting for the PI, it may not be for the students, especially domestic/local students who may have families and life nearby. One will often find that not all students are interested in transferring, and that happened to me as well. In such cases, the PI may want to work with the department chair to ensure that the students can find other advisors and complete their degree. Sadly, there are no better options.
For students who transition with the faculty member, it is a lot of emotional and physical effort. I think the PI should be considerate and flexible. The student who transferred with me has family and children. I covered their moving expenses and tried to be flexible about when he joined me at the new institution. I conveyed to him that it was fine to work remotely for an extended period, if needed. Of course, the offline practices of Covid work culture were still very much in practice, and were helpful.
What were some of the most important actions you took to maintain your research group culture (norms, expectations, etc.) while transitioning between institutions?
One of the perks of being a faculty member is the opportunity to envision and implement your philosophy of learning. To do this, faculty really need to have clarity on what they expect from their students. And it has to be clearly communicated.
Two norms that I try to implement are: a work/life balance for our team members and the expectation that the students must grow in their performance and independence with time. I want that my students are always excited about their work, and love come to the lab every day! That requires continuous encouragement and motivation from my side. It is an evolving process. We try to get to know each other personally, and are open emotionally to discuss life and some philosophy! Science is done in a calm mind and a friendly atmosphere is very helpful. It does not mean that we don’t have frustrating moments, but we try to overcome them while keeping the bigger goal in focus.
I also try to establish a culture that encourages growth. I expect graduate students in their first and second years to make a lot of mistakes as they embrace research. With maturity, they should be making fewer mistakes and become independent. By their fifth year, I want my student to really transition into a colleague. Once that happens, it is time to graduate.
At Clemson, to help communicate my expectations to my students, I started developing “policy” documents and manuals. These documents communicate how we operate. For example, we have developed manuals for best data practices, presentation etiquettes, research progress and expectations, recipe of research philosophy and approaches, professional development, etc.
The focus of academic research groups can evolve both when staying at an institution and when you move between institutions. When will a research team’s focus evolve and how do you know it is the right time for that evolution?
Some faculty stay focused on a single topic for their entire careers, although that approach is receding quickly with the changing funding environments. Others, expand or transition to new areas. While my research team continues to focus on atomistic and microstructural modeling of solid-state materials including alloys and ceramics, we started to integrate machine learning sometime around 2018. Around that time, machine learning emerged as an important and a very useful tool to probe materials, especially high entropy alloys that are data heavy. To get my research team prepared, ewe quickly realized that my students needed to take mathematics/statistics, coding, and machine learning courses. This was a strategic change. Similarly, when we moved last year, we decided to build an open repository that hosts the data for not only our team but our research community. Not only it helps to share our data but also serves as a mechanism for community service. We are growing in this direction.