On the unexpected ways in which our research can be useful
It was January 2020, and I have just landed in the United States for the first time in my life. With my J-1 research visa in hand, I was about to complete a part of my Ph.D. at The University of Utah. After leaving the plane, I headed to the U.S. Customs to have my documents checked. The customs officer asked me a bunch of standard questions like why am I coming to the U.S., how long will I be staying, and what my research is going to be about. As the officer approved my entry to the U.S. with a big stamp and handed my passport back, he said: “I hope your research is useful to humanity.”
This sentence provoked some unusual thoughts in my head. Here I was, merely at the start of my Ph.D., a complete rookie in what it means to be an academic and to do research, and suddenly someone had hopes that what I do is of help to the world. Do I really have it in me to make this happen? In the midst of the next two months of hard work and the COVID-19 pandemic, which unfortunately caused me to prematurely evacuate from the U.S. back to Europe, I think I’ve forgotten about that sentence.
It was only a couple of months later when I had a chance to work on the development of a new scientific software when thoughts about usefulness of my work appeared in my mind again. Working on the new Python library prompted me to think some more about what it means for the output of my work to be useful to someone: another researcher, another grad student. I thought: Clearly, it needs to have functionalities that other researchers are currently interested in and can benefit from. Clearly, it needs to be well-documented so that people know how to use it and their time is not wasted in trying to understand my code. Clearly, I need to provide a couple of tutorials so that people have a good sense of what is even possible to accomplish with this library. I did all of those things and I think the efforts were worthwhile. Every once in a while, Ph.D. students from all over the world email me to let me know that our software has been useful to them.
After my first software publication, it was time to roll my sleeves and produce research papers. At this point, I was already halfway through my Ph.D. program. I realized that I can apply the same rules when describing our research ideas and results as I did when coding the Python library. My advisor, James, helped me a lot on the journey to make our research work useful to the community. With each paper we wrote, he prompted me to imagine that another grad student will be reading it. What information then, would a grad student need and appreciate if they wanted to reproduce our results and learn something new from our research that could fuel their own? This helped me to write papers with grad students as my main audience in mind. I since strive to teach the reader something interesting about our field of research by writing sections that are illustrative and didactic. I’ve made it a personal goal for myself to share all the code that can be used to reproduce figures from our papers. I also make sure to provide all the details on our work, which can easily be outsourced to the supplementary materials, even if the format of the journal does not allow enough space in the manuscript itself. I continue to hear from researchers and students that reading my papers was useful to them, that those papers helped them get familiar with our research discipline, that they applied our methods in their own work.
So what’s the upshot of this story? Well, I have no illusions that the ideas that I developed in my research so far are useful to humanity. In the end, we, researchers, all make tiny, incremental advances with each paper that we write, adding just one more voice to the vast sea of the ongoing academic discussions. But I sure can shape the outputs of my work in such a way that they invite another academic to build something of their own on top of what I’ve done. Maybe, here and there, I’ve also found a way to say something inspiring in my academic prose that another researcher really needed to hear in that moment in time. And who knows, maybe, if we all advance together that way as researchers, our collective effort, one day, becomes useful to humanity.
