On the unexpected ways in which our research can be useful
It was January 2020, and I had 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 part of my Ph.D. at the University of Utah. After leaving the plane, I headed to U.S. Customs to have my documents checked. The customs officer asked me a bunch of standard questions like why I was coming to the U.S., how long I would be staying, and what my research was going to be about. As the officer approved my entry into 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 meant to be an academic and to do research, and suddenly someone had hopes that what I did would be of help to the world. Did I really have that much power 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 forgot 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 the usefulness of my work appeared in my mind again. Working on this new Python library prompted me to think some more about what it meant for the output of my work to be useful to someone: another researcher, another grad student. I thought: Clearly, it needed to have functionalities that other researchers were currently interested in and can benefit from. Clearly, it needed to be well-documented so that people knew how to use it and their time was not wasted in trying to understand my code. Clearly, I needed to provide a couple of tutorials so that people had a good sense of what was 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 up my sleeves and produce research papers. At this point, I was already halfway through my Ph.D. program. I realized that I could apply the same rules when describing our research ideas and results as I had when coding the Python library. My advisor, James, helped me a lot on this journey to make our research work useful to the community. With each paper we wrote, he prompted me to imagine that another graduate student would be reading it. What information, then, would a graduate 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 graduate students as my main audience in mind. Since then, I’ve strived to teach the reader something interesting about our area of research by writing sections that are illustrative and didactic. I’ve made it a personal goal to share all the code that can be used to reproduce figures from our papers. I also make sure to provide all the details of our work that can be easily outsourced to the supplementary materials, even when 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 has been useful to them, that the papers helped them become familiar with our research discipline, and that they have 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’ve developed in my research so far are useful to humanity. In the end, we, researchers, all make tiny, incremental advances with each paper 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 at that moment in time. And who knows, maybe, if we all advance together in that way as researchers, our collective effort will one day become useful to humanity.
