A member of the Je lab is working on an electroencefalography or EEG electrode used to record brain activity electrode // Credit: Norfaezah Abdullah, Duke-NUS
Liberated by this realisation, Je didn’t worry about wrong answers or whether his experiment might fail but focused on how he could advance our knowledge of the brain. And where better to do that than at the National Institute of Health, which was then at the height of research funding and sprawled across 60 buildings. He entered the Graduate Research Programme as the only PhD student in Dr Bai Lu’s lab, competing with ten postdocs. His graduation requirement? One first-author paper per year in a journal of higher-impact than the Journal of Neuroscience.
“Ridiculous, right?” said Je. “So, I worked like crazy. I worked from 8am to 2am, stacking my work so that I could do multiple experiments at the same time.”
One of his productivity hacks was to attach Post-it notes to his monitor in the electrophysiology room, which he rotated so that he could see the screen through the window from his work bench. The Post-its made it easy for him to track neuron activity while he was working on another experiment like molecular cloning.
Long hours, stacked experiments and just three days off—that’s how Je spent the five years of his PhD. And the three days of leave he allowed himself? For his honeymoon in Key West.
But he graduated from the programme with an armful of papers in top journals and the luxury of applying to any lab for his postdoc.
“I decided to apply to Dr Mike Ehlers’ lab at Duke. He was awarded a young investigator award at SFN [Society for Neuroscience] as well as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and I thought he was a genius,” said Je.
With six confocal microscopes in the lab alone, Je was in a candy store. “Even the entire department of neuroscience put together had as many confocals as we had in Mike’s lab,” he recalled. “I had total freedom to do any crazy experiment I could think of.”
“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” – Albert Einstein
But this freedom came with a price, in the end: “My two best projects that I completed during that time were scooped.”
Because other groups had published similar work first, his projects lacked the novelty that academic journals require. This included developing a new mouse model that recapitulated what happens when the brain experiences an imbalance between excitation and inhibition, widely believed to be an underlying driver of psychosis and schizophrenia—work that had taken him three years to complete.
“This experience made my postdoc terrible,” said Je. “At the same time, my wife gave birth to our first child. And she asked me, ‘Why don’t you get a real job, not just a postdoc?’”
Without a published paper to his name from the postdoc training, that seemed an impossible ask.