Orchestrating a powerful group

Abstract

As I entered my assistant professor years in the early 1990s and worked to assemble my research team, I considered each candidate individually. I took on students based on grades and test scores, and my relationships with them were one-on-one. I didn't consider their teamwork abilities or soft skills - or the group dynamic as a whole. This approach gave me a somewhat productive lab group as measured by single member outputs, but over many years, I came to appreciate that the collective matters - a lot. Beyond the individual output of the graduate students and postdocs lies a parallel universe of teamwork, peer-to-peer mentoring, and - most important - discovery for the research group as a whole.