Please introduce yourself.
My name is Donald Stein. Born and raised in
NY. I’m a professor currently based in the Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology
program. But for 24 years, I was a professor in the School of Medicine in the
department of Emergency Medicine where I ran the emergency medicine brain
research laboratory focused on traumatic brain injury, stroke, and in the last
7 to 8 years or so, a deadly brain cancer. I also serve, at Emory, as dean of
graduate studies and vice provost.
How did you decide on your profession in brain and biomedical research?
When I was an undergraduate, I couldn’t figure
out what it was I wanted to do. I ended up initially going into experimental
psychology. Then, I also got trained as a clinician and started my first job
after I graduated from college at the Veterans Administration Hospital in
Michigan. There, I saw some terrible cases of traumatic brain injuries and
other psychiatric disorders caused by war-time experiences at that time. I
couldn’t really understand why nothing was being done to really help them very
much. We were keeping them very constrained and out of harm's way. I felt, if
we’re seriously going to help patients with these kinds of brain injuries and
psychiatric disorders, we needed to do more than just talk therapy. We had to have
a much more profound understanding of how the brain works. So I switched what I
was doing to research. I decided to focus more on the experimental aspects of
how the brain works.
What has been your favorite part about your career?
I think the best part of my career has been
teaching… and working with people like you! Seriously. If you can’t pass on
information to the next generation, what are you doing? The best thing, I
think, was the opportunity to work with young people and to be involved and engaged,
not just at the undergraduate level, but graduate and postdoctoral level.
That’s what being a professor is all about.
Why did you decide to accept the teaching position at the department of medicine?
I was not expected to do any teaching when I came
to Emory. My job was to be dean of the graduate school and vice provost for
graduate studies and so on. I negotiated with the provost and president. For
me, it was very important for me to keep a hand in teaching and working with
students at all different levels, including post-docs. I’ve had students from
all over the world work with me over the course of my career. Administration is
ok. But what would enhance that administrative experience was seeing the
administration work at the level of faculty and students. I went back to the
medical school because my work was very translational trying to fix brains\ injury. It was a good fit. The department chair said, “We work on this all the
time. Do you want to join us and become part of our faculty? We’d think you’d
have a good home.” I said, “That’s a great idea. I would like to do that”. And
so we had the brain research lab, and moved it over [to the School of
Medicine].
What has been the most difficult part of your research career?
The most difficult part of my career was
balancing family, research, and teaching. The big problem I was facing was the
tremendous pressures that are put on biomedical researchers and researchers in
general and finding funding to support everything you do. Those kinds of
pressures-- where the university expects and demands people to do this especially if you’re
working in a medical center--are intensive. Especially if you’re dealing with
the contingencies and politics of federal funding, it can be very very hard and
can detract from teaching and quality, quantity, and type of research you’d
like to do. Those have been the most challenging parts of my career. The most
challenging has been the never-ending demands to get extramural(?) funding and
to face the reality that no matter how much you get, the administration is
never going to be satisfied.
What is the best advice you could give to someone pursuing the same track as you?
At the start of my career, it was a very
different time. We were in the heart of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. I
was in college when Sputnik went up. The U.S. freaked out when they got a
satellite into space before we did. Why do I mention that? Well, the United
States was like, “Well we are far behind in space, far behind in science, we
gotta beat them at everything”. At the time because of that, if you were to go
into any field of science, you would be sure you would get support. If you got
into a school, you would get a fellowship, you would get a job afterwards.
There was no question. Nowadays, that's a very different situation. If I were
starting out today, I would be a little more concerned about picking a
scientific career because the challenges are much more demanding when I was a
student. There’s no guarantee you’ll get a job right after graduate school now.
When I was a student you pretty much had your pick. The government was plowing
a lot of money into the sciences. It was an easier time. Today, if I were doing
it, I would give a lot of thought into what it is you need to do. You have to
do much more planning. You have to be much more aware of circumstances and
aware of what you want to do and how much time you want to spend teaching, how
much time you want to spend in research. It’s a much more challenging
environment for young people today.
