Sunday, April 01, 2012

How many years of Post doctoral experience do you think one need in order to become a Principal Investigator?


2 comments:

Rathankar said...

two to three yrs of active research in various disciplines is sufficient i think. this experience will enable one to think in diverse ways and will make him/her to unlearn how he has been trained for his phd and to start learning how to train his (PI) students in research

i feel training in academics is quite different from that training required to do research. Getting trained in doing research comes by experience in how one fails in doing an experiment and what does he understand when he fails in that experiment. Failing in an experiment not only concludes that he has used a wrong protocol, but also guides him as he should be able to recognize such erraneous protocols at the beginning stage itself. But training in academics only teaches us how to do everything correctly and not to identify mistakes

Rathankar said...

Two to three yrs of active research in various disciplines is sufficient i think.

To become a PI, one needs to understand how to design a correct protocol and the understanding of designing a correct protocol, stems up only when he understands how not to design erraneous protocols. He should also be able to identify the variants that can be inserted in a protocol, such that he can get different results and can do comparison of them too, to decide which protocol is correct