Rediscovering Joy in Scientific Research

The typical measures of success in science will not make you happy. On paper, 2025 has been my best year as a scientist: a couple of manuscripts published, a couple more in review, and an in-person interview for an assistant professor position at a highly respected research university. Despite these accomplishments, I have never been more dissatisfied with my career. Over the past year or so, I just haven’t enjoyed doing science. I’ve felt burnt out and have struggled to find motivation. Yes, there are extenuating circumstances, both in my personal life and the country more broadly, that have contributed to my anxieties and stress. But many of my problems are much more deeply rooted. I write this because I know I’m not the only academic struggling with these issues. Recent reports have found the mental health of graduate students and post-doctoral researchers to be on the decline. In this career, where failure and criticism are far more common than success and praise, it is not shocking that so many of us go through fits of despair, depression, and anxiety. 

Below are some thoughts and reflections on how I got here and what I’m doing to try to rediscover the joy for this job I once had. These are the results of both self-reflections and conversations with my therapist. There aren’t any particularly novel insights here. I suspect you would find many of these tips in self-help books about productivity and mental health. Even so, I hope that if you or someone you know if struggling with these issues, then it will at least help you understand that you are not alone in dealing with these problems. I’m not quite where I once was, but just a few shifts in my mindset and my approach to research have helped me.

Don’t stretch yourself too thin with projects

Academics at any stage of their career are under pressure to publish scientific findings. From tenure-track job applications to grant approvals, a good publication record is always an advantage. The phrase “publish or perish” comes to mind. If you don’t publish, then you don’t secure jobs or grants, making it harder to publish new research. It’s a vicious cycle.

Earlier in my career, as I was trying to build up my publication numbers, I pretty much agreed to work on any project, whether suggested by my PhD or post-doc advisor (i.e, my boss, for any non-academics reading this) or another professor in the department. It’s very easy in the moment you’re invited onto a project to say “yes.” I would often tell myself that the analysis would be straightforward. Any bioinformatician or computational biologist reading this knows this is rarely the case. Even if I knew going in it would be a bit more challenging, I would tell myself that it would be worth it to have this project on my CV. I would be lying if I said this was bad for my career. I made many connections and published some nice papers by working on these projects, but it all contributed to burnout. 

Aside from the project itself, it’s easy to forget the overhead that comes with being added to a project. Being added to a project means regular meetings with the primary investigator (PI) on the project, which you have to take time to prepare for. It means contributing to writing the paper. It means time taken away from the main projects that you are likely more passionate about and expected to make progress on. Don’t have time to do all of this during normal work hours? If you’re like me, that means dedicating extra hours during the week to being on the computer, taking away time usually dedicated to family and friends, physical health, and hobbies.

At various points during my career, I’ve been stretched too thin. How can you avoid this? First and foremost, avoid perfectionist tendencies. Anecdotally, this is not uncommon among academics. Balancing numerous roles is a given, especially when you reach a certain career stage. You have to accept that some things just have to be good enough, especially if you want to maintain some semblance of a healthy work-life balance. Even as I try to finish this article against the deadline, I am struggling with the anxiety that it won’t be perfect…but that’s okay. Second, it’s important to learn that it’s okay to say “no” to projects. Yes, having lots of projects is good for your CV, but that mental wear-and-tear eventually catches up to you, especially when unexpected life events occur. Be aware of your limits and be intentional with the projects you choose.

Work on problems important to you

But how does one decide which problems to work on? To answer this question, a colleague of mine pointed me to a 1986 seminar led by mathematician Dr. Richard Hamming. If you are unfamiliar with him, Dr. Hamming was a recipient of the Turing Award (the Nobel Prize of computer science). He worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos with Dr. Hans Bethe’s team. He went on to work at Bell Labs alongside Claude Shannon (information theory, Shannon entropy) and John Tukey (Tukey’s post-hoc test for ANOVA), among other notable scientists and mathematicians. All that is to say, he was a big deal. During his seminar, Dr. Hamming spoke on why many Bell Labs researchers were consistently and exceptionally successful. One of his key insights was that they tended to work on important problems, i.e., “Nobel prize-type” problems. He noted that among the most successful researchers were those who not only thought about important problems, but would often keep them in the back of their mind until a reasonable approach to tackling the problem became available.

If you’re a scientist reading this, then you are or have dedicated a significant amount of time to learning about your field. Thus, I suspect you are already quite passionate about it, and the important problems in the field are also important to you. A key point that Dr. Hamming raised was that consistently great scientists at Bell Labs were not afraid to work on smaller problems that formed the foundation for solving the bigger important problems. This is where I often got myself in trouble: I would take on smaller problems without a clear vision for how it would help me solve a bigger problem. At various points throughout my career, this led to quite a bit of frustration and cynicism because I wasn’t sure why I was working on a project other than to get the publication. This is not to say those projects weren’t important. I think they were within the context of their field, but they did not obviously fit within the context of problems important to me. 

During the first few years of a PhD, you are unlikely to know which problems are important problems. You will likely go through a phase where you take on numerous projects to see which problems interest you. But a few years into your PhD, you usually gain some clarity on the big problems in your field and even how you might go about attacking them. At this point, it is important to be intentional with the projects you take on. Before agreeing, ask yourself not if you could contribute to this project, but with your limited time and energy, if you should contribute to this project.

Taking time to think about big problems can keep things fresh

It is easy to get overwhelmed with the practical aspects of research. Running experiments, writing code, etc., are tangible evidence of progress. When 95% of the job is failure, it’s easy to get caught up in these measures of productivity. This may be a hot take, but I think these things are the least important part of our jobs as researchers. For example, given a well-documented lab protocol, a good lab technician could run your experiments. 

The most important aspect of our job is to think, not superficially, but deeply, to develop new insights into our respective fields of study. This requires actively keeping up with the literature and synthesizing new information in the context of existing data to spark novel ideas. Coming up with a new hypothesis, protocol, etc., is more of a creative endeavor than a scientific one. I sometimes say, with tongue firmly in cheek, that this makes scientific research more of an art than a science.

In his seminar, Dr. Hamming emphasized the importance of taking time for deep thinking: he designated his Friday afternoons as “Great Thoughts Time.” Over the past couple of years, I found myself reading the literature less often, in contrast to what one might expect if they saw the number of tabs open in my web browser. As a computational biologist, most of my time was spent writing code and analyzing data. That’s not to say these activities were not mentally stimulating. They were, just on a smaller scale. In recent months, I’ve dedicated my mornings to reading and thinking about the important problems in my field and how they relate to my current projects. Doing so has helped me see the forest for the trees, giving me more motivation when I actually sit down at the computer to work on those projects. Although it means less time physically in front of the computer, the added motivation has helped me focus on my work, resulting in increased productivity.

Don’t be afraid to challenge yourself

Scientific research is challenging enough as it is. Because of this, it’s easy to get trapped doing more or less the same projects over and over, making use of your preexisting knowledge and toolkit. Although pivoting too far away from your areas of expertise may hurt your productivity, I’ve found that working on similar projects dampens my enthusiasm for them. Part of the enjoyment I get from doing research is learning new things. I imagine this is the case for most other scientists. However, when you apply the same set of skills to investigate similar problems, there’s very little room for growth. 

For example, I have three publications that apply the same tool to investigate how natural selection on codon usage varies across different features of a protein. These papers each have the theme that confounding factors can appear as different selective pressures acting on codon usage patterns. In terms of my growth as a scientist, each of these papers contributed positively, but the biggest gains were obviously made during the work presented in the first paper. In that first paper, I learned about methods of statistical inference, codon usage bias, population genetics and mechanisms of protein secretion. On the follow-up projects, I learned a little bit more about protein structures and gained some experience mentoring undergraduates. Although I could continue to churn out publications by applying the approach in these papers to a variety of genomic data, I don’t think there’s much more I can do with it that would help me become a better researcher.

To keep things interesting in science, I think it is important to challenge ourselves intellectually. Part of the challenge of, well, challenging yourself is being okay with failure. This is something I have always struggled with. Learning new things and applying new skills to your research will result in mistakes, but this is a natural part of the learning process. As put succinctly in Dr. Martin Schwartz’s essay “The importance of stupidity in scientific research,” if you don’t feel stupid, yor aren’t really trying. (This article is a must-read for all scientists. I try to read it once every year.) Although challenging ourselves may be uncomfortable, recognizing that this may slow down our short-term productivity, it can help our long-term productivity by giving us a greater breadth of skills to apply and problems to tackle. Recently, I’ve been challenging myself to broaden my understanding of theoretical population genetics, going beyond some of the models I’ve used in my codon usage bias research. It’s close enough to my expertise that I’m not completely clueless, but different enough that I’m expanding my knowledge of a field (including the mathematics) that is integral to my research program. 

Don’t be afraid to seek professional help

In closing, this career path can be very isolating. The hours are often long and the pay is sub-standard relative to our levels of expertise. It’s hard to tackle these things alone. Friends and family certainly help, but I encourage any of you struggling with your mental health to seek professional help. I have attended therapy on and off for the past decade. Although it is not cheap, it is worth it to have a professional help you reflect on your struggles and possible solutions.