How serendipity built a cross-disciplinary career

Something about my NSERC grant proposal bothered me the whole week. I could not pinpoint what it was, so I spent the week rereading it, tweaking sentences, replacing phrases, and sometimes just staring at it. Feedback from my colleagues could not help with my disquiet; they thought the proposal was in great shape and required only minor cosmetic edits.  

Then, one evening, I had a strong urge to revisit an old email I had sent in 2010, seeking feedback from Canadian and American professors on a PhD proposal. At the time, I was a sessional instructor teaching chemical-reaction engineering at a university in Zimbabwe. I had just been shortlisted for a Fulbright Scholarship, and I was proposing to develop an analytical technique that would model how organisms unwittingly take up pesticides in soil. Although I won the scholarship, I ended up tackling a completely different subject for my PhD. 

I am now a tenured associate professor in Canada, and my angst, I realized, stemmed from the fact that the research I was proposing to NSERC was an elaborate iteration of that one-page PhD proposal I’d sent out 16 years ago.  

A winding career path 

My career trajectory epitomized the old saying, “Wait until you get tenure, then you will do whatever research you want!” So it turned out. When I arrived in California to start my PhD, I discovered my supervisor already had several doctoral students working on a topic related to the one I’d proposed. I ended up pursuing the second-best topic available, chiral pollutants in the environment. This taught me a valuable lesson on adaptability and cognitive flexibility: although it seemed unfair, as I had to develop new analytical methods, it gave me the opportunity of understanding how advanced analytical instruments worked, developing procedures and guidelines, and gaining subject mastery. Today, I can break apart such instruments and build them up again without a manual.  

When I arrived in China for my postdoctoral fellowship on protecting Chinese white dolphins, I found my supervisor and I came from different fields: he was a marine ecologist, while I was an environmental chemist. When we talked about the project, we had to rely on analogies to understand each other. Because of my time teaching reaction engineering in Zimbabwe, I envisioned the Chinese white dolphins as reactors, fish as raw materials, and the marine environment as a closed system receiving inputs from land- and ocean-based activities. As my analogical thinking grew, it became easier for me to contribute to other projects my supervisor was working on, which ranged from developing bioremediation strategies for cleaning up soil using marine microorganisms, to assessing toxicity of chemicals using dolphin skin cells, to evaluating the diversity of fish in coastal environments.  

After securing a permanent position as an assistant professor in forensic science in England, I moved away from China. It was during this period that I realized my atypical career path could make it difficult for me to progress. During a progress review meeting, one of my line managers expressed concern about the diversity of my research interests, asking: “When you are up for promotion, your professorship will be in what field?” I never had the privilege to think about that: I had done research in analytical chemistry, microbial ecology, marine mammalian toxicology, environmental chemistry and environmental engineering. Now, I had to think seriously about specializing, but I needed grant money for that, and funders needed proof that I had specialized enough for the proposed research to succeed. So, I left for Canada — to the University of Saskatchewan where my atypical research background was considered valuable, as it could promote collaborations within the University. 

The advantage of not specializing 

As I revised my NSERC proposal, I noticed how almost every aspect of it, from the writing process to the final product, paid homage to my interdisciplinary travelogue. While the proposal took me back to my environmental chemistry roots — looking at how complex chemical mixtures behave in the environment — it also borrowed ideas from marine ecology, where chance and circumstance shape community diversity. My experience teaching chemical-reaction engineering enabled me to reimagine an organism as a set of interconnected unit operations that can each be best understood by tracking what goes in, what changes, and what comes out. Designing my proposed fieldwork, I paid homage to my stint in forensic science by remembering that every contact leaves a trace.  

I have printed out my old PhD proposal and placed it in a frame; I am going to hang it in my office to serve as a reminder that in these past 16 years I have never taken a detour. Rather, my research journey was like a treasure hunt: in each area I studied, I collected skills, tools, experiences and knowledge to add to my chest. Together, they  proved helpful in applying for — and winning — my recent NSERC Discovery Grant.