Losing my Religion, 2e

reflections on and anxieties around academic careers (in nutrition)

Growing up queer and deeply religious in a conservative catholic environment hones in one the ability to sit with cognitive dissonance. I spent much of my youth grappling with signals from media, culture and the Church that my inner thoughts were sinful, enough to be deserving of a life condemned to eternal hellfire; at the same time, I was low-key academic about trying to get to the objective truth of the immorality of my existence- reading the bible, the history of Catholicism and the ecumenical councils, the influence of translations from spoken Aramaic through to English. I spent years clinging to faith and being devout while also struggling to make sense of my identity and sexuality. Existing in dissonance isn’t fun, but i’m quite good at building up a tower of it in a corner of my mind that i frequently visit to dissect but don’t let actively influence my life much - i just kept trucking along, kept being faithful, living a devout life, planning to become a priest. That dissonance tower becomes a game of jenga and much like jenga, it falls in one fell swoop. For me, i can remember the moment i accepted myself and abandoned my faith (it was 2008, i was on a run listening to a Kelly Clarkson album).

I rarely think back to this time in my life, as it genuinely feels like another lifetime, but my thoughts have drifted back to it more recently as I’ve watched a new tower of cognitive dissonance begin to wobble - this time, it’s not about a religion but academia (yes i know i sort of traded religion for a cult and should probably unpack that in therapy). I didn’t come into academia red-pilled though - my family forced religion on me but they were not particularly academic. I actually remember talking to an academic career counselor (hi ruth!) in my first year of undergrad as i talked through career struggles (i was a business major but my interest in science/metabolism/nutrition was growing but we didnt have that major) and after listening to me for hours, she told me I was going to become a researcher. I was so turned off by this assertion at first, as I was pretty sure I wanted to be a clinician. Ffw a few years and I came to what my counselor saw in me - that I was endlessly asking questions and always wanting to know more, and focused very much on the ‘how’ we think we know things, less on what actions to take with what we know. At the end of my junior year, i eagerly sought out all things research that I could find and ultimately within a couple years and 5 different research experiences, applied to nutrition doctoral programs at Cornell and University of Michigan.

I went into academia without a particular passion for any single nutrient, pathway or disease. I was mostly frustrated with my dietetics/clinical coursework not teaching me the how we know what we know, and that I couldn’t sit down and read through a cell culture study, a mouse study and a human study, and full dissect thier methods sections. My only real goal in research was to be able to do that (this is naive to some degree looking back and i should have spent more time before going into a PhD program) - i didn’t have particular aspirations to be a professor or work in industry or teach etc. My end goal was the PhD RD credentials and learning as much as I could about designs & methods of research in physiology/metabolism/nutrition. I was fortunate to ultimately have supportive co-advisors in my PhD and work across a basic sciences endocrinology lab with transgenic animal models and in vitro model systems, as well as work in a human nutrition lab that did more randomized controlled trials, LCMS, and work with stable isotopes. My expectations at the outset of this were, genuinely, to be pretty bad at research - at best, do some studies that incrementally moved the field forward, but I’d at the very least learn methods in the process.

Everybody in academia is smart and I personally think serendipity plays massively into academic success - this isn’t saying there’s not hard work and drive/curiosity etc, but after my time watching folks at top institutions, some of the most brilliant folks I saw didn’t continue on in the academy because things just didn’t turn out as planned and they were unlucky at various points (note: people come and go from academia for all sorts of reasons that are totally valid; i’ve also seen many successful folks willing leave, despite often shaming from academics for leaving the supposedly righteous academy). I had anything but a perfect dissertation but I’d say I had a relatively serendipitous PhD process - fortunate to get a training grant, fortunate to get funding to do a clinical trial with isotope tracing in pregnancy, fortunate to have a colleague running some GC note odd fatty acids eluting off the column unexpectedly, fortunate to have a year long project fail & leave me despair-reading the literature, ultimately stumbling onto a paper that would allow me to launch a project that let me achieve my goals of working across cell, mouse and human data with reasonably meaningful implications for human nutrition & cell biology. Academia went better than I expected and the creeping feeling of ‘maybe I can (should?) do this’ began to emerge.

Serendipity didn’t produce naivety, however and a new tower of cognitive dissonance began to be built. There’s a lot i find so weird about academia. Early on, I was struck by how little formal training I was getting - few upper level classes, few formal methods courses, lots of hands on in the lab training that felt more like a whisper down the lane version of science. One could argue its an apprenticeship model but i think its hard to ignore that sociopolitical changes have radically transformed higher education and have drug academia away from its core mission of training, teaching and mentorship- a thesis i’ll continue to build out below. As a relative academic novice, I also began to question the huge push for quantity of publications, and making sure the quality was sexy enough to get published in a top tier journal - how do you set out at the outset to know you’re going to make huge discoveries in the 4-7 time frame of a PhD? It became obvious to me that there were elite labs with funding, power and influence who figured out ‘the game’ of publishing consistently in top journals like Nature Cell and Science, rather than labs happening to stumble onto genuine scientific discoveries that warranted impact in such journals. Many methodologically questionable research practices that I saw near and far from my academic orbit, often in the effort of getting papers, were increasingly talked about on academic social media: inappropriate or lack of randomization, use the wrong statistical approach (always the one giving a more forgiving p value), p-hacking datasets, fitting posthoc hypotheses to the data (HARKing), removing data points that didn’t fit a hypothesis and coming up with posthoc reasons why it was justifiable, etc etc were happening all around me. In some ways, I’m grateful to have done my PhD during the rise of the rigor and reproducibility epidemic - I could go find conversations on line that felt like a place of respite where there were folks serious about the huge methodological problems happening across research (for those who might think i’m being dramatic, take a basic gander through the estimates of how bad the state of experimental animal research is). In other ways, doing my PhD during the rigor and reproducibility epidemic felt a bit like gaslighting - inside the academy, there were few active conversations about it, and nothing had changed in the incentive structure to produce any real change. I was fortunate for the journalists and data sleuths calling out the issues, but was also shocked (still am shocked) that there wasn’t (isn’t) a mass sociopolitical call for an overhaul (for context: I was at Cornell during the entire Brian Wansink scandal first reported on by Stephanie Lee and watched on Twitter as Wansink got eaten alive after his OG pontificating blog post; this is part of a long reckoning across several fields including pschology, economics, and high impact cell biology/cancer papers that many of their findings are irreproducible/significantly lacking in rigor).

My cognitive dissonance towards the end of my PhD sourced from the following: we are told academia is this almost righteous path, seeking objective truths, serving as a bastion for knowledge exchange to advance our understanding and society. In nutrition in particular, we are told academia is the defender against industry corruption & that industry funded science is inherently too conflicted - good vs evil, clear cut. While i held this ideal in my mind, i was also documenting the realities - there is massive resource constraint in academia that not only fuels a bit of competition but drives folks to the point that they’ll do anything to survive. There are few guardrails in place apart from the honor system at the end of the day. You do sexy science, advertise it as so, get funding (usually NIH money but ever increasingly trying to catch the eye of industry & venture capitalists as NIH is defunded by paylines that don’t budge or adjust for inflation). Everyone takes a yearly rigor and reproducibility training and then goes back to their lab and continues what they were doing before said training to stay afloat. The whole system is sink or swim, and when folks are constantly at risk of drowning, we shouldn’t be too surprised they do whatever it takes to keep their heads above water. Sure, industry has a profit motive, but how is academia not considered totally conflicted due to the insane resource constraint and resultant need to appear successful at making sexed up scientific discoveries all the time to keep grant funding and literally keep your job/lab? Add into that some ego & prestige and you’ve got the makings of immense conflicts - at least industries have a profit motive to double triple check their findings and make sure they don’t invest in something that’ll flop in clinical trials and never make profit.

I should say at this point that a lot of my dissonance developed around basic biomedical work. I worked in both clinical trials and basic science in my PhD - this alone creates massive conflict in your mind, because clinical trials have greatly advanced in the past 30 years to put guardrails in place to ensure folks don’t essentially practice low rigor/lie/cheat/cut corners. Pre-registration is the biggest win that comes to mind - it’s become very challenging to publish a clinical trial in a reputable journal without having pre-registered the plan for the study (its design, what outcomes will be measured, what the primary outcome is, what the secondary outcomes are, etc). There is a classic paper looking at NHLBI supported trials between 1970 and 2012 that looks pre-2000, before preregistration on clinicaltrials.gov, and post-2000, finding a huge uptick in the # of trials reporting null results after this time. It is quite likely that the source of this is not scientists having worse hypotheses but rather, scientists were running studies, measuring multiple outcomes, and reporting on the one that hit P<0.05 and pretending that was the outcome that the trial intended to look at the whole time. There’s no pre-registration in basic science studies (many argue against it because it’ll ‘slow down’ discovery but to me, that’s a pretty obvious admittance that folks’ cute n=6 mouse studies are pilot data they either haven’t reproduced enough to be confident its a genuine phenomena or it’s a curated subset of data to tell a predestined story). Similar to preregistration, clinical trial world advanced by having study checklists to show how many participants were screened, enrolled, randomized, and ultimately analyzed. In basic science research, you never know how many animals or replicates of cells were tested, how many versions of the study design/protocol there were, how many of the animals that were randomized (if they were even randomized) were ultimately included in the final analysis/figures (in my experience in academia, students & postdocs regularly throw out mice from the study that don’t fit the hypothesis, don’t have objective criteria for why they do so or document it, and their PIs are oblivious to these practices, only seeing the final data that looks great). I think there are many social, cultural, political and financial reasons that influence this motivated thinking, not just a lapse in ethics, but alas, these are things basic sciences has totally dropped the ball on requiring that has otherwise close to revolutionized the rigor and transparency of clinical trials. There are many calls for more rigor, transparency and openness within science that I’m wholly supportive of, but the system needs to change it incentive structure to require these things, lest researchers just view it as another barrier to jump over impeding their ability to meet the metrics set forth in academia to be ‘successful’ (success in academia not really being measured in any way by how many worldly truths you uncover but how many papers you publish and grants you get). Note: i’m not going to say the degree to which i think some of this bad behavior happens - all i can say is i’ve been at several top institutions, i’ve seen it regularly, and the incentive structure certainly does not drive people to not do it.

A really impactful read for me came out at the end of my PhD - Richard Harris’ Rigor Mortis (I had to microdose listening to it because it more or less detailed low rigor and/or unethical things i’d witnessed in science up to that point and named/shamed structural problems of modern science that don’t incentivize self-correction). Harris was actually the speaker at that year’s rigor and reproducibility symposium. At this point in time, Wansink’s case had already rocked the campus and media coverage of rigor/reproducibility made it hard for faculty to simply put their head in the sands, though I still regularly meet faculty (who have probably not looked at their trainees’ raw data and/or have no system set up in their labs to even know how their trainees conduct experiments) who claim its just a few, ultra rare bad apples (the snowballing of uncovering academic misconduct through the low hanging fruit of catching duplicated/manipulated images like western blots i think has reduced the number of folks gaslighting this issue). As I was leaving my PhD, friends can tell you I was pretty unsure about academic careers.

I took a year in between PhD’ing and whatever was next to finish my dietetic internship and complete my RD credential. It was ultimately good to get (a little bit) out of the bubble of pure academic research. I began to see friends in academia go off to research faculty positions, teaching positions, postdocs, science writing, and various industry jobs, and kept in touch hearing about their stories. As I began thinking about next steps, I essentially considered all of the above but a lingering paper (my larger one with cell, animal and human data) had some wrapping up to do. I had touched base with the original lab that I had based this work off of, who were very interested in extending my work, and were quite transparent about the fact that there were complexities in the story and in reproducing some experiments (partially key figures but not a deathknell to what I had done). I decided it was best to go do my postdoc in that lab and try to finish the story I started in my PhD - there were some key experiments there that would amplify its impact and the Texas Medical Center was potentially a good place where I could trial building a clinician-scientist type career (there’s not an easily laid out path for this for PhD RDs like there is for MD PhDs).

I would ultimately do 2 postdocs in the Texas Medical Center. In both, I walked in on irreproducible data that any sort of digging under the surface of that irreproducibility led to either 1) a very forgiving take that sloppy work and unintentional errors occurred that compromised the validity of the work, or 2) the more suspect take was that folks were doing lots of the bad behavior described above to get funding/papers/prestige. In one case, the PI responded calmly and wanted to get to the bottom of what was real and what wasn’t. In another, the PI was a bit of a nightmare, and unwillingly to own up to the issues, trying to coerce trainees to work with irreproducible data that itself had technical issues to the point that it was unusable (for the curious, it was over a year long mouse experimental data that failed to reproduce 2X, with the ‘1 time it worked’ having absurd technical issues, ultimately turned out to be a subset of the original dataset that was hidden for unclear reasons, and most of the outcome was Chip-Seq data with the worst batch effects you can imagine - an absolute mess to walk in on and slowly discovery in the first 2 months of your 2nd postdoc) . I would ultimately leave this 2nd lab along with another trainee and had conversations with high ups at the institution who determined that our several page list of issues in the lab didn’t rise to the point of scientific misconduct until findings were published; these higher ups knew that multiple trainees had been on these projects and cycled in & out (the lab was well known to HR when i spoke with them), ultimately ruining their academic careers because they were unwillingly or unable to continue working on irreproducible, low rigor work. Coming face to face with the version of academia that empowers PIs to the point that it allows them to sink many other’s careers is an ugly place to find yourself. (Note: it's not worth calling out any specific names here. Unfortunately, I have a somewhat long and growing list of trainees I've known who have been lost to academia because of completely toxic PI behaviors that should disqualify them from running a lab and for some, ever being involved in research. Systems protect these folks, NIH has not taken the problem seriously, and the focus needs to be on systemic change, not slaps on wrists).

These 2 postdoc experiences overlapped a lot with the pandemic, and collectively were a pretty huge setback for me academically and mentally. Serendipitously, however, I got a big clinical trial data set in just about a week before the pandemic shutdowns and had begun working on another trial during my postdocs as ‘side’ projects, trying to continue my plans of doing both human trials and basic science work; these trials could ostensibly keep me afloat in academia (i.e. look busy publishing) but to say my faith in the system was shaken is an understaten. I had also gotten an early career editor position at a top journal in the field and felt like i could shake off these setbacks - again, pushing on despite the cognitive dissonance.

Getting out of a toxic postdoc lab is not easy and the uncertainty of waiting to find the next position makes things worse. Fortunately I had connections and was able to go back with my 1st postdoc boss to a researcher position at Berkeley where the lab had moved (my original reason for seeking out 2nd postdoc). At this point, I had already somewhat regularly been getting emails from faculty search committees encouraging me to apply to open searches - if you’re thinking to yourself that I’m unwell for still moving on in academia after 2 compromised postdocs, you’d probably be correct. My only defense is that there is genuinely something a bit intoxicating about discovery and that, as I told you in the beginning, my cognitive dissonance is a jenga tower and at this point, it hadn’t come crashing down.

Being in the Bay area is an odd experience, from both a personal and professional perspective. It’s the most wealth concentration in the entirety of human history, the bet on tech has resulted in massive income disparity, tiny bungalows are millions of dollars, rents are absurd, homelessness is common - yet all your east coast friends make fun of you for being so liberal that you move to Berkeley because college students with blue hair protest here often. That personal note spills into the professional - the cost of living is prohibitively expensive for what academia pays (i don’t know how PhD students do it here). That high cost burdens grants heavily so money doesn’t go as far for research. That high cost makes everything more expensive for a university system that has continually seen less state investment and relies heavily on philanthropy (which is often large sums of money but with heavy conditions restricting how its used). I hadn’t ever seen the more west coast approach to doing science, though I’d heard of it happening at Stanford, but really I have come to think most people stay in the Bay because of 1) the weather and 2) the proximity to venture capital funding. Indeed, NIH grant dollars don’t go far enough here and are not reliable enough that it seems you almost have to do science with an eye towards having a spin off company coming from your lab. This model lends itself to labs needing to behave more like an industry start up and to market their science to get VC attention and money - i have no doubt there are folks doing this in a more ethical way, but you can think of it as a continuum, with folks genuinely trying to fund solid research, more resveratrol-like work, and then the pure Elizabeth Holme /Theranos style. There’s of course a point where preliminary evidence is exciting and worthy of talking with investors about, but, again, there are few guardrails in place preventing hyping of data and we see this all the time, in both basic and clinical sciences (i’m looking at you various genetic/microbiome-testing companies swearing to have algorithms that predict the health impacts of diet that have risen and fallen over the past decade). I don’t want to sound like i’m judging folks who take the VC approach to research funding - if anything, i’m a bit jealous that VCs care about others’ work enough that they’re a reliable source of funding. The shifts in trends over time away from consistent NIH money towards needing VC money is what’s concerning.

Part of losing my academic religion comes from the substantial defunding of experimental human nutrition. Sure, there is some government money (NIH, USDA), but government investment in experimental nutrition has seen huge declines over the past couple decades, not only in primary grants but also in supported infrastructure. It’s just gotten wildly expensive to conduct this work. A huge reason is the switch from the General Clinical Research Center model to the Clinical and Translational Science Institutes (GCRCs→ CTSA/Is) - these provided the basic infrastructure to conduct a lot of human clinical research, including metabolic kitchens and staff to undertake controlled feeding/intervention trials where we could tightly control intake and assess the physiological effects of foods/varied nutrient intakes. The funding model for these has largely flipped to be less subsidized and more investigator led, and that’s great if you’ve got Pharma at your back funding Phase I/II/III trials, but human nutrition has no pharma. If you’ve noticed the past 20 years of diet study headlines are (apart from epidemiological observations) specific food products (almonds, walnuts, avocadoes, blueberries, dairy, red meat, eggs), that’s because experimental human nutrition has largely become commodity board funded as well as some industry funding for specific ingredients (e.g. isolated fibers). You can find several commentaries (with fabulously overdramatic titles) that underlie this history - here and here, and I can vouch for having had dozens of senior researchers who trailblazed in human nutrition trials for decades who generally advise early career folks not to try to go this route, because even they struggle to get money to keep it up (we even saw this issue of infrastructure get some play in the StatNews profile of Kevin Hall’s efforts recently to get more serious investment in the ability to do controlled feeding trial/human metabolism work intramurally). This lack of research funding and infrastructure affects not just nutrition but our ability to do translational work in metabolism. There’s not yet a tractable VC investment model for human nutrition research, even stuff that’s very basic at the bench with translational potential, because there’s no prescription pad and absurd insurance reimbursement at the end - its reasonably big enough business but not big enough - your best bet is maybe a subscription predictive algorithm based on continuous glucose/ketone/lactate monitors, studying the metabolic effects of eating muffins that will be turned into a hyped app to tell people how to eat, or a nutraceutical that can bypass expensive regulations and tiptoe towards vaguely medicalized health claims until the FTC comes knocking - these are all more market-driven more than research-led and not areas of research I seriously expect to advance the field into the next generation.

Apart from the infrastructure issues, there’s also a pretty big level of exhaustion with nutrition research at the NIH - large trials (with key design flaws IMO) of vitamin D and omega 3 supplementation, the most recent in history, have produced largely null results. Those are the lower hanging fruit nutrition trials, being easily supplemented nutrients with reasonable biomarkers of nutrient status. Feeding studies aren’t as enticing to fund given that they’re shorter term and typically can only measure surrogate endpoints (e.g. blood pressure, blood cholesterol) and not hard endpoints (e.g. cardiovascular events). Important advancements in evidence-based medicine have raised the bar for nutrition studies and there’s simply not the will/$ to invest in human nutrition research at the level that it needs to be done (and I personally don’t have a ton of faith that the precision nutrition-type initiatives will really reverse course on nutrition meeting the evidence-based medicine bar or improving these funding gaps).

There’s also a sort of cultural issue - nutrition was historically the hold out place for several fields, everything from the cell biology of metabolism to global health. Many of these subfields have emerged into their own fully fledged identities - there are now entire molecular metabolism departments and cell biologists tackling these topics, arguably with better tools and more resources, & there are now entire departments dedicated to public/global health that are doing a lot of nutrition work. In many ways, I understand why the fields have changed and shifted away from classical nutrition work, though I’m saddened there’s not the potential to do a lot of what the generations of nutrition researchers did before me, now with the better tools we have. Funding cycle booms and busts will always happen, and sure, I could chase down writing NIH grants about nutrition & whatever today’s hot topic is (e.g. microbiome) or pursue more pure cell biology of metabolism, getting away from the more human physiology centric studies that I’ve been a part of (funded largely by Industry & NGO money) - at what point does this become strategy and chasing funds at the expense of my own interests and where the science naturally leads me? Maybe i should be trying to woo more venture capitalists or financially endowed folks with personal interests in nutrition and convince them of the magical life extension that’s going to occur from my studies. I say a lot of this tongue in cheek and not to sound whiney, but rather, I’m still grappling with the realities of academia and research funding - they’re so distant from what I thought academia and research would be like because the research I read that made me fall in love with human nutrition & metabolism is minimally fundable. I am wrapping up editing a graduate textbook in nutrition & metabolism and struggle to sit with how little we still know about human nutrition, from how the body handles, senses and responds to both classical nutrients, let alone the increasing appreciation for the likely hundreds of compounds in foods that interact with our physiology that we’ve only just scratched the surface of. Now would be the perfect time to take massive advances in mass spectrometry and sequences and apply them to old school rigorous metabolic investigations with controlled feeding, static biomarkers, dynamic isotope fluxes, etc but alas, there are few if any ways I see to plan a stable career in human nutrition for this sort of work. It is always ironic to me that the mainstream culture around health and wellness is obsessed with nutrition and wants to micro optimize every aspect of diet (of course this is for profit mostly but there’s a little science behind a lot of it) yet obtaining and maintaining funding to somewhat confidently have a career in academic experimental nutrition research that could begin to answer some of these questions seems so out of reach .

There’s a lot of levels to my cognitive dissonance that don’t fit neatly into my chronological story but contribute several layers to the jenga tower: the defunding and corporatization of higher education, with the mission of education being increasingly distal in the list of priorities of academic institutions relative to generating revenue streams, owning property and maintaining a sense of social capital and elitism that draws in student dollars and investments; the un-serious outsourcing of teaching to non-career track instructors; the overreliance on volunteer undergraduate research labor, inherently selecting for those privileged enough to work unpaid; the lack of a funded career scientist track from the NIH/NSF that allows for non-PI and non-postdoc/grad students to be in labs, doing the research without the incentives to climb a ladder rewarded only by high impact publications; the increasing expectations of scientists (trained to be scientists) to be PIs that are good managers of people, finances, & labs, with limited support staff, that are also expected also to be good teachers, also expected to be start ups constantly fundraising, also expected to sit on grant review panels and have broader impacts (e.g. peer reviewing, textbooks, talking to the public) - truly, being a faculty member is being asked to do about 7 jobs with increasingly less and less institutional support that is bad for the individual faculty member generally, and even worse for those who make it into the faculty ranks who don’t have the various privilege (e.g. financial, social, partners, etc) to help manage just being a human and having a life/family; the concerns I have around increasing political questioning and interference in science because of the increasing acknowledgment of the rigor and reproducibility crisis, despite a decade now of NIH swearing its totally going to address it more seriously. I could go on and on ad nauseum but I ultimately find myself regularly questioning - what is the mission of academia? For faculty, it feels like a gameified system - you garner prestige and social capital, get grants, generate sexy data, and repeat. Excellence in research methods and design, mentorship, and teaching, have seemingly become secondary to winning the game at R1 research institutions. In my experience, there are both amazing humans who enter that system and beat the game, and some of the worst people you’ll ever meet in your life who are willing to win the game at any cost - the system at it currently stands doesn’t adequately parse out those two to elevated the former and push out the latter. I say all of this being very aware i’m a relatively privileged white male who’s never had to deal with the struggles that many colleagues i’ve seen have endured being black, non-native english speaking, differently-abled, and women subjected to toxic harassment from older males, to name just a few.

My jenga tower of cognitive dissonance is wobbly, to the point where it’s likely to fall. That one key block i can remove without falling is a faculty position in a supportive environment with great colleagues dedicated to doing rigorous science, being great mentors/educators and seeing the humanity in those in the academy, not just how they can be cogs in someone elses wheel of success. I don't think the state of academia even really allows for this unicorn position to exist or if I’ll ever find it; it seems much more likely that i also lose this religion on a run to a (probably the same) Kelly Clarkson album.

-KCK

Post Scriptum: I have long been pretty vocal/uninhibited in sharing my thoughts and words about academia and research on social media. I have also long been warned that being so candid is going to negatively impact my career or get me in trouble. Blog posts like this are particularly high risk. While I have been met with top-down pressure and chastising to not say things i’ve said online, there has been a much larger chorus of trainees/early career folks who reach out and express thanks - the silence around these topics apart from whispered conversations due to fear of retribution is a collective form of gaslighting that academia imposes that helps maintain the status quo. I’ll never forget the first time I expressed concerns about the state of funding in academic nutrition research to a senior & powerful center director and was immediately classified as ‘not wanting to work hard’. I really do want academia to be everything that I thought it was, and that’s why I’ll critique it. If there’s faculty search committees or other related jobs out there that read this and think it is disqualifying, i’m ok with that and relatively confident its not an environment i’d thrive in or want to be in. I hope there are good faith academics reading this who understand, even if not totally agree, with what’s laid out here, and are dedicated to changing both the unpleasant realities of academia, correcting perceptions and working towards amplifying the good academia does amidst all of the gameification.

Post Post Scriptum: Contrary to what one might think reading this, I still regularly encourage folks to continue on in academic careers if that’s what they truly feel is best (just as I encourage folks to consider non-academic careers in a stigma-free way) - every career path is full of pluses and minuses that should be subjected to a personalized cost-benefit analysis. The change I hope to see around the culture of academia, which already seems to be underway, is more broad encouragement that folks explore career paths broadly beyond academia and come back to choosing academia if that’s where they really land - this requires being candid about the academic strengths and challenges, without reflexive defenses of academia that seek to portray it as something that its not. Academia has long enjoyed a halo of prestige and a supply-demand imbalance that allows it to have 100s if not 1000s of applicants for every tenure track position, and its okay if imbalance drops - its extremely unlikely to ever fall to the point that there are not enough reasonably well-qualified candidates for the jobs out there. There’s legitimate change that academia needs to tackle to be a place where people want to work, particularly after COVID-induced shifts in folks prioritizing their life outside academia as well as their mental and financial wellness. For those wishing to pursue academia, I hope my path: 1) presents both real world challenges you may face that you can plan around (i.e. having a network that you helps you be resilient and escape bad situations); and 2) spurs you to think creatively about innovating (i.e. how do you pivot to maintain funding and resources as academic climates and priorities shift as they are now in human nutrition). Neither doom&gloom around academia nor rose-colored glasses are helpful when looking at academia in my opinion - we need folks dedicated to both reform and advancement, and the first step in this is calling out real problems to find real solutions for academia to work towards the version of itself that we all wanted it to be: a place for curiosity to uncover truths about the world and improve human lives, not the hypercompetitive, resource-constrained game to beat.

There’s otherwise a lot that excites me about the potential future of nutrition science - I think folks at all levels, but especially early career folks, need to be thinking about how to be strategic and innovative. There is huge potential for nutrition folks: the continued focus of global health researchers on nutrition; areas of clinical trials like adaptive trials that readily need to be applied to nutrition studies but rarely area; emerging large cohorts with whole hosts of omics data (including metabolomics data capturing many nutrients & food-derived compounds that can be correlated with genotype, the proteome, etc to reveal novel cell biology and modifiers of the response to nutritional interventions); a great need but potential for integrating nutrition methods (both biomarkers and self-reported dietary intake data) into the AllofUs cohort and other precision-medicine led initiatives; CRISPR-based screens are complementing population-wide genomic approaches to further facilitate discovery at the cellular level, and there’s a need for nutrition minded folks to advance cell culture conditions to provide relevant models of differential nutrient exposures to fully leverage these new tools; advances in obesity pharmacotherapy (e.g. GLP-1’s) that can not only save us lives but will likely necessitate shifts in the nutrition therapy we apply alongside their use (e.g. products to prevent malnutrition while taking these drugs); there’s the huge climate crisis and its impact on the nutritional value of our crops, shifts in the relative plant vs animal-based composition of the diet and nutrient intakes, and the emergence of cellular agriculture producing novel products that need nutrition folks’ input and evaluation; there’s a need for bringing implementation science to nutrition to effectively leverage our existing efficacious recommendations. The list goes on and on. All of this can be leveraged and explored from within and outside of academia and I genuinely think there’s a bright future for folks interested in nutrition & metabolism.