#1: If you build it
What do you do when researching a fascinating topic, 8-12 hours daily alone in a lab? You start to question your own sanity! Don't misunderstand me; I LOVE my work and research. But, standing for hours upon hours in a refrigerated box (no, seriously, I mainly work in a room that is 15C or 59F with no windows and a very loud fan) without speaking a single word to a soul, quickly becomes soul-sucking, especially if you like people, sharing ideas and collaborating on a project. I have no problem working alone. But I find it difficult to justify my efforts if I’m not doing anything for anybody but myself. For me, science isn't about me and what I'm doing. It's about the world and all the cool things we can learn by observing and asking questions!
So after being told, "Too bad, that's what a PhD is", I said, "Yeah, OK, but it doesn't have to be that way". And honestly, it shouldn't be that way. Science is supposed to be collaborative. Innovation and inspiration flourish when we work together with different people. It's that whole "two minds are better than one" mentality. It's not that my brain can't solve problems and come up with ideas. The fact is, my brain is a product of the many different lived experiences and ideas I've been lucky enough to learn about. Other people have different views, experiences and educational histories. There is incredible value in such diversity of opinion and imagination. Not seeking that out is a waste.
I'm not one to stand for the status quo if and when it's not good enough. Realising my research would benefit from more collaboration, I decided enough of the isolation in a lab. Time to get other people involved. But how?
My mum is a huge American baseball fan, so I've seen the movie Field of Dreams a fair few times. If you've not heard of this film, you probably weren’t born in the USA in the 1980s. Basically, the protagonist converts a cornfield into a baseball field after hearing a ghostly voice tell him, "If you build it, they will come". He turns an American cornfield into a "field of dreams", inspiring people and uniting a community. He transforms his world by believing in what things could be rather than what they are right now.
This is what I'm working towards with The Crab Lab. Rather than accepting my PhD for what it was "supposed to be"--an individual research project on a narrow topic with limited reach and influence--I built a lab. Rather than accepting that things were "good enough", I am trying to improve them. It seems to be working. It's hard work, but the things that are worth it aren't supposed to be easy. And science is not and should never be about a single researcher alone in a lab working in isolation on a subject. That's how things get missed and messed up. It's far better to have people working together to discover what makes this world work.
Enter The Crab Lab. It's my PhD, but way better. It's a community of students, scientists and local interest groups working together. My research focuses on the biology, ecology and behaviour of intertidal hermit crabs. Our Crab Lab shows that taking a narrow topic and inspiring people to get involved benefits science and society. We do more work and do it better. Because we are doing it together. I built a lab and inspired a lot of different people to join in and make it better.
A huge thanks goes out to all of you who have gotten involved. I’m glad you’re here. We’re going to discover amazing things together. Each of you is going to make all the research and work more worthwhile.