It's not just in fairy tales that gifts can come with curses. Like Midas with his golden touch – who ends up turning his daughter into a metallic statue – leading researchers can possess great strengths that come with hidden dangers. One of those strengths, believe it or not, is their capacity for envisioning. 

That’s right: your ability to see a blazing path through the conventional to a breakthrough approach may be a liability if you cannot communicate your vision well. Leaders who are true v…

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we witnessed an appalling demonstration of what happens when a non-expert makes a policy decision without understanding or respecting expert opinion. Donald Trump’s arrogance hit a dangerously new high when he stood on the White House Balcony, fresh out of hospital and still infected with COVID-19 and ripped his mask off in front of the press.

In a perfect world, the people holding power would make decisions based on sound advice from well-informed, w…

When I was young and naive, I foolishly thought that a career in academia would be the ideal place for someone who disliked conflict. My plan was to tuck myself away in the library for most of my days, curl up with my stack of books, and crank out lectures and articles. What could be more tranquil than a working life spent reading, writing, and teaching?

Boy, did I get that scenario wrong. Not only does teaching late adolescents require high-level conflict negotiation skills, but scholarship it…

How do you visualize your writing time in your schedule? Do you see it as fixed or flexible, optional or mandatory? 

I have a tendency to see mine as if it were endlessly stretchable within a fixed 24-hour period. Seeing time like this is a challenge I’ve struggled with my entire life, and I have a shelf of time management books to prove it.

In my mind, time functions as some kind of innovative material, a substance so elastic that you can use it to create a container with infinite capacity. N…

Knowledge translation is playing an increasingly visible role in driving innovation, with the Research Impact Story emerging as a recognizable genre used by funding organizations, research institutes, and start-ups.

Typically, the story begins something like this:

Meet our Researcher of the Month, Dr. Letitia Song.

Dr. Song grew up in the small town of Cambridge, Ontario, where her family had settled upon immigrating from Vietnam. When Dr. Song’s mother, Lila, was diagnosed with a particularl…

In 1995, I spent most of my days buried in fiction and scholarship that took me back to the middle of the 1800s. When I wasn’t poring over microfilm of nineteenth-century women’s magazines, I was reading literary criticism about women’s writing during the era of such celebrated male authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.

As I pursued these two research tracks, I read with one foot in highbrow culture—the world of Hawthorne and Melville—and the other in the lowbrow culture of “domes…

As a researcher, you’ve developed a sophisticated set of communication skills. You’ve mastered the art of sharing your findings with your peers through academic articles, posters, and conference presentations. You’ve probably written at least a couple of scholarship or grant applications. You may also have gained experience as a teacher, in which case you’ve learned how to convey complex information to novices in your field. And if you’ve spent any time on committee work, then you’ve likely been…

We often think of core values as standalone principles. But aren’t they really a set of interrelated assumptions? When I think of the values that have shaped my career, they form a syllogism:

• Knowledge is a treasure.
• Treasure is for sharing.
• Therefore, knowledge is for sharing.

Because I’ve much of my life mistakenly thinking that everyone shares my perspective, it took me years to realize that the middle piece of this syllogism isn’t necessarily a given. In fact, in many ways, cultural …

When I really need a shot of optimism, there’s nothing like a dose of Romantic poetry to shift my outlook from despairing to hopeful. That’s Romantic with a capital R. Not poetry commemorating the bond between lovers but poetry that celebrates the connection between humanity and nature, the depth and breadth of human emotion, and the transformative nature of art.

At the start of this new year, I feel in deep need of some Romantic buoyancy. The state of our fragile planet seems more fragile than…

Generative AI and I are just getting to know each other. Right now, I'd describe our relationship as hesitant dating. I'm still a bit too wary to invest a lot of time or cash in getting to know AI at a deep level. But I have become curious enough to have the equivalent of a few coffee chats.

For years, I've put off even shaking hands with this new technology, thinking (arrogantly) that I, a "professional writer," didn't need any new-fangled help. Back in the early 2000s, when I was a full-time …