I felt confined by my disciplinary training. Making art freed my scientific ideas

From ScienceMag:

I sat on a park bench, watercolor palette and sketchbook in hand. I built up the layers of my painting slowly, capturing the bustling street scenes around me. A wash of cerulean for the sky. A mix of burnt sienna and buff titanium to frame the outlines of the New York City skyline. I moved my brush by instinct, based on whatever inspiration struck me in the moment. I took up sketching during the COVID-19 pandemic and have no formal training in art. So I have no preconceived notions about what my art should look like or how I should be doing it. It’s the opposite of the attitude I had once brought to my scientific research. But I am now thinking about science differently. Making art has inspired me to approach research on my own terms, freeing me from the invisible constraints of my disciplinary training and my assumed role in academia. I am now forging a more creative path.

Several years before the pandemic hit, I started a faculty job in a medical school where I was expected to use my Ph.D. training in biostatistics to analyze health-related data sets. I was told it would be nice to get my own grant funding, but not necessary. I could work as a co-investigator to support other investigators’ grants. I did not have to set the research agenda or generate hypotheses; physicians and epidemiologists would come up with important scientific questions, and I would provide statistical support to help carry out the research.

This role appealed to me. I saw it as a way to work on my passion, biomedical research, without shouldering the stress of continually writing grants. It also fit with my Ph.D. training. My peers and I were regularly given data sets to analyze. We weren’t trained as biomedical hypothesis generators. Our task was to develop the best statistical model we could for the data at hand, to answer a predefined question.

As a faculty member, I initially relished being able to jump around to different projects in environmental health, dementia, substance use disorders, and chronic disease research. However, over time I began to feel constrained. It was as though I was doing science through a secondary filter, through the interpretative lens of another researcher.

Around that time I took up urban sketching as a hobby. In my art, I wasn’t following someone else’s lead or molding myself to someone else’s discipline. I chose what to depict, sketching on location to examine the scene from a mix of vantage points and letting the emotions wash over me. That creative process gave me a lot of joy. I began to wonder whether I could approach my science this way, too, developing my own research projects from the ground up, based on the questions and hypotheses that most grabbed me as a researcher.

I had doubts about whether I could generate ideas myself and get proposals funded as the lead principal investigator. Would my dabbling across many biomedical fields be a hindrance to winning grants? Would reviewers think I lacked focus or the right expertise to lead a project?

I decided to give it a try anyway. It has been exciting to thread my own ideas together and come up with a project that feels my own. The effort has paid off: I recently got my first major research grant funded through the U.S. National Institutes of Health, a milestone that has boosted my confidence to continue to pursue my own ideas. Putting the proposal together also helped me see that there is value to my broad research background. By dabbling across fields, I have developed a unique view and am able to combine different fields using my own creative lens.

Before making art, I was mentally tied to a narrower perspective: the idea that “this is my scientific training, and this is how I am supposed to use that training to solve scientific problems”—a box I was not even aware of being inside. By breaking out of that box, I found a new joy in research.

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