Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with my PI, Dr. Ahmad Hariri, who generously took time out of his busy schedule to share with me some personal anecdotes about his process of entering the world of scientific research. Dr. Hariri is the director of the Laboratory of NeuroGenetics and oversees the Duke Neurogenetics Study in addition to being a professor of psychology and neuroscience.
For undergrad, Dr. Hariri ironically attended The University of Maryland (once considered a huge rival of the Duke’s basketball team) where he studied biology and eventually stayed to complete his master’s degree in evolutionary biology due to his strong interest in evolution and natural selection. Later, he went on to obtain his PhD at UCLA, where one of the first neuroscience programs was introduced. However, he stated that prior to this he had always maintained an enthusiasm for studying behavior; it just happens (and I was surprised to learn) that noninvasive functional imaging had just been developed around the time he was an undergraduate, so the active studying of the human brain and behavior at this whole new level was a relatively new field when he first began to engage with it and decide to pursue it.
In addition to his research, Dr. Hariri also happens to teach an undergraduate neuroscience course called Inside the Disordered Brain, so I decided to ask him about his experience with teaching. To which he enthusiastically responded that he loves it. Dr. Hariri first discovered his passion for teaching when he was a graduate student at the University of Maryland, as a TA, but unintentionally distanced himself from it in his early academic career, as he was in the medical school (he was briefly at the University of Pittsburgh with an appointment in psychiatry but decided that the clinical side of behavior was not for him) where there were not many opportunities or requirements to teach. In fact, one of the primary factors in his coming to Duke was the possibility of being able to teach simultaneously alongside researching. It is, in his words, “the most fun [he] has” in his line of work, as research includes encountering many “peaks and valleys” while he felt that the valleys were minimized in teaching.
When encountering these valleys, or what some might consider “failures”, Dr. Hariri states that it is important to recognize that they are inevitable and hopefully momentary, but that ultimately they should be used as an opportunity to consider trying a different strategy. A saying that they have in the lab is, “closing doors is almost as important, if not more important than opening doors”. He believes that the advancement of knowledge is not necessarily reliant on solely proving that your hypothesis is correct, but can also be initiated when you realize that things are not exactly how you hypothesized; the most important thing is to accept it and then move forward. He did acknowledge that one of the best things about science are the discoveries or the “successes”, which are “almost addictive” no matter how big or small. That being said, according to Dr. Hariri, getting from one discovery to another requires much tedium and sometimes many failures.
When asked about one of his most embarrassing moments as a scientist, Dr. Hariri recalled when he was a PhD student and was volunteering as a participant in a study his PI was conducting. This particular study required an fMRI. After completing the scan, he could tell his PI was a little concerned and asked what was going on — it turns out there appeared to be an abnormality (what looked like a lesion in the occipital cortex) in his scan and asked a neuro-radiologist to come examine it. After the neuro-radiologist examined the scan for a while, she stopped and turned around and asked if the subject had a “prominent proboscis”. Evidently, the image of his nose had wrapped around and put a shadow on the brain scan to look like a lesion. “Never in my life have I ever been so relieved to have a big nose!”
Outside of work, Dr. Hariri tries to spend a lot of time with his wife and his two young kids. He mentioned that at this point in his career, a lot of his time is spent writing and editing papers and no longer in the day-to-day collection of data (when he was not lecturing or preparing lectures). For undergrads trying to get into science, Dr. Hariri’s advice was to start early and to explore different methodologies and lab settings. He noted that much of the lab experience is reflective of the interpersonal connections made there, and cautioned that it would be a disservice to the science itself to dismiss an area of research due to these other aspects of working in a lab. Also, he shared that one of the biggest mistakes that he sees young scientists make is going right into huge defining programs (medical school, graduate school, etc.) immediately after undergrad and advised to take a year or two in order to become more competitive in these programs. Above all, he emphasized not to sacrificing personal happiness for anything (grades, money, places, people, prestige etc.)—“everything else will fall in line”. Thank you, Dr. Hariri for your time!
