Ever since Dr. John Pearson was a kid, he knew he wanted to be a scientist. He is now living out that dream with his own lab, the Pearson lab. Earlier this week, I had the privilege of sitting down with him to hear his story.
Dr. John Pearson grew up in Kentucky and went to University of Kentucky to study math and physics and earn his Bachelor’s degree. Afterwards, he earned his PhD in Physics from Princeton. At this point, he was unsure about what he wanted to do, but he knew he had an interest in neuroscience, sparked by a neuroscience and physics class he took his last year of grad school. Inspired by that interest and his passion for science, he applied for a couple postdoc positions. He started at Duke in 2005 working under Dr. Michael Platt and he studied the neurobiology of decision making in monkeys. This lab was on the bigger side, which was something Dr. Pearson really enjoyed. He appreciated being in an environment where collaboration and learning was encouraged. This stood out to me because the value of teamwork is central to his own lab currently.
A few years and a couple postdoc positions later, Dr. Pearson developed an interest in data science and machine learning. In his time away from the lab, he started taking online coursera classes and training himself in that area. Not long after, he received a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to explore the intersection between computation work and neuroscience. He was an Assistant Research Professor in the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences from 2015-2018. In 2018, he signed to stay at Duke and started his own lab, the Pearson lab, which focuses on modeling and analyzing neural data using cutting edge computational tools. Since 2018, he has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Informatics, under Duke’s School of Medicine. He really enjoys being the Principle Investigator of the Pearson Lab and some of the highlights include: overseeing a multitude of projects, training and mentoring students, creating an energizing environment with the team, and of course developing amazing new technology.
Interviewing Dr. Pearson about his journey to becoming a scientist was super insightful and also inspiring for me as I start my journey into science. His path was pretty complex and there is one final piece of insight related to this that I would love to share. I asked him about general lessons for budding scientists and he told me this: Research is hard – it’s as if you’ve been dropped in a jungle with no map. You might panic and it might take a long time to get out, but with some hard work, you will eventually find your way to your passion.
