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Erik: How are you learning to work more effectively across different disciplines?
Stacie: I think I'm learning to work more effectively across different disciplines simply
by virtue of having a better understanding of the perspectives of those different disciplines.
Understanding that different disciplines have different cultures, and learning as a supervisor
or a manager how to serve role with that, how to adapt my expectations to that, how
to encourage collaborations between people who have different perspectives.
You know, one specific example is, and it's funny, it's just very timely, so we had this
meeting last week, it was called the translational interface committee, and this is a group of
department chairs, from the basic science side and from the clinical side, so the chairman
of Neurology and a Neuroscience researcher, a big meeting, and we talked a lot about how
do we encourage translational research, how can we get clinicians into the labs, to understand
the basic science so that they can go back and treat the patient with schizophrenia or
Parkinson's disease. Those cultures are really different, the culture of a clinical scientist
is very different from the culture of a basic scientist, and it's very interesting to put
those populations of people together. It's usually very successful, it's very collaborative,
it's—ends up being very collegial but there might be a little bit hesitance on the clinician's
part to go into the lab because the science can be a little bit intimidating. These are
very smart people but it's a different training, it's a little bit of a different background
and from the basic scientist part, the clinician may be a little bit intimidating, you know,
that's the person who's going head-to-head with the patient and solving the problems
in the clinic. So I think breaking down that wall and showing people that what you, sort
of what you perceive to be intimidating or what you perceive to be a cultural difference,
you know, in reality when you get two people in a room they're usually okay.