BY Kimberly Link-Wills
Jayanta "Jay" Debnath, Chem 92, featured speaker at the fall President's Scholarship Program luncheon, admitted he is not the typical Georgia Tech alumnus.
"I'm not an engineer. I'm not a manager. I'm not an entrepreneur who's interested in starting his or her own company, at least for now. Rather, I'm a scientist who's engaged each and every day in basic biomedical research," said Debnath, who earned his medical degree at Harvard and now is an associate professor at the University of California at San Francisco.
"I believe a lot of what it takes to be a good scientist is exactly what it takes to be good at anything. To be a good engineer, an entrepreneur or a good doctor, they all take the same assets and skills," he said, highlighting five attributes essential to professional success.
"Scientists must be curious. This in principle sounds really obvious and really easy but as I've gone through life, I've come to realize how difficult it is to actually be curious," Debnath said.
Scientists must question preconceived notions, he said. "Successful scientists have to be unwilling to accept things on faith and have the desire to really test things for themselves. We have to be willing to take a step back and explore avenues that seem completely unjustified in the hopes that we may uncover new knowledge that turns out ultimately to be very, very important.
"This questioning of popular theories and well-established models is very difficult but is critical for the scientific process to work. I would argue that it's critical in all aspects of life."
Debnath said scientists must be persistent. "There's a lot of rolling up your sleeves and getting experiments done, especially in fields like molecular biology and biochemistry. You need to know how to buckle down and concentrate and, furthermore, you need to understand the experiments you design that look awesome in theory often don't really work in real life."
Flexibility also is essential. "You're going to fail and in fact you're going to fail often," he said. "The key is you want to fail early, kind of like a football season. You want to get those losses out of the way.
"Scientists must be able to communicate solid ideas. This is a common misperception about scientists, that they live solitary lives, wiling away in our labs in the dark," Debnath said. "Actually, communication is a critical aspect of the scientific process.
"Even though it would be nice for us to sit around and let our data and our results speak for themselves, in reality we absolutely have to engage in marketing in order to stay in business. This is just like any other profession."
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