Notes from the faculty-trainee lunch at Yale with Jun Lu on Oct 21, 2026

Main goal would be to help the field of interest progress.

Questions while aproaching a problem

  1. How well or poorly is the field of interest researched?
  2. Does your research question involve all the necessary tools?
  3. What kind of contribution will help the field progress?
    • Make use of the tools you currently have to approach the problem, high risk, high effort, high reward or low effort, low risk high reward would depend on the person investigating the problem.
    • If the field does not have the necessary tools, then the greatest contribution to the field would be to build the tool. Lack of a particular tool could also be limiting the field to progress.

When to pull the plug on a project?

  • Depends on money and time invested
  • A project doesnt always have to be futile. One can think of the different possible end goals with the results from that particular (supposedly failed) project.

An adjacent topic of discussion on how to pursue a research question while starting a lab

  • Any type of investment is made on the person rather than their pursuit. It can be a great research question or a great product. The main bottleneck is the person. Its important to show skills that involve, leadership, proactiveness, enthusiasm, can the person see something to completion do they have capacity to navigate through failures. A person’s profile would showcase these.