How Do Some Research Scholars Become Famous Through Their Work?

Being a research scholar is quite demanding. Not all the research data scientists advance to become famous by winning a Nobel Prize. The working data scientists and research scientists anyway get eulogized by their peers for their hard work and gallantry every day for the consulting work. Their innovation sparks breakthroughs in research progress, they resolve long-standing conundrums in the field and come up with multiple solutions that can advance further studies. Any work created by a research scholar creates expanding influence in the field of research. For some data scientists, it’s a mission to win a Nobel Prize and they dedicate their lives on working on a particular idea, where the rest of the researchers are active in the large field of study. The life of a working data scientist parallelizing the research could be complex. There are adverse effects of performing research and working a full-time job at the same time. The adverse effects could be mental and physical as well with a blurred vision and splitting headache in the backdrop of a stress and suffering of overloading the brain’s functions. A Nature’s survey 2019, with more than 6000 PhD students revealed the turbulent nature of doctoral research and Postdoctoral research after PhD. The Nature’s survey also reveals the deep-rooted stress and work-life balance. You have to go through miles and miles of research papers, research journals, research magazines, and books to be able to understand what you have to research. There is a long and painful search for what topics you can research on and the tools with which you can complete that mission.

For Barbara Lipska, who is a research scholar and neuroscientist, is an expert on brains and spent  years studying every type of mental disorder one can possibly imagine, and yet it did not prepare her for her own madness. Many experts failed to explain why some of the researchers can no longer identify your house or your car, or why is that you’ve gone for a morning jog with a purple henna on your head. Why you have no idea, where you’re in your own neighborhood, your own streets, regardless you pass the same trees and same streets every day. Barbara Lipska lost her own mind in 2015. She was oblivious to the fact, that she lost her sanity, she keeps asking her family “Am I Sane? Am I logical? Am I making sense?” The terrifying experience she was going through is caused by the excess research she has been conducting on neuroscience over the years. She suffered anxiety, post-traumatic stress just by conducting research alone. She explains in-depth her terrifying experiences in her 2018 book “The NeuroScientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery,” which is a great read.  She further explains that, the brain is not a simple organ like a heart, it’s an engine like organ with billions of neurons and connections, absorbing culture with every interaction and experience with others in the society. Though, she recovered, she says, she became someone else, and not the person she liked. She explains how she brushed herself with the insanity – “Despite all my years of studying brain disorders, for the first time in my life I realize how profoundly unsettling it is to have a brain that does not function. And the more I remember from the days and weeks of my madness, the more frightened I become that I will lose my mind again. Perhaps madness is not the proper term to describe my condition at the time. After all, it is not an official diagnosis, but it is often used informally to mean instability, insanity. So instead I think of myself as having experienced a number of symptoms connected with a range of mental disorders. In other words, I had a brush with insanity. And I have come back.”

Researching is primary and secondary. Primary research is when the researcher goes out into the field and find the participants to extract answers from. It is not just a question and answering matter, in fact, the researcher has to do a lot of things pre-research. For example, they will have to figure out what the topic of their research is and then narrow it down to one small fraction of the entire idea. Then they have to devise up the tools and methods to conduct the research that will slim down the entire raw data into one conclusion. The nature of the research is innovation and generating novel ideas. It’s not mechanical work to repeat the same topic every day, which would not cause stress or adverse effects on the mind. The fact to research a new idea itself can cause anxiety.

Secondary data is when the researcher goes through heaps and heaps of data to come to a conclusion. They look into past works and other writings that might have been published on the very topic, or something related to it. This is difficult in its own right, because usually when this sort of research is implied, the researcher has picked out a new topic that has been derived from previous researches. They would pose their opinions on other peoples’ findings and deliver their research to the world.

But the researchers’ work is not finished there. They then have to write up the entire research paper. Starting from an introduction, as in what pieces of writing really piqued their interest and motivated them to research on this topic. They will have to talk about the methods of research they used, what happened during the research, the methods they used to come to a conclusion, the conclusion itself, the limitations, and what is now up for grabs.

It is not exactly easy to become famous for what you have researched. There might be many researchers who become famous in the industry they work in, but very few of them are able to find fame beyond the folds of the research industry. There are very few researchers who are able to become so famous like Dr. Ganapathi Pulipaka. The American entrepreneur, a research scholar in machine learning and data science, Chief Data Scientist, author, and SAP Technical Lead, has been famous for his works on machine learning and his speeches on his papers.  He has written over 400 research papers and is also heralded as a speaker over the machine learning algorithms.  It takes a solid endeavor to have an analytical mind, being a people’s person at conferences, and on social media, and having an empathetic curiosity to be able to see the fame that Pulipaka has seen. They should be able to come up with bigger ideas and understand the smaller details at the same time. They should not be opposed to spending ample time on one question or aspect of the research. They should have a high curiosity factor to be able to come up with things to discover, to be able to put two and two together and figure out what piece of the puzzle is missing.