EL1 BUILDING A CAREER IN NEURO-ONCOLOGY RESEARCH

A young neurosurgeon has several interesting and important possible career paths: clinical care, clinical/translational research and more fundamental research. Each of these has its own requirements for training, talent and commitment. A closer inspection of each of these, however, reveals that they are basically quite similar. From this, several general conclusions can be gleaned and recommendations for optimizing the chances of long-term career success. In this short talk, I will review the aspects of our training program that has allowed each of our Japanese trainees to have remarkable success both while with us in the US and upon their return to Japan. My goal is to explicitly describe and state these as a roadmap for success, particularly in the rapidly developing field involving the application of molecular and genetic technologies to translational and basic neuro-oncology research—but also as more generally applicable principles.