Summary
A conversation with early career researchers about doing circadian science rather than about its conclusions. How questions get chosen, how multidisciplinary teams are assembled, and what the field still does not know.
Dr Panda's own path is instructive here. His postdoctoral training taught him to combine biology, chemistry and engineering expertise to ask larger questions than any one discipline could handle, and his laboratory has worked that way since, with genetics, molecular biology, multi omics, preclinical work and human studies running alongside each other. More recently he has been integrating what he calls wetware, software and hardware, meaning laboratory research, computational and AI methods, and wearable sensors with mobile health platforms. The published record behind this involves hundreds of collaborators and coauthors.
For a PhD audience, the useful part is the candour about open problems. Which mechanisms remain unexplained, which human findings have not replicated cleanly, and where a newcomer might productively start.
