St. Vincent de Paul Teacher-Scholar
Award Lecture - August 28, 2007
Byron C. Yoburn
Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy
and Allied Health Professions
yoburnb@stjohns.edu
All the things that one should say on the occasion of receiving
the St. Vincent DePaul teacher scholar award need to be said.
I am deeply honored to have received this recognition. It is
especially meaningful, since it is my conviction that the St.
John’s University community has been instrumental in allowing me to
develop my career as a scientist and as an educator. The
University has been a consistent supporter of my science and my
efforts as an educator, and this has made an important
difference.
This faculty convocation coincides with my 20th year anniversary
at St. John's. During this period, remarkable things have
happened - professionally and in my personal life. In August
of 1987, I was a fairly young man with a growing family and many
challenges in front of me. Today, my oldest daughter has
graduated from college and is pursuing, successfully, a business
career in the entertainment industry. My youngest daughter
will be 20 in four weeks and she is entering her junior year in
college; with ideas of becoming an early education teacher.
To understand why I am particularly grateful for the support I
have received from St. John's, perhaps I should review, my
academic history. I received my Ph.D. from Northeastern
University in 1979 and subsequently completed a postdoctoral
fellowship in the Neurobehavioral Sciences at Columbia University
Medical School. I remained on the staff at Columbia for year
or two after finishing my fellowship, and then began a second
fellowship in Pharmacology at Cornell University Medical
College. I remained at Cornell in the Department of
Pharmacology for several years and in 1986 received my first major
NIH grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).
However, I was not convinced that I was in the environment in which
I wanted to develop my career. So, I began to look for the right
place.
In 1987, with my youngest daughter expected in only four weeks,
I moved to St. John's and took up my appointment in the College of
Pharmacy and Allied Health Professions. Liz was born 23 days
after I arrived at St. John’s. Parents know that a new job
and a new child certainly take you to the farthest reaches of most
stress indices! Nevertheless, since that time, I think by any
metric, I have had, and continue to have, a rewarding and
successful career at St. John's. I came as an Assistant
Professor in Pharmacology and I have risen through the ranks and
was appointed Full Professor in Pharmacology in 1994.
Professionally, I have remained supported by the National Institute
on Drug Abuse almost continually for the last 20 years. My
work has centered on the fundamental mechanisms that determine the
action of opioid drugs; such as morphine, heroin and
methadone. This topic has remained an important area of
interest for NIDA and to me – perhaps, a lucky coincidence!
However, all did not proceed according to plan. Sometimes
funding was delayed or grants simply did not receive scores that
were in the fundable range. During those periods when I did
not have support from the federal government to keep my lab active,
I received strong encouragement and clear indications of faith in
my research program from the University administration.
Equally important, I benefited from the support of my colleagues
throughout the university (almost too many to mention, but my
heroes know who they are and have been thanked). In fact, I
was the beneficiary of goodwill from virtually all elements of the
St. John's community: from my undergraduate students, graduate
students, staff, fellow faculty, administrators -- from just about
everyone. Those relatively brief periods of unfunded
grant applications were particularly difficult; especially since I
believed firmly that my lab was pursuing an important topic that
merited support. It was hard to maintain an active, functioning
laboratory under those circumstances. However, in addition to
the faith of my friends, my lab also benefited from tangible
support from the University in the form of the supplies and
equipment I needed to keep my lab functioning. We were able
to continue to produce the data that were absolutely essential to
put our research proposals in the fundable range. Perhaps, my
own faith in our work; which at times may have been somewhat
irrational; and the financial and emotional backing of the
University were what maintained my ability to dust myself off,
rewrite my proposals and eventually get back in the game.
I know many of you are beginning your career as faculty
members. It's a difficult and exciting time - It won't come
again. I think it’s a good time to put in place strategies
and an overall framework to try to ensure your success and, of
course, your personal satisfaction with your career. I
suppose at this point in my career I can offer you some advice and
some encouragement. What do I think is the most important
component of having a successful academic and intellectual
career? Well, some have said success is 99% perspiration and
1% inspiration - there is great value in tenacity and hard
work. Others think the major part of success is just showing
up on time; and this is certainly important!
Seriously, though, I think the recipe for success requires three
ingredients. Two of these ingredients are in your external
environment and one is internal and involves your mental set.
The first element is your work environment. Based on my
experience, I believe you have maximized the probability of your
efforts being appreciated, supported and valued by being in the St.
John's community. Hard work and success are valued here -
this has been my experience, and I hope it's yours. Another
element is your personal life. I have been particularly
lucky. My wife of 31 years has valued truth, candor, and
intellectualism throughout our lives together. She also holds
a Ph.D. in psychology, and is a successful clinical
psychologist. She is a rigorous empiricist; a quality that
any basic scientist values highly. Our shared academic
pedigree, our common belief in the value of science and education,
and her ability to understand what drives basic science and the
scientist have been instrumental in allowing me to chart a research
course that resulted in, what I believe, a successful career.
Even more important, she has never lost faith in my abilities to
succeed. In addition, my large extended family has been a
source of inspiration and support. I hope that you can find this
level of personal fulfillment.
The third component for academic success, I believe, is internal
and you have complete power and discretion over it. In my
view, having a successful academic career requires evolution of
your interests. I often think of myself as trying to keep
myself alive intellectually. I conceptualize this as an
ongoing campaign. What do I mean by that? I am
sometimes tempted by the easy way out: to let things slide.
However, I fight to reject this and force myself to study new
topics, learn new things and to be involved in as much as
possible. I am always glad I took this path, even though it
is harder and I struggle with my own limitations. I think
that you need to read in every area that catches your fancy, as
well as areas that don't. Personally, I enjoy fiction, biographies,
I particularly enjoy books about physics; but, actually I think I
like most anything; from plumbing to finance. My wife will
tell you that when I get started in a new area, I approach it like
a crusade and will not back off until I feel I have a fair idea of
what is happening. While that may be extreme for some, what I
have found, and continue to discover, is that by trying to keep
myself alive intellectually and learning about most anything that
catches my eye, these themes and ideas often express themselves in
my research, in my daily interactions with faculty, and, very
frequently in the classroom. My research interests have
evolved since I published my first paper in 1976; and much of this
evolution I credit to the things I've read outside the area of my
research focus. That seems counterintuitive. One might
suppose the efforts that will impact on your research the most
dramatically are your studies directly in your main area.
However, what I find, is that looking elsewhere for intellectual
stimulation often broadens and clears the road in front of me when
I think about what I'd like to do next in my research
program. So, my original interests in pharmacology were
related to studying dose response relationships in the whole
animal. Over the years, I have become more interested in
molecular and biochemical approaches and have turned my work in
that direction. Most recently, my reading in mathematics and
mathematical modeling have resulted in my research shifting again
in an attempt to quantify the relationships among different opioid
drugs and the degree to which they produced tolerance. In
short then, it's evolution of your interests; keep reinventing
yourself, thinking about new things, ……. that makes your
intellectual journey continually interesting - for every one - for
you, for your students, for your colleagues, for your
family.
This is all I wanted to say. I wanted to thank St. John's
- and I've done that and it is a heartfelt thanks. I wanted
to tell new faculty, for what it's worth, what I think they need to
do to keep themselves intellectually alive. I'm not sure it
will work for you - it has worked for me - perhaps you have another
formula and 20 years from now you'll be standing here telling
others what you think is the recipe for success. Hopefully,
one of us is right!