5 Hats of a Principal Investigator
What is a Principal Investigator (P.I.)?
In academia, the P.I. is the leader of a lab thus works to secure public grant funding, to recruite/mentor students, and to disseminate research, and of course must have a Ph.D.
Outside of academia, the role of P.I. can be held by anyone with at least a masters degree, but is not a term used regularly outside of the true crime genre of entertainment. Though I admire and respect the detective Carmen Sandeigo from early 90’s PC games, my lab coat, gloves, safety glasses, and safety shoes are quite a different look than one may imagine at first!
Using the P.I.’s academic and experiential knowledge, they are expert multitaskers, wearing several hats in various types of research experiments in multiple industries.
The top 5 of these hats include:
- Designer A P.I. uses their expert knowledge and research to form a hypothesis to solve a problem, then designs experiments (D.O.E.: design of experiments) that provide a clear answer to prove and/or disprove their hypothesis.
- PlannerA P.I. finds resources- funding, materials, equipment, other relevant experts- to plan out all the details related to their process of solving a problem.
- ExecuterA P.I. follows through with execution of research and/or development, ensuring that every statistically relevant test is completed, every funding source is tracked down, and the sample preparations are consistent with the DOE.
- Documenter: A P.I. knows there is no such thing as too much data (esp now in the age of AI), and will document every little pertinent detail that is useful to their hypothesis and experiments, such as the time of day/temperature/humidity of the moment doing a specific measurement.
- Interpreter: A P.I. will process data and utilize various software, mathematical tools, or automation tools to interprete the results to form a conclusion and finally to advise other stakeholders on the next steps.