STORY BY CHI-PING DAY, PhD  February 2, 2026 Becoming a principal investigator , the holy grail of academic research, was never quite the dream goal I imagined for myself. Maybe because I felt I didn’t check all the expected boxes. I was a seasoned graduate student preparing to defend after more than five years of work, yet my publication record wasn’t impressive and I lacked confidence in grant writing. My experiments were unpredictable and my interest in exploring questions