Growing Up in Science: David M. Schneider

David M. Schneider

[su_boxbox title=”About”]Dr. Schneider earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering with a focus on control systems and prosthetics. During his undergraduate years, he spent two summers as an intern at a medical device company, where he holds a patent for the software and hardware he developed for building intelligent pacemakers. David then earned a master’s degree in biomedical engineering, where he used electrophysiology, behavior, and computational modeling to study how barn owls hunt their prey. After finishing his M.S., David spent 11 months as a research assistant at Columbia University. During that short time he performed experiments leading to 3 manuscripts on primate behavior, vision and attention. The following year David continued at Columbia as a graduate student, rotating through three labs, one of which resulted in a first author paper. David joined the lab of Sarah Woolley as its first graduate student, where he published 8 more papers (3 first author) and received multiple fellowships and awards, including an NRSA. David moved to Duke University for a postdoc in 2012 and published his first 2 papers within 24 months. As a postdoc he was the recipient of a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation postdoctoral fellowship and an Allison Doupe Fellowship from the McKnight Foundation. David does not have a K99/R00, but only because he declined it (after receiving a perfect score of 10) to accept a Career Award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. David started his lab at NYU in January of 2018 and was recently named a Searle Scholar. The story below is re-published in collaboration with Growing up in science. Learn more about the Schneider Laboratory. The story is co-published in collaboration with Growing up in Science. [/su_boxbox]

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] grew up in rural North Dakota. I was a mediocre student in high school and applied to exactly one college, North Dakota State University, where it took me 5 years to earn a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. It took 5 years because I nearly flunked out in years 2 and 3 and rarely attended class except in years 1 and 5. Despite bad grades and a broken compass, I applied to 4 masters programs and got into 1, for the sole reason that the chair at that department was a former professor at NDSU.

David M. Schneider

When I finished my masters, I applied to 11 PhD programs and was rejected by all of them. The next obvious step (to me) was to cold-call the director of graduate studies at Columbia (where I had just been rejected) and ask if there were any labs that would hire me for a year. There luckily was, and so I packed my bags and moved to New York. I worked at Columbia for a year, reapplied to grad school and was accepted everywhere I applied this time. After starting my PhD, I naively interacted with PIs as if they were peers. This includes the time I bumped into Richard Axel at a bodega the summer before grad school and told him I was going to join his lab for his first rotation. I did indeed rotate in the Axel lab.

During my first year in grad school, I transiently suffered from anxiety attacks, which just about made me drop out of grad school. But I recovered and ultimately ended up studying bird brains with Sarah Woolley, then moved to Duke for a postdoc before coming back to NYC in 2018. My path eventually worked out because I married someone much smarter than myself and because rather than work 80-hour weeks, I spend most of my evenings and weekends hanging out with my children.

Cover image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

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