Author: [AUTHOR] Published on 5/1/2023 12:00:00 AM

Rajat Desikan, PhD, Director, GlaxoSmithKline, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom

How do you keep focused and motivated?
At the risk of sounding cheesy, I love the field of drug development and my role as a clinical pharmacologist in accelerating the process of delivering lifesaving medicines and vaccines. It is the perfect confluence of pursuing scientific curiosities and achieving real world impact while having fun with delightful and warm scientific peers and colleagues. This entire ecosystem, including my ever-supportive family, fuels my focus and motivation.

What is the most important leadership lesson that you have learned the hard way?
Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I have a somewhat academic bent of mind, and in the pursuit of rigor have missed opportunities to let my work impact critical decision-making. While this has been a hard lesson, I have learned from it and am now working on developing a two-step process – developing tools that suffice to enable quick decision-making in real time, and later refinement of those tools to the rigor expected in top academic journals for my own satisfaction, either for future deployment or for publishing as scientific papers.

What is it like being an Editor-in-Training for CPT: Pharmacometrics & Systems Pharmacology?
A dream come true! I am passionate about the scientific publishing process, and deeply believe in its instrumental role in shaping the scientific landscape (despite its limitations). While I had authored many papers, I longed to be on the “other side” and experience/influence the editorial process. Being an Editor-in-Training (EiT) for a standard journal in our field – PSP – has been an incredible opportunity for early career scientists like me. Not only do we get to interact with giants in the field like Dr. France Mentré, Lena Friberg, and others, we get an early insider's view of the bleeding edge in our field and critically appraise it, thus enabling our evolution as scientists. The icing on the cake is the warm and super-friendly journal staff, who have held our hands throughout and made this process thoroughly enjoyable. I cannot recommend the program enough!

Do you have a favorite tip or trick for clinical practice or research that you want to share with fellow members?
While I feel a little uncomfortable sharing tips/tricks, one habit that has upped my productivity by a notch is planning my entire week first thing on a Monday morning. This helps me focus and avoid bleeding away energy before the essential wins for the week are under my belt.

Dr. Desikan has been a member of ASCPT since 2021.