An interview with

Professor Peter Koulen

Listen to the interview with the Editor-in-Chief, Prof Peter Koulen, by clicking the Play button (the full interview is 11 minutes, 40 seconds). A transcript of the interview is also provided below.

Q: I understand that Open Access Animal Physiology – the journal that you edit – is a very new publication. When should we expect to see the first papers published?
Prof Koulen: We are expecting the first article to be published in early December [2009] and we have a number of articles already in the queue for publication.

Q: Could you tell us a little bit about your vision for this particular journal?
Prof Koulen: As you might see from the title – which is very broad: Animal Physiology – how I envision this journal to have its biggest impact is in that it is a truly interdisciplinary journal that allows authors to use it as a platform for hypothesis-driven and mechanistic research, but also give them the opportunity to cross-fertilize different fields that you could summarize under physiology.

Q: What would you say are the benefits of “Open Access” journals such as Open Access Animal Physiology?
Prof Koulen: The immediate benefit is definitely it has a very fast turnaround and a pretty wide exposure. Something that potential authors might not know is that besides getting access to colleagues in the field, the Open Access idea also generates a lot of interest from people outside the field such as engineers, statisticians and physicians. I get quite a few calls from people who are not doing research in my field who ask me questions about the publication.

Q: Which topics in your area are under-researched, in your opinion?
Prof Koulen: In our area, I think the most under-researched topics are research areas that are difficult to tackle. So, for example, system integration, where folks research the interaction of different parts of physiology, as well as an area where we still don’t have the right research tool and where we have to dip a little bit into our knowledge of zoology and different species to use the right tool for a specific answer that is needed in a field where the traditional tools probably have no place.

Q: If we talk about you, for a minute. Could you tell me about your degree: What did you study? When and where?
Prof Koulen: I studied biology in the 1990s at the University of Mainz in Germany and at the Max-Planck-Institute for Brain Research. My main focus was zoology. But I also studied biochemistry and genetics and I got my PhD in 1997.

Q: What led you to decide on that particular line of study?
Prof Koulen: I was always very interested in life sciences in general, but I think one of the big motivating factors for me was to get to know my PhD mentor Dr Heinz Wässle, who was a very instrumental and very important researcher in the field who had the special gift of being able to generate enthusiasm for this line of research.

Q: What are your main research interests now?
Prof Koulen: My main research interests now are the function and the diseases of the nervous, as well as the visual, system.

Q: How well do you think the current education system and educators serve students today?
Prof Koulen: I believe, actually, that today the education system serves students better than when I was in high school or an undergrad in that they are oftentimes tailor-made to students’ interests and not so much an off-the-rack program which allows students to really study what they are most gifted for and make them more successful.

Q: Any thoughts on how specialists in the field can help patients better understand their work? For example, do you support the idea that academic or scholarly papers should all carry a “plain text explanation” of main findings or conclusions?
Prof Koulen: I think that a good paper should allow that even a non-specialist can understand what’s going on in a particular research study. So, just that. But at the same time there is also something being said for allowing the scientific discovery process to mature. What I mean by that is, oftentimes, it takes not just one but several publications, validation and looking at different aspects to really bring out the main take-home message of a particular field of research. So while it’s good for an individual research paper to showcase what is important about it, oftentimes it takes a little while to bring these aspects out and that, oftentimes, is achieved in review articles or in books and also in popular literature.

Q: Who, in your opinion, is doing the most interesting or exciting work in your field of science at the moment?
Prof Koulen: I think that’s a difficult question because in animal physiology and human physiology there are very very exciting sets of research going on currently. What excites me currently the most are new approaches that use optical sensors that can be genetically encoded. So we can measure the activities of cells without ever having to interfere with them in the first place.

Q: You may already have answered this question but what are the rapidly-evolving “hot” areas in your specialty right now? And what might they lead to?
Prof Koulen: I think the most interesting and most rapidly-evolving hot areas also coincide a little bit with what I characterized earlier as under-researched areas, in that, oftentimes, research at the crossroads between two major fields such as the interaction of the nervous system with the immune system or the nervous system with the endocrine system. I think those are truly the fields where we can expect to see the biggest changes in the future and that, in my opinion, will allow us to tackle complex diseases that one particular field can probably not address so efficiently.

Q: If we turn back to talking about yourself again, who’s had the biggest influence on your career? And what have they done that has been influential on you?
Prof Koulen: Again, I would have to definitely cite my PhD mentor Professor Heinz Wässle, who provided me with one thing that is very difficult to obtain by just reading the literature or by just being very diligent: which is motivation. He really was able to provide his students with the drive for discovery.

Q: What’s the most far-reaching change that you’ve experienced during your career as a scientist?
Prof Koulen: I think the biggest change was something I never envisioned as being problematic but it’s definitely a big challenge, which is the transition from being a member of a team to becoming the leader of a team with the research oftentimes staying the same but the view of how research is being done oftentimes changing completely.

Q: If we look ahead, say, five or 10 years, what changes might you expect to see in your area of specialization?
Prof Koulen: What I expect to see is that we as a research community try to rapidly integrate experimental, analytical and diagnostics systems. That would allow us to go beyond asking questions that are just dealing with linear relationships. To give you an example of what I mean by this, ten or 15 years back, one of the most important technological aspects of the laboratory was the darkroom where one could go in and develop photographs. Nowadays, it’s even become a challenge to explain to students what a darkroom is and we are looking at technology that is far more advanced that allows us, basically, to develop an image and analyze it and use it as a diagnostic tool all at the same time.

Q: Which area of science, outside your own specialty, would you most like to know about?
Prof Koulen: Actually, plant physiology. I would be very interested to learn more about that because plants, unlike animals, have different energetic and evolutionary constraints and they have to solve similar problems but come up with different strategies.

Q: If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
Prof Koulen: I would love to do more research and less research administration but, on the other hand, administration is also important otherwise research does not go on.

Q: Do you have any unfulfilled ambitions that you’d like to try to address in the future?
Prof Koulen: Professionally, I would really like to see an individual nerve cell in a living organism functioning at the ultra-structural level. That is something that would really excite me. Personally, I think there are lots of things exciting that are very difficult to narrow down to just one thing: just enjoying life.

Q: The final question: what do you think is your greatest achievement in your professional life?
Prof Koulen: I think being able to teach the next generation of scientists and physicians because without them we would still be able to stand on the shoulders of giants but it would be tough to pass it on into a meaningful future.

Professor Koulen was interviewed by Ruth Le Pla at Dove Medical Press. Ruth has setup interviews with some of our other Editors-in-Chief, so keep a look out for these, they should provide some compelling reading.
 
If there is someone in a specialist field you would like to read an interview about let us know and we will do our best to arrange it.

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