MICCAI 2018 Daily - Wednesday

beginning, students are quite unsure in which direction to go. These days, they expect their supervisor to have a path to a solution in mind, and I often don’t. I really would like a student to explore a subject and come up with their own ideas. Luck is one component, but I also think you need a good overview of the subject area, which is getting more and more difficult because conferences are getting huge. Do you think that students have it easier or harder than you did 20 years ago? I think they have a more difficult life if they want to become an academic because I think I was quite lucky. I started in the field when the field was emerging. We had a relatively straightforward career path, at this point. I think nowadays if you want to go to industry, it’s much easier now than it used to be. Actually, getting an academic post is getting more challenging. It’s the second time that you’ve said you were lucky. What other factor, combined with luck, helped you to get to where you are? You also need to be able to persevere in an area. If something does not succeed, to not switch the research direction, for example. Did you start out doing what you wanted or is this something that you figured out with time? I think I was always a bit stubborn. If you would ask other people about me, they would always complain that he might be too stubborn. I think I was always a bit like this. Also, over the last years, I learned that this can actually be a valuable skill if you actually want to persevere. For example, I worked on a subject where it didn’t quite work. A year later, two years later, we tried a new angle trying to solve the same problem, and suddenly it would work. I guess most great scientists were stubborn, weren’t they? Yes [ laughs ] I hope so! Can you share with us the most important thing you learned from your own teachers ? I’m very grateful to my postdoc mentor, David Hawkes. When I actually started my postdoc, I had previously very little experience in medical imaging. I was working more in the area of applied computer vision. Dave Hawkes introduced me to the concept of really working in a hospital and applying medical imaging. When I started on my first day as a postdoc, he said, “ Your project is the following. ” I didn’t really do at all what he wanted me to do. We came up with a very different problem which is that of non-rigid registration. He was very encouraging. He said, “ Actually, it doesn’t matter if you don’t solve the problem we initially started off with .” We found a really interesting problem to work on. He gave me the freedom to work on this, but he also gave very good critical feedback. I learned a lot from that. Do you see yourself doing the same for your students? I hope so. I think I’m reasonably flexible. I want them to come and tell me that they’ve done something different than we initially expected. I think this is also important in the scientific field that you have enough flexibility to explore avenues Daniel Rueckert 5 Wednesday “ I didn’t really do at all what he wanted me to do. ”