As the history and interview below illustrate, the Association of Medical School Pharmacology Chairs (AMSPC) has been an instrumental force in shaping the teaching, and advancing the scientific bases, of the pharmacological sciences since its founding in the 1960s.
AMSPC and ASPET began a collaborative webinar series this year called “Future Leaders in Pharmacology” that gives visibility to early career scientists—nominated by department chairs or ASPET division chairs—who show promise as future leaders in the field, an important aid to young scientists entering a crowded job market during an uncertain time for science. But, like ASPET and other leading associations within their fields, AMSPC has been resilient during this turbulent period and provided support for members and students through its annual conference, advocacy, and continued focus on advancing scientific knowledge.
We’re pleased to present this informative history of the association, provided by Sandeep Bansal, MBBS, MD, MBA, FAAPE, and in-depth interview with AMSPC President Nancy Walworth, PhD.
Association of Medical School Pharmacology Chairs (AMSPC): The Evolution of a Discipline
and the Emergence of the Knowledge Objectives in Medical Pharmacology
By Sandeep Bansal1, Gary Rankin2, Robert Theobald3, Kent Vrana4, Nancy Walworth5
- Burnett School of Medicine at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX 76104
- Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine, Marshall University, Huntington, WV 25755
- Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine, A. T. Still University of Health Sciences, Kirksville, MO 63501
- Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey, PA 17033
- Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ 08901
The evolution of pharmacology education in North America is closely tied to the history of the Association of Medical School Pharmacology Chairs (AMSPC). Over several decades, AMSPC has played a central role in defining the discipline’s educational mission. Among their most enduring contributions is the development of the Knowledge Objectives in Medical Pharmacology, a framework that has guided pharmacology instruction across North American medical schools for nearly four decades.
Origins in Advocacy and Identity
The Association for Medical School Pharmacology (AMSP), later renamed the Association of Medical School Pharmacology Chairs (AMSPC), was established in the late 1960s, with documented leadership beginning in 1968. In the decades that followed, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, the organization’s role expanded as academic medicine underwent major structural and curricular change. Pharmacology departments, once firmly established as independent academic units, began to face increasing pressure from institutional restructuring. Increased competition for research funding, shifting research priorities, and the rise of integrated curricula led many schools to merge or dissolve standalone pharmacology departments. During this period, AMSP served as a national forum for pharmacology chairs to collectively address these challenges.
Early leaders of AMSP, including Harold Hodge, PhD, Tom Maren, PhD, and Harold Hardman, PhD, provided steady stewardship as departments navigated restructuring. In addition to facilitating national dialogue, the organization fostered mentoring and collegial support for newly appointed chairs, helping them navigate departmental leadership, resource pressures, and evolving curricular expectations. Sustained leadership across successive administrations of the organization reflected more than organizational governance; it underscores a generational commitment to preserving pharmacology’s identity within medical education. The organization’s mission extended beyond professional networking and increasingly centered on safeguarding the discipline’s identity and educational integrity within medical education.
Early accounts suggest that AMSP also engaged institutional leadership, particularly deans, in efforts to maintain pharmacology departments or ensure that pharmacology remained a dominant component in merged units. Although these efforts met with mixed success, they catalyzed a more enduring strategy: defining the discipline through its educational contributions rather than through departmental structure alone.
As academic medicine evolved, AMSP transitioned to the Association of Medical School Pharmacology Chairs (AMSPC) in 2003, during the presidency of Israel Hanin, PhD, with Gary Rankin, PhD, serving as secretary. Across this period, medical schools increasingly adopted integrated organ system-based curricula and centralized Offices of Medical Education. These reforms redistributed formal classroom hours for pharmacology instruction, embedded pharmacology content within clinically oriented modules and, in many institutions, compressed foundational science instruction. While the organizational name changed, the central concerns regarding pharmacology education remained consistent: ensuring adequate representation of pharmacology within integrated curricula, preserving conceptual coherence across curricula, and navigating the growing diversity of faculty backgrounds involved in pharmacology instruction.
In this environment, AMSPC increasingly focused on educational leadership to sustain the discipline’s relevance. The most significant manifestation of this effort was the development and continuing refinement of the Knowledge Objectives. To sustain its emphasis on pharmacology education in more recent years, AMSPC itself evolved to include pharmacology content experts as members from institutions that do not have formal pharmacology departments.
The Knowledge Objectives in Medical Pharmacology: Origins and Purpose
The Knowledge Objectives in Medical Pharmacology, commonly referred to as the Knowledge Objectives, were first introduced in 1985 under the leadership of James Fisher, PhD, and other senior members of AMSP. The initiative was conceived as a consensus-driven effort to define the minimum essential knowledge that all medical students should possess at the time of graduation. A third edition was issued in 2005, under the leadership of Richard Eisenberg, PhD, and Gary Rosenfeld, PhD. The evolution of the Knowledge Objectives parallels the AMSPC’s leadership trajectory, with successive presidents guiding revisions that responded to advances in therapeutics, changes in licensure expectations, and shifts in educational philosophy.
The original purpose of developing the Knowledge Objectives was to identify core pharmacological principles and assist faculty in organizing curricula across diverse institutional settings. However, the significance of the Knowledge Objectives extended beyond curriculum design. They served as a national benchmark for pharmacology education, a tool for curriculum committees, and a mechanism to ensure pharmacology remained visible within evolving curricula. Importantly, the Knowledge Objectives were designed as guides for faculty rather than as student study materials. This distinction allowed them to remain adaptable across different curricular models and institutional contexts. In this sense, the Knowledge Objectives represented a strategic shift, from defending departmental structures to defining educational value.
The influence of the Knowledge Objectives grew as concerns about prescribing competence gained national attention. In 2007, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), through its Medical School Objectives Project (MSOP), emphasized the need for medical graduates to be prepared as safe and effective prescribers. Within this context, the Knowledge Objectives were recognized as an important framework for defining the pharmacological knowledge required for clinical competence. Their alignment with competency-based education further enhanced their relevance.
The Knowledge Objectives have undergone several revisions, reflecting both advances in pharmacology and changes in medical education. The 2012 edition, chaired and edited by Richard Eisenberg, PhD, and Carl Faingold, PhD, marked a significant modification, introducing integration of clinical pharmacology within each section, alignment with licensure expectations, and incorporation of emerging areas such as genomics. Subsequent updates emphasized conciseness, reduction of redundancy, and continued focus on core principles and prototype drugs. These revisions underscored the intent that the Knowledge Objectives remain a living document, responsive to both scientific progress and evolving educational standards.
The Knowledge Objectives in Medical Pharmacology (KOs) are a compilation of pharmacology concepts and content developed to guide faculty members in the education of medical students. The KOs were originally created in the mid-1980s by the Association of Medical School Pharmacology Chairs (AMSPC) to guide the development of core pharmacology content and suggested contact hours for undergraduate medical student education.
Collaboration and the Future of the Knowledge Objectives
A pivotal development occurred in 2022, when AMSPC formally established a collaborative partnership with ASPET’s Division for Pharmacology Education (DPE) to guide future revisions of the Knowledge Objectives. This collaboration represents an important evolution, from a primarily chair-driven initiative to a broader educational enterprise that incorporates active pharmacology educators with expertise in contemporary pedagogy.
To align with contemporary educational standards, the forthcoming 2026 revision adopts Bloom’s taxonomy as an organizing framework, emphasizing progression toward higher-order cognitive processes, including application, analysis, and clinical reasoning. Reflecting this shift, the document’s title is being updated from Knowledge Objectives to Pharmacology Learning Objectives. This change signifies a move from content enumeration toward competency-driven, outcome-based educational design. The revised objectives employ action-oriented, measurable language that supports active learning, critical thinking, and the application of pharmacological principles in clinical contexts. This approach is intended to provide educators with clearer, measurable objectives that facilitate the design of classroom sessions, case-based discussions, and active learning activities consistent with contemporary best practices in medical education.
Enduring Impact
Over nearly four decades, the Knowledge Objectives have served multiple and evolving roles: defining essential pharmacological foundations, guiding faculty in curriculum development, and preserving the visibility and coherence of pharmacology within increasingly integrated curricula. They have been particularly valuable for new faculty members and for educators teaching outside their primary areas of expertise, offering a structured yet adaptable framework for organizing content while maintaining disciplinary rigor.
[The Knowledge Objectives] have been particularly valuable for new faculty members and for educators teaching outside their primary areas of expertise.
The history of AMSP and AMSPC reflects the parallel evolution of pharmacology as both a scientific discipline and an educational enterprise. The development of the Knowledge Objectives marked a pivotal moment when department chairs collectively affirmed their responsibility not only to steward disciplinary identity and departmental success, but also to intentionally shape and advance pharmacology’s essential role in health professions education. Through successive revisions, the Knowledge Objectives have adapted to advances in therapeutics, shifts in licensure expectations, and transformations in pedagogical philosophy.
The forthcoming transition from Knowledge Objectives to Pharmacology Learning Objectives represents the next stage in this evolution. By adopting outcome-based language, higher-order cognitive expectations, and a framework grounded in contemporary educational theory, the revised document is designed to support active learning, clinical reasoning, and meaningful application of pharmacological principles. Importantly, it is now structured to be adaptable across health professions programs, allowing institutions to align the objectives with discipline-specific curricular models while preserving core pharmacological principles.
In an era characterized by rapidly expanding therapeutics, increasingly complex health systems, and heightened emphasis on patient safety, the founding vision remains both relevant and forward-looking, to ensure that learners across the health professions are prepared to apply pharmacological knowledge thoughtfully, safely, and effectively in the service of patient care. The continued stewardship and modernization of the Learning Objectives affirm AMSPC’s enduring commitment to shaping the future of pharmacology education across the healthcare continuum.
As pharmacology education continues to evolve across diverse health professions programs, AMSPC invites educators, department leaders, and clinical pharmacologists to contribute to future revisions of the Learning Objectives. The vitality of this document depends on sustained scholarly engagement and generational stewardship. Colleagues interested in participating in future updates and revisions or providing discipline-specific expertise are encouraged to contact Sandeep Bansal, MBBS, MD, MBA, FAAPE, at Sandeep.Bansal@tcu.edu.
Acknowledgments and Author Contributions
The authors acknowledge their prior leadership roles within the Association of Medical School Pharmacology Chairs (AMSPC), which informed the historical perspectives presented in this manuscript. Specific roles include: Robert Theobald (Secretary, 2004–2006); Gary Rankin (Secretary, 2002–2004; President, 2004–2007); Kent Vrana (President, 2019–2022); Nancy Walworth (President, 2024–2026). The authors also acknowledge David Hein, PhD, who served as a counselor at AMSPC from 2000–2002, for his thoughtful review of the manuscript.
Sandeep Bansal, MBBS, MD, MBA, FAAPE, is a medical educator and pharmacologist with over two decades of global experience in curriculum innovation, learner-centered education, program evaluation, and academic leadership. He has taught upwards of 10,000 medical students worldwide and has served across both new and established medical schools.
Dr. Bansal has been a member of ASPET since 2006 and is also a member of AMSPC. He currently serves on the executive committee of ASPET’s Division for Pharmacology Education and on the Society’s Science Policy Committee. He chairs AMSPC/ASPET’s Pharmacology Learning Objectives project, leading a national effort to revise and align pharmacology learning objectives with contemporary competency-based educational standards. He is also co-founder and co-director of ASPET’s Prime-Educator Certificate Program, a national faculty development initiative dedicated to advancing excellence in pharmacology education.
Dr. Bansal has led and supported major curricular innovations at multiple medical schools, including the transition from a discipline-based curriculum to a spirally integrated, organ systems–based model, the design and implementation of a fully flipped pharmacology curriculum within a compressed pre-clerkship program, and contributions to an engineering-based medical curriculum as founding faculty and course director. His scholarly work focuses on active learning, learning approaches, motivation, and academic performance. He is a co-author of Learning Pharmacology through Clinical Cases. His career reflects a sustained commitment to educational innovation, mentorship, and the preparation of future physicians and educators.
An Interview with Nancy Walworth, PhD, President of AMSPC
The Pharmacologist: One of the central themes The Pharmacologist has come across, in our recent interviews, is the current challenges facing scientists—losses of funding in academic institutions, elimination of federal positions, and more. How have these challenges affected AMSPC’s membership, and what are some of the ways members have dealt with them?
Dr. Walworth: If anything, these challenges have brought the AMSPC community together.
When we returned from our annual meeting in January of 2025, which overlapped with the rapid issuance of executive orders that altered the research landscape overnight, we began meeting on a weekly basis via Zoom to keep each other informed about the changing environment. Meeting regularly was quite beneficial and sometimes therapeutic. It was great to have the support of other chairs who were facing similar situations: faculty with cancelled grants, students with cancelled visas, suspension of study sections. As each chair was embedded in a different institution spanning states across the country, we heard a variety of concerns, with views from their state’s political leadership. And we all operate in different financial ecosystems, so the impacts on budgets, for example, were quite variable. We benefitted from learning about innovative approaches to counter the challenges that we could percolate up to the leadership at our own institutions. The information sharing has been helpful.
And of course, we encouraged each other to support initiatives driven by scientific societies, including ASPET, to make our voices heard through action alerts, sending or signing on to letters, or contributing to funds to support scientists in need. At our 2026 AMSPC annual meeting in early February, we welcomed Carter Alleman, Director of Government Affairs and Science Policy for ASPET, who conducted an advocacy workshop that was very well attended.
All our members recognize that we are living in a precarious time for scientists. I think the biggest concern is for our early career scientists: junior faculty who have recently started their labs at a time when changes at NIH are jeopardizing their success, or postdocs on the job market when institutions are concerned about future funding. One of the initiatives AMSPC undertook in partnership with ASPET is the Future Leaders in Pharmacology webinar series to give early career scientists some exposure when times seem tough.
The Pharmacologist: As noted in Dr. Bansal’s accompanying history of AMSPC, there is an occasional institutional push to merge or dissolve pharmacology departments. Can you discuss the motivation, or some of the factors, behind that reasoning? What’s the best way for departments to maintain their independence?
Dr. Walworth: As I’ve learned at the institution where I work, change is a constant. The impetus for change may come from a leadership transition, political winds, or shifting financial resources, but successful institutions will work through change, hopefully in thoughtful ways. I am most familiar with the medical school environment. Medical school departments were established to teach discipline-specific content to medical students. When I joined the pharmacology department as an assistant professor, we taught a full semester course in pharmacology, with a couple of lectures per day and multiple small groups throughout the semester. I enjoyed getting to know my group of medical students each year and learned as much pharmacology as I could in the process.
The way we teach has changed a lot in thirty years. Now we assume that medical students come in with a deep foundational understanding of basic science, so the pre-clerkship curriculum has become quite compressed. In addition, our curriculum is systems-based and interdisciplinary. As a result, medical student teaching is no longer directly tied by discipline to departments. Thus, a department’s organizational structure is more important for unifying its research focus.
The way we teach has changed a lot in thirty years.
Pharmacology remains an important discipline: medical students should certainly be taught how drugs work, or at least how we understand them to work, and what types of adverse effects they can cause. Advocating for space in the medical curriculum for pharmacology is a constant need and a challenge. Of course, pharmacology is of broad relevance to the scientific community and the pharmaceutical industry. And the laboratories in our departments serve as a training environment for undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral trainees to develop their scientific skills and to consider how to address important scientific questions through the lens of pharmacology. Scientists are always trying to understand how things work. Throwing a perturbant at a system is a good way to figure that out. And that, in a simple sense, is the nature of pharmacology.
The Pharmacologist: What led to your own interest in pharmacology?
Dr. Walworth: I trained as a cell biologist. As an undergraduate student learning about the LDL receptor pathway, I became interested in how proteins move about within cells. For graduate school, I looked for programs with scientists studying membrane trafficking and landed at Yale in the Cell Biology department. Yale had recently recruited two scientists applying the principles of genetics to study how proteins destined for secretion are moved through cells, Peter Novick and Susan Ferro-Novick. I think everyone in my class, including me, did a rotation with either Susan or Peter. As an aside, their PhD advisor, Randy Schekman, later won a Nobel Prize.
I ended up in Peter’s lab for my PhD thesis. It was an exciting time, as he had just identified that a small ras-like GTPase played an essential role in protein secretion, which led to the identification of the “rab” proteins that do the same in mammalian cells. In Peter’s lab, I learned to appreciate the utility of yeast genetics as a method to identify proteins that are important for particular functions, and the value of being able to make mutations in their genes to assess the roles of specific domains and residues. When it was time to apply for post-docs, there was a lot of excitement in the cell cycle field because scientists working in several different experimental systems, from Xenopus ooyctes to clam embryos to mammalian cells and yeast, realized that they were all working on the same proteins. In other words, there was a universally conserved regulatory complex that controls cell cycle progression—a cyclin-dependent kinase.
I joined David Beach’s lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island to work on mechanisms of cell cycle control in the yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe (fission yeast). Doing a genetic screen, I cloned a gene that I called “chk1” (pronounced check one) that turned out to be critical for delaying the cell cycle when cells are exposed to agents that damage their DNA. I spent a year at the Netherlands Cancer Institute working with a very generous scientist named René Bernards during which time I found that the Chk1 protein was phosphorylated in response to DNA damaging agents, a modification that is dependent on other components of a genetically defined checkpoint pathway.
From Amsterdam, I looked for a faculty job in the United States and was hired into a medical school pharmacology department that was led by cancer pharmacologist Leroy Liu. Over the course of his career, Leroy had discovered the mechanism by which a major class of cancer drugs, topoisomerase inhibitors, cause DNA damage, and he thought it made sense to hire someone who was studying how cells respond to that damage. As a faculty member in a pharmacology department, I was responsible for teaching the discipline to medical students. Fortunately (for the students), we were “eased” into teaching, a few subjects at a time. I loved learning pharmacology, and figuring out ways to explain to students the basis by which the drugs they would likely be prescribing are thought to work.
In my own lab, and in the teaching that I later did for graduate students, I came to appreciate how closely genetics and pharmacology are related. A genetic approach allows one to use mutations to disrupt cellular pathways; a pharmacological approach makes use of small molecules to disrupt cellular pathways. And of course, genetics influences how cells and physiological systems respond to perturbation by drugs, hormones or other ligands.
I came to appreciate how closely genetics and pharmacology are related.
The Pharmacologist: Can you discuss a particular mentor or educator who influenced you, either as a student or an early career scientist?
Dr. Walworth: There are many. My PhD mentor had a big impact on me as did the educator who taught me about the LDL receptor pathway in a cell biology class in the 1980s (Monty Krieger). Peter, my PhD mentor, is a very serious scientist, but he also taught his lab members not to take ourselves too seriously. Ira Mellman, who was a member of my PhD thesis committee at Yale and later went on to work at Genentech, and Mike Snyder, who was my qualifying exam mentor and went on to Stanford, both gave me a lot of confidence that I needed much later in my career. Along with Peter, they were both incredibly supportive when I was a graduate student.
In an academic career, there are a lot of hits to absorb: rejected papers, rejected grants, negative comments from peers or supervisors that undermine your confidence, attribution given to others for work that you do. Every now and then I look back on something that Peter or Ira or Mike said that reminds me that I am a well-trained scientist who has contributed to the field. It’s easy to forget that sometimes.
The Pharmacologist: Can you discuss or describe a career highlight?
Dr. Walworth: Getting my first NIH grant was really exciting. I mentioned earlier that I spent a year in Amsterdam at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. The work that I did in that period was important because it laid the foundation not just for my job talk, but also for my first NIH grant. So, when I arrived at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in 1994 as an assistant professor, the first thing I did was write a grant based on that work. I was fortunate to have excellent colleagues willing to read the application and give me good feedback, and the grant was funded on the first submission. Soon thereafter, I learned from my good friend Steve Elledge, who was at Baylor and later moved to Harvard, that he had cloned the human gene for Chk1, which of course meant that one of my aims was now irrelevant (!), but that was ok.
As an educator, a big highlight has been the opportunity to train both graduate and undergraduate students. Helping students develop as scientists is very rewarding. In addition to training students in my own lab, I also had the privilege of co-directing the Rutgers Graduate Programs in Molecular Biosciences for more than a decade. With my colleagues, we redid the curriculum to better prepare students for the type of interdisciplinary work that has become so important in science. Having the opportunity to interact with dozens of graduate students and help them navigate their time in graduate school, which can be very challenging, has been quite gratifying.
As an educator, a big highlight has been the opportunity to train both graduate and undergraduate students.
The Pharmacologist: As someone who has worked both in faculty and as a department chair, what was a significant challenge with that transition?
Dr. Walworth: I became a department chair when my chair took a sabbatical, and when he returned, he decided he was ready to give up being the chair.
So, taking on the role of department chair was not something I had planned to do.
At that time, there were a lot of transitions happening at my institution: our basic science departments had been reorganized, reducing the number from five to three, and soon thereafter, a major reorganization of the university occurred. My job as chair was to help other faculty, staff and students in the department work through significant change and be comfortable with it. The most significant challenge for me personally was to become comfortable with the broader responsibility that I had assumed. I was very fortunate to have support from more experienced chairs who provided good counsel. In fact, one of them strongly encouraged me to attend meetings of the chair’s association for my discipline, which for me is the AMSPC and she was right, of course! Sharing experiences with others who are facing similar challenges is extremely beneficial.
The Pharmacologist: Speaking of the AMSPC annual meeting, this was addressed at the most recent one (“Leveraging AI to Accelerate Departmental Success”) but, for readers who couldn’t attend, what are some of the most interesting or innovative ways that AMSPC members have utilized AI at their institutions?
Dr. Walworth: That session was really interesting. Some folks are using AI quite a bit, while others are more reluctant or cautious. A couple of interesting applications include using an AI tool to evaluate whether a grant application is appropriate for a particular study section or grant mechanism; or to prompt the AI tool to provide a review of your own grant proposal focusing on logic, clarity, or justification. Some chairs noted that they ask their trainees or junior faculty to put a draft of their writing through an AI tool before they will look at it—this is basically to avoid the chair having to do a first-round of editing, which saves a lot of time. Discussants were careful to delineate when it is appropriate to use an AI tool and when it isn’t. For example, asking an AI tool to provide a brief summary of a proposal for a departmental letter of support that will accompany the application is a relatively low stakes undertaking. When the stakes are high, for example a letter for promotion or reference for a job application, it is necessary to do the writing yourself. Some used AI to generate minutes of faculty meetings, though noted that editing was required. Another interesting use was for website redesign, including, for example, creating cartoon summaries of faculty research programs.
When the stakes are high, for example a letter for promotion or reference for a job application, it is necessary to do the writing yourself.
The Pharmacologist: How do institutions best prepare today’s pharmacology students to work in the industry?
Dr. Walworth: I think the best way to prepare students to work in industry is to teach them to be great scientists—well-informed, trained to think critically, able to converse with scientists in different disciplines who have a range of expertise. Today’s students need to be equipped with communication skills as well as experimental skills. They need to write effectively (and know when it’s ok to have an AI assistant edit their writing!) and give clear oral presentations.
The Pharmacologist: Conversely, is there something that institutions could do to better prepare students for a career in industry?
Dr. Walworth: I think Rutgers is doing some amazing things in this regard, so I’ll mention a couple of the important programs we have in place.
A number of years ago, the NIH recognized that academic institutions were training bench scientists to be bench scientists at academic institutions. All well and good, but most students don’t go into academia, the majority do something else. NIH launched a funding opportunity for BEST grants (BEST: Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training). Rutgers was fortunate to receive one of these and developed a program called iJOBS: interdisciplinary job opportunities for biomedical scientists, which is now supported institutionally. It is a multi-faceted program, but the key is to provide students with exposure to the range of opportunities they can pursue with a research-driven PhD, whether as a scientist in industry, a writer, a tech transfer specialist or a policy maker. The program hosts workshops and site visits and provides mentorship from professionals in a variety of industries. The iJOBS program has good evidence that the students benefit from the experience. While there were faculty who initially were concerned that these exposure activities might distract students from their research work in the lab, it turns out that students who take advantage of iJOBS are more productive and efficient. While replicating iJOBS at other institutions may not be feasible, finding ways to expose students to the range of opportunities they can pursue as a scientist, including industry research, would be to their benefit.
The Pharmacologist: What advice would you give to a student who has an interest in pursuing pharmacology?
Dr. Walworth: For a student interested in any discipline, the advice that I think will serve them best is to pursue a scientific question that is deeply interesting to you.
When experiments don’t work, or you must change the direction of your project, you have to care about what it is you are studying. Let your intellectual curiosity drive you. Ask yourself why you are interested in a particular area of science. If you can’t wait to see the results of an experiment, you’ve made a good choice, and if the results lead you to think in new ways, you’re on to something.
