 I'm Dr. David Gathara. I'm an epidemiologist by training, but with the undergraduate training in nursing. My experience in research and interest in research started in my undergraduate level, where the university went to really expose students to research at a very early stage, away from the first year. At that point, I picked up my interest in research and had the interest to do this more as a career. I was lucky enough after graduation and did some bit of practicing for licensing and ended up with a job in research. After that, I moved on to pursue the career mainly academically, but also in practice. My career work has panned a lot of disciplines, started doing quality of care assessment work, moved on to clinical trials, used a bit of advanced statistical methods to analyze routine data for better decision making. But my current work now focuses on human resources for health with a bias to nursing. My main interest in this area has been resorted from when there is a nursing workforce crisis, there isn't enough hands on the ground. From my previous work, some of the findings that came out of that work was poor quality of care, but a lot of it focused on the clinical aspects of care. I was also trying to assess, do clinicians actually do the right assessment, do they make the right investigations, do they give the right treatments and do these adhered guidelines. But a more important question that kept lingering at the back of my head was that, where all these things were being done the right way, where the interventions actually get into the patients. That was an important question for me. More important is that all these interventions, whoever be it medical, nutritional, whichever intervention that you think about that gets to a patient in any patient setting, most of them are delivered by nurses. And therefore the nursing workforce is very important in evaluating what care the patients ends up getting. So the current work that I'm trying to develop is what is the role of nurses in the delivery of quality care and how might we get funders by generating this evidence. Because this area of work has been really not a key area that funders have picked up upon. A lot of the funded research is on clinical work, but we hope that by getting funders interested in generating this evidence they will appreciate the importance of this workforce and this area of research, a field of research. What I would tell young people who are interested to join the field is research is really interesting. It can be rewarding. It's rewarding, especially when you come up with findings that you actually end up discovering that you are influencing policy, you are influencing practice, which is very important. And getting people to recognize your work at a global level and when you come up with ideas that funders can believe in and see that you actually have an important question and an important problem that you can bring a solution to. I think we need more of that in our setting because there are a lot of questions that need answers and there is only a limited number of us. So, yeah, this should feel welcome to the field. If you want some bit of patience, well, you need both the academic and research experience to go up the ladder.