Scientists with ADHD speak up: when fire meets focus

For volcanologist Lis Gallant, her first clue that she might have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) came during a conversation with a professor during her graduate studies. He noticed that her oral presentations were very detailed, but that her written work was, as she puts it, “ugh”. So, he asked her about her writing process. Gallant, now at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo, told him: “I sit down for five minutes and hammer some stuff out and then wander away.” To which he replied, “That’s not right,” she recalls, laughing.

How to be a brilliant ally to your neurodivergent lab mate

ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition affecting the frontal lobe of the brain. People with ADHD are usually worse at focusing on mundane tasks, and better at focusing on things they find interesting, than are neurotypical people. In a research career, the condition can be both a boon and a burden. ADHD can distract a scientist from their to-do list, but also enable them to focus intensely on what they love. In recent years, there’s been a growing awareness of ADHD, especially about how it can present differently, depending on whether someone is raised as a girl or a boy.

The ways in which ADHD manifests are almost as varied as the people who have it. So, too, are the tools they find most effective to deal with it. “Every neurodivergent person is different, which means that you need to figure out what works for you,” says Richard Littauer, a computer scientist at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand who has ADHD and autism.

Six researchers with ADHD spoke to Nature about their experiences and how they set up strategies for success. Many of these can help any researcher who feels overwhelmed by time-management challenges.

An extra weight

Many challenges come with having ADHD. Coping with them can feel like “this extra weight of management”, says Lynn Kamerlin, an evolutionary biochemist at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta who has ADHD, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Many people with ADHD benefit from stimulants such as a combination of amphetamine and dextroamphetamine, sold under the brand name Adderall, or from other medications. “As soon as I got on the right medication, I was like, ‘This is how a ‘normal’ brain works? Not screaming at itself?’” Gallant says. Katherine Morton, a postdoctoral researcher in toxicology at the University of Rochester in New York, says that her anxiety also improved greatly once she was on medication. But each person is unique: medication doesn’t work for Littauer, and Kamerlin has a rare medication allergy that rules out most stimulants for her.

With or without medication, a key challenge is task management. People with ADHD are best at paying attention to things that are urgent or deeply interesting to them, and can easily forget about everything else or get overwhelmed by deciding what to prioritize. Kamerlin is half-Persian and half-Swedish, or, as she says, from “one culture that’s chronically late and one that’s chronically early”, respectively. One early clue that she had ADHD was how much she struggled with being on time.

“My to-do list, it’s still a really big trigger for me,” says Kamerlin. If it gets too long, it becomes overstimulating, and she spends “almost as much time panicking as actually getting stuff done”. The panic and overstimulation can feed procrastination. Gallant put off writing her master’s thesis and then wrote the first draft in five days — not a strategy she recommends.

Gallant now has several strategies for managing to-do lists. Having ‘accountability buddies’ helps. Every day, she checks in with friends from her graduate course, some of whom are also neurodivergent, to discuss situations and goals that they are stuck on and to break them down into smaller tasks. Similarly, to get her writing done as a graduate student, Morton joined a writing group started by a friend who also has ADHD. Having neurodivergent accountability buddies helped, because they had as much incentive to keep the group going as she did, she says. The group met at coffee shops and used the Pomodoro method: 20-minute bouts of work, followed by 5-minute talking breaks.

Gallant also sticks to pen-and-paper to-do lists instead of using digital versions. Even if she never looks at the paper to-do list again, she says, the act of writing it down helps her to remember, something that is borne out in research (F. R. Van der Weel and A. L. H. Van der Meer Front. Psychol. 14, 1219945; 2024).

Many people with ADHD, including Gallant, do well with deadlines. But now that she is mid-career, “I can tell that a lot of deadlines are fake — I’ve seen through the veil,” she says. “I can’t lie to myself and tell myself that this deadline that’s soft is hard.” Having collaborators with diverse skill sets and work structures — for example, some are without teaching obligations and have more time for big-picture thinking — helps, “because I am not the only person driving a project forward”.

Christin Monroe is a chemistry educator at Landmark College in Putney, Vermont, an institute that is designed specifically for neurodivergent undergraduate students. Monroe finds that people with ADHD, herself included, must be “more deliberate about planning time”. She has sometimes felt that the extra planning doesn’t ‘count’ as hours of work, because neurotypical peers don’t necessarily need to do it, but she thinks it’s important for people with ADHD to treat the time they spend planning as a legitimate part of their jobs.

Energy and empathy

Despite these time-management hurdles, ADHD brings many strengths that are well-suited to research: an abundance of energy, ideas and an ability to juggle a lot. “I’m very fast when I’m focused,” says Kamerlin. “I think very fast, I talk very fast.” Littauer has been in his PhD programme for nine months and has already published one white paper and has eight scientific papers in review. Monroe says she is really good at starting projects but not so great at completing them, so she finds that her best collaborators are people who are good at finishing and polishing projects and papers.

How I’m learning to navigate academia as someone with ADHD

Morton’s ADHD gives her a fine attention to detail, and to patterns in experiments that others miss. For example, when she worked in a mosquito laboratory, one experiment involved deleting a large chunk of DNA that affected the strength of the insects’ flight muscles. Everyone thought the experiment had failed because the mosquitoes, which were kept thousands to a cage, looked normal. Only Morton noticed a handful of mosquitoes at the bottom of a cage that were hopping instead of flying. Their flight muscles were weaker, and the experiment had worked.

Gallant says her ADHD makes her “really well suited to doing work in hazardous conditions”, which, for a volcanologist, is invaluable in field situations. It helps her to keep her team safe, for example, when they land in an active eruption site, with lava flowing towards them, and they have ten minutes to collect data. Her brain can switch rapidly between assessing how quickly the lava is moving, assembling instruments, collecting data and monitoring her team members.

Several studies have found that people with ADHD are more sensitive to injustice than are neurotypical people (R. Bondü and G. Esser Eur. Child Adolesc. Psychiatry 24, 185–198; 2015), and Gallant has noticed this in herself as a strong commitment to justice, equity and diversity work. “My brain functions kind of like a spiderweb: I can see all the connections,” she says. “One small thing here will make me angry about the whole system. That’s really great in terms of thinking about solving problems.” And it’s “really infuriating” to see so many connected problems that others gloss over.

Gallant says that her ADHD also improves her mentoring and teaching of students. “It has made me a more empathetic professor, because I remember struggling with things.”

Deliberate structure

The scientists who spoke to Nature find various ways to structure their work lives around their neurodivergence. “It’s a big time investment to understand who you are, but you reap the benefits many times over,” Kamerlin says.

Monroe’s school algebra teacher introduced her to a trick that she uses to this day. The teacher noticed that she would rush through her tests and fail them, although she’d solve algebra problems for fun in her own time. “Why don’t you just take it twice?” she recalls her teacher suggesting. “That’s been a style I’ve adapted for a lot of things. I need to get that ‘shitty first draft’ done to feel like I can relax.”