This on hold question is actually pretty interesting and I think a good candidate for reopening. I suggested an edit to clarify/add background/references, let me know if y'all think it looks good
Also figured I'd introduce myself--my name is Luigi and I'm a postbac fellow at the NIH. I'm a big fan of the Biology.SE community you guys have built here and I'd love to be more involved. I've been trying to answer some older unanswered Qs to help the site get ready for graduation but if there's anything else I can do that'd be helpful definitely let me know.
I'm interested in infectious disease pathogenesis and pathogen-host interaction. Right now I'm working on HIV and SIV but my interests aren't necessarily limited to retroviruses
I agree with Chris, that kind of promotes results-driven research
I feel like it should be your PhD committee's job to determine whether or not you did good work, rather than a kind of arbitrary two-first-author-paper minimum
But I guess it doesn't matter how fair it is because that's your requirement
There's some neural network modeling research in computer science that's very interesting
The human brain is a pretty hard problem though
@WYSIWYG do you work from a mathematical or a more applied programming perspective?
And 10-12 papers in 4 years sounds like an outlier, I feel like it would be pretty difficult to be invested in that many uniquely publishable units especially when most PhDs seem so focused on their own projects