About

I’m David Stuckler. I’ve been a professor at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge. I’ve published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers, including in Nature, The Lancet, and the British Medical Journal, and I’m the author of The Body Economic, translated into more than ten languages. Research.com ranks me the number one social sciences researcher in Italy and among the top 100 in the world. Clarivate has repeatedly named me among the world’s top 1% most-cited researchers (Web of Science), and Foreign Policy named me one of its top 100 global thinkers. (see full profile on Google Scholar here)

I mention this not to impress you, but so you know the advice on this site comes from two decades spent inside the system it describes: publishing, reviewing, and supervising at every level, from a first proposal to high-impact journals.

But the most important thing I’ve learned is not how to do research. It’s why so many capable researchers struggle with it.

The problem I kept seeing

Across institutions and disciplines, the same pattern kept repeating.

Researchers were not failing because they lacked intelligence, motivation, or technical skill. They were failing because the core logic of research was never made explicit.

They were expected to:

identify meaningful questions
structure arguments
design viable methods
write clearly for reviewers

…without ever being taught how these pieces fit together.

Supervisors gave feedback late. Courses focused on methods in isolation. Writing was treated as a stylistic issue rather than a structural one. Judgment was assumed, not trained.

As a result, many researchers worked hard while feeling:

unsure whether they were making real progress
overwhelmed by reading and rewriting
anxious about choosing the “wrong” topic
frustrated by reviewer comments that felt arbitrary

I saw this not only in students, but in experienced researchers as well.

My own training didn’t solve this either

Even during my own graduate training, I often felt uncertain whether I was moving in the right direction or simply staying busy.

What eventually made the difference was not working longer hours or reading more papers, but learning to see research as a structured process, one with identifiable decision points, failure modes, and patterns.

Once those patterns became visible, progress became much more predictable.

Why FastTrack exists

FastTrack was created to make the implicit logic of research explicit.

Not as yet another content-heavy course, and not as motivational coaching but as a structured system for helping researchers move from confusion to clarity, and from stalled projects to publishable work.

At its core, FastTrack focuses on:

how to identify real research gaps
how to structure arguments reviewers can follow
how to design viable projects early
how to write clearly at the paragraph and section level
how to make progress under uncertainty

Most importantly, it focuses on judgment, knowing what matters now, what can wait, and what is noise.

How this site fits into that work

This site is not a course catalogue.

It’s a reference space.

The Guides section collects the most common conceptual errors and decision points researchers face, based on live workshops, real submissions, and years of supervision and review.

These pages are meant to:

clarify how research actually works
correct common misunderstandings
provide mental models you can reuse
help you orient yourself before going deeper

They are intentionally not step-by-step manuals. Execution lives elsewhere.

If you’re new here

A good place to start is the Guides section, where you’ll find explanations of:

what literature reviews are actually for
why papers get rejected despite good ideas
how writing structure affects reviewer interpretation
how mindset and decision-making shape progress

If that way of thinking resonates, you’ll likely find the rest of the work useful.

FastTrack exists because I don’t believe researchers should have to “figure it out alone.”

Clear thinking can be taught.
Good judgment can be trained.
And research progress does not need to feel mysterious.