@00797bc6 wrote:

"The problem is bigger - junior people who work in different areas at the same time are viewed with suspicion, or worse, by hiring committees."

Yes.  There's a limit to how much one can pretend to be something one is not, but I try to tell my grad students that they should pick one thing to be the world's expert on, and let other things take a background role.  Joe is the world's expert on the monoidal Grothendieck construction.  That work has been used in at least two software projects involving multiple people: one when he was a grad student, and another now: I'm using that math to help design software for modeling infectious disease.   But there are also lots of other papers citing Joe's work on this!  If he explains those in his research statement, he'll look like what he truly is: the world's expert on some pure math that has lots of different applications.

@47933d1d -