Transitioning to Mentoring Roles
This is a corollary to a post I wrote about choosing mentoring teams…instead, its about how I’m learning to think about what role I could and want to play as a mentor for the next year or two.
In a soft-money environment like UCSF, it’s prudent to think about how one’s own mentoring time is funded. The most common way is by using one’s own research time and resources - in other words, salary support provided by a research grant like an NIH R01 (typically a 5-year, $500k/year award) to mentor another person (such as a medical student or fellow) to conduct research that achieves the goal of the R01. It may take more time…and different types of effort…than doing that work oneself, but has its own reward.
For mid-career faculty, there are specific sources of funding to provide salary support for mentoring. Examples include the UCSF Mid-Career Development Award for Research Faculty or the NIH K24. Faculty with these sorts of funding are able to support mentees with a wider range of interests. Funding for research fellowship directors varies widely. From what I’ve seen so far, in the Bay Area, fellowships supported by training grants like T32s do not provide enough support for fellow salaries, nevermind fellowship director salaries. Efforts to supplement training funding appropriately target fellows first, and some research fellowships therefore are run entirely by directors volunteering their time.
How is this playing out for me so far? I love mentoring. And I’m realizing I need to think seriously about how to support my time so that I don’t resent unfunded mentoring time (which again, I’m either stealing that time from my own research or from my family/sleep/exercise time).
There’s four different flavors of mentoring/advising roles I’m currently playing:
Supporting medical students and other graduate students who want to do a research project/paper over a few months or a year.
Serving as career mentor and sounding board for fellows in the two fellowship programs for which I hold leadership roles
Providing methods consults in the context of another leadership role;
Serving as a longitudinal research mentor or advisor for early-career faculty, either hypothetically as I help support the writing of a career development grant application, or in practice after the award is funded and the work is starting.
With regards to serving in as a methods expert or mentor on grants, from the generous examples of my own mentoring & advising team, I've been taught to help promising investigators working in aligned areas get funded however they need...and then to re-negotiate relationships based on mutual need/availability after that.
Unfortunately, I’m not eligible for a K24 (as I'm not a clinician), and this is the most common path taken by my colleagues who are clinician-investigators. The obvious alternative for me is a NIA K07 that senior PhD-trained investigators can obtain to “implement a program to advance a field of aging research” – and I have at least 2 examples of this pathway among colleagues. But it requires having a vision and motivation to program-build, and I’m not quite there yet.
In writing this post - which is effectively me recording what I’ve learned about options and starting to think about sustainability & boundaries going forward - I’ve discovered some options for me to continue to grow as an investigator. Unfortunately, options that seem relevant to me - the K05 and K26 - do not currently have funding opportunities. More unfortunately, neither of these support mentoring explicitly. Here are some other options I’ll be investigating in the future.
There’s a K02 that provides “three to five years of salary support and "protected time" for newly independent scientists who can demonstrate the need for a period of intensive research focus as a means of enhancing their research careers”.
There’s a K18 for “experienced scientists to augment or redirect their research programs through the acquisition of new research skills”. One example is PAR-20-211, which “support[s] career development experiences and a small-scale research project that will provide experienced investigators with the scientific competencies required to conduct independent research projects that more thoroughly investigate interrelationships among behavioral, biological, endocrine, epigenetic, immune, inflammatory, neurological, psychological, and/or social processes”. Another example is PA-22-051, which supports “established mid-career and senior investigators who are interested in developing new skills in comparative effectiveness research methodology and applying these methods to patient-centered outcome research (PCOR).”
So where does that leave me? Well, this thinking is now recorded, and I’lll shift it to the back burner to simmer while I focus on writing grants this fall, especially an R01. I’ll revisit it in January or February when I am preparing for annual reviews with my various bosses, to ask how they think about these things, and whether they’d be opening to talk about alternative funding strategies. I’ll keep reaching out to colleagues to ask how they creatively fund their mentoring time. And I’ll keep building this kind of scaffolding for my mentoring based on common questions I encounter.