Junior faculty mentoring at UCSF

Keith Yamamoto
Executive Vice Dean, University of California San Francisco
San Francisco, California

We all benefit greatly from mentors at every period in our training and careers. This is especially true in academic science, where so many processes, decisions and responsibilities that strongly influence our trajectory to success or failure are not only under-emphasized in our education, they seem in fact to be actively ignored. Critical tasks such as strategic planning of the research program, grant writing, financial management of research funds, training of technical staff, mentoring of graduate students and postdocs (including occasionally adjudicating conflicts between them), preparation and publication of research manuscripts, course planning and didactic instruction, academic committee work and politics may appear all to be calling for simultaneous attention. This can make the transition from postdoc to faculty extremely challenging.    
   
At UCSF, active mentoring of all junior faculty is viewed as a crucial activity. It is undertaken in somewhat different ways in different departments and research units. I summarize below a program that was developed in the mid-1990s, when I became chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology; I put particular emphasis here on one component of that program, a novel procedure for grant planning and preparation, but all of the mentoring activities are important. Closely related versions of this plan have been adopted by other units at UCSF and elsewhere.    
   
Mentoring teams: The junior faculty member selects from amongst the UCSF senior faculty three individuals to serve as a mentoring team; one of them is designated as the primary mentor. Although not all team members must be from the junior faculty member’s home department, the primary mentor should be. Team members need not have extensive research expertise in the junior faculty member’s area of research, but one or more have should have a good working knowledge of the field. At least one, and preferably all, should have extensive experience as a study section member or chair in the NIH peer review system.    
   
Grant planning and preparation :  The keys to this procedure are the conversations with the committee prior to writing, and beginning the writing with the Specific Aims page:

1. Before writing anything, the junior faculty member begins with a 90-min conversation with the mentoring committee, discussing potential questions, objectives, aims and long term goals of a grant application. It is important to meet collectively with the committee, and not separate one-on-one meetings, to optimize interactive discussion and group-wide refinement of ideas.
   
2. With that conversation in mind, the junior faculty member then writes a one sentence Objectives statement, and 3-5 Specific Aims. These should total not more than one typed page.

3. The junior faculty member meets again for 90 min with the committee to discuss the Aims; by meeting collectively, the differing opinions among the committee members can be clarified or resolved, and the Aims strengthened and refined.

4. This nine person-hours of senior faculty “feed forward” discussion provides a strong foundation for the preparation of the full proposal. The optimal order for writing the different sections of an NIH R01 grant should be Specific Aims, Summary, Preliminary Results/Research Design and Methods, Background and Significance. The proposal should address explicitly the five NIH Criteria for Rating Grant Applications: Significance/Impact, Approach, Innovation, Investigator and Environment.

5. If time permits, the completed proposal should be read and commented upon by the committee, but this final review is less essential than the two initial conversations.

Other responsibilities and benefits. The mentoring team works with the junior faculty member until promotion to tenure. This can be through regularly scheduled meetings, or ad hoc one-on-one meetings with the primary mentor or other members to discuss any issue of concern to the junior faculty member.    
   
One essential topic for discussion is the promotion and tenure process itself; the committee should provide information that helps to make the process transparent and nonthreatening. An important collateral benefit of the program is that the mentoring team members become strongly invested in the success of their mentees. They know not only the research ongoing in the mentee’s lab, but the overall basis for the research program. They may have made suggestions that affected the mentee’s planning for a course, or a decision about how to frame a manuscript for publication. Thus, the mentoring team members are exceptionally well informed about the research and overall career track of their mentees, and are able to provide deep perspective and insight.    
   
At UCSF, every faculty appointment is made with the full expectation that the new colleague will achieve success and distinction, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, this is the outcome; one element behind that outcome is the active mentoring program. Notably, all of the key features of this program seem readily adaptable for researchers in India. Even without adoption of a formal program, junior faculty could take the initiative to seek advice on grants or other issues of interest or concern; such guidance might prove to be especially    
   
Whelpful for grant applications in the international arena, such as the Human Frontiers Program. Individual senior faculty could make themselves available to build strong ties to young colleagues, providing crucial advice and support. Experiments in India with features of this mentoring program could build an enduring network of interaction that strengthens the whole enterprise.

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