As a mentor, my mission is to demystify the process of achieving scientific brilliance. This stems from my experience as a trainee when I thought that scientific brilliance is something you either have or not. For the longest time, it was a mystery to me how excellent science comes about. It was not until late into my training as a postdoc that I realized that brilliance is not something that you have. Rather, it is something that you learn.
Brilliance is learned: Empowering mentees to aim for scientific excellence
As a foundation for cultivating scientific brilliance, I strive to create an environment that is safe for all team members. Safe means that all feel supported in both seeking and giving feedback as part of the creative process. Valuing the contributions of each team member ensures that each person feels they belong on the team and is comfortable speaking their ideas regardless of their identity, experience, role and rank. Safe also means valuing candid but kind communication. While candid communication is not always cozy and comfortable, kindness in the delivery assuages fear of judgment, rejection, or retaliation. This creates cohesion and trust because the feedback is authentic, timely, and supportive.
As I am writing this, creating a safe space sounds so basic that we shouldn’t even have to spell it out. Yet, building an inclusive culture of safety and belonging doesn’t simply come into existence because we hold a particular set of values. It is something that requires deliberate effort to put our values into action. Because an environment of safety is integral to my mentoring philosophy, I took the initiative to acquire leadership and mentoring skills that I was not taught in my academic training. Part of maintaining this safe environment also includes me showing up authentically and letting my mentees see that I too am subject to pressures, fears, and insecurities, and moreover, that when I make mistakes, I own them and actively work to course-correct. As mentees join the team, we engage this environment to co-create in three dimensions, People, Projects, and Productivity (P^3), to help them learn how to reach their brilliance.
P1. People: Personalizing the path to scientific brilliance
How I work with a mentee depends on their palette of capabilities and skills, behavioral patterns, values, beliefs, identity, and goals or mission. Each of these potentially can be tapped to help mentees achieve scientific excellence and their personal best. One of my earliest realizations as a mentor was that some mentees had excellent skills or were able to build them rapidly, yet they didn’t yet see themselves as capable, confident, and independent scientists. Helping mentees cultivate confidence in their scientific identity is especially important for women and underrepresented minorities who disproportionally face this challenge, as I learned with one of the first undergraduate students to join my lab. She and I worked mostly on her confidence, self-esteem, and beliefs around her capabilities because her lab skills were fantastic. In time, she began to see herself as someone both capable and excellent at doing research. This ignited her passion and led her to align her career aspirations more closely with her interests. Initially on a pre-med track, she joined a Neuroscience PhD program and defended her PhD thesis last year.
The step from postdoc to tenure track faculty is also another transition where mentees may struggle. One of my mentees at this career stage joined the team as an exceptionally well trained, scientifically passionate, and driven. Yet, they too carried insecurities that prevented them from stepping into their full potential. By offering her opportunities and resources to test drive their brilliance, they developed an independent line of research as the basis of a K99 proposal. Although not funded, this experience resulted in immense growth as a scientist. To summarize their transformation in one sentence: They found her voice as an independent, mature future faculty member.
Another postdoc in my lab had very different mentoring needs. Their scientific process was largely driven by the question of what is technically possible. We worked together on leveraging their interest in technology development and expertise to orient their brilliance toward important scientific and clinical challenges. They found their perfect fit in a Department of Biomedical Engineering.
P2. Projects: Navigating Scientific Discovery
I love that the flexible nature of Neuroscience research provides the right vehicle for growth to mentees, no matter where they are at. When mentees start in the lab, we discuss their scientific interests, career goals and ambition, skill level, and risk tolerance so I can help them choose projects with the appropriate amount of challenge to achieve their goals. I am cognizant of the reality that although every mentee has value to contribute to the scientific process, not everyone enjoys being in charge intellectually or organizationally. Yet, being solely responsible for a project is important to build analytical skills, creativity, resilience, and to strengthen the ability of the mentee to get out of their comfort zone.
Typically, trainees work on two projects, which for some may entail a risky and a safe one. I hesitate to assign risky projects alone because they may lead nowhere or turn out to be technically too challenging. I want mentees to be able to fall back on a different publishable project since as a research community we have not yet figured out how to measure productivity when there are no publications to show for. When I see a disconnect between their skills/performance and goals or role, we either adjust one of these, or work on additional skill development. I find with the right support, there inevitably is a point of transformation and intellectual growth when mentees start to take full ownership of their projects.
Aside from assigning multiple projects to one person we also use a second strategy to manage risk, namely assigning multiple people to one project. This not only manages scientific risk, but it also increases fun and decreases stress because people feel less alone when things get tough. Furthermore, it is a good training strategy for learning new technical skills, and team members can put their heads together to problem-solve when something does not work. It also serves as an opportunity to build interpersonal, communication, and leadership skills. Often projects become team projects when a manuscript is in sight but work still has to be completed to get the project over the finish line. Team science moves the work along faster and team members earn co-authorship to document their productivity (even if their own project is challenging). We communicate clearly and often about authorship and priorities to help people balance their individual projects with team projects. The person who initiated the project is typically first author, and as they approach the end of their tenure in the lab, I pair them with a second first author to assure publication and continuation of the project.
Another avenue for the team to work together and for honing intellectual as well as analytical skills are our grant writing efforts. I include trainees in the creative process of coming up with research ideas based on our results, in the planning of experiments and in very specific literature searches (we have a detailed process for this) that explore the rigor of the prior research and gaps in the field. For mentees who move on to faculty positions, they take whatever projects they want to start their own research programs. I aim to teach a mindset of abundance where there are plenty of ideas to explore and no two people solve problems in the same way. Because we openly communicate about plans and the direction that my lab is taking, I experience no problems with overlap. We simply decide that we will not compete, but instead collaborate and maintain open channels of communication to achieve just that.
P3. Productivity: Cultivating efficiency, rigor and impact as foundation for scientific brilliance
My observation is that mentees who are organized and efficient are more likely to succeed than those with great ideas but no solid process for execution. Hence the skills related to productivity contribute to scientific brilliance just as much as intellectual, analytical, and creative abilities. I also have observed that surprisingly many mentees struggle to do the right things at the right time with the appropriate quality, which can result in having to spend longer hours at work, low quality work products, and sometimes mental health challenges. To counteract these problems, I implemented systems with my team that serve as learning opportunities and as team performance support.
Systems for productivity and accountability.
When it comes to planning mentees tend to fall somewhere along a spectrum between two camps: 1. It’s difficult for them to break their mid- and long-term goals into smaller chunks, so they are inefficient day-to-day. 2. Or they spin their wheels day-to-day but have challenges seeing how their small tasks move them toward their goals. To combat this, we have a system starting with recording long-term goals in Individual Development Plans. These are chunked into annual goals, then further broken down into quarterly Objectives and Key Results, monthly and weekly outcomes. We use elements of Agile project management and do more detailed planning in a task management software. In a weekly performance dialogue session, we assess gaps in reaching outcomes and explore the root causes. This trains mentees to objectively self-assess their performance and areas for improvement and gives the team the chance to spot, discuss, and correct mismatched priorities.
Systems to ensure rigor & reproducibility. Because doing research with high rigor and reproducibility aligns with our value of integrity, we challenge ourselves to find better ways to reduce bias and to increase reproducibility on an ongoing basis. Our systems include clearly defined processes for experimental record keeping and an integrated electronic lab notebook/inventory/mouse database system that allows us to track which reagents are used in experiments. I used to teach the rigor and reproducibility training to graduate students at Virginia Tech and regularly build content into our team meetings and retreats where we discuss experimental design and appropriate controls, data analyses processes and statistical analyses. For the latter, mentees also consult with the Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Research Design (BERD) unit at UAB during project planning and when we run into complexities during data analysis. Whenever we repeat processes, we create a standard operating procedure to standardize not only experimentation but also subsequent data processing and presentation or authorship policies. We have a checklist for data reporting that aligns with those of Nature Neuroscience even when this level of detail is not required by our target journal.
Systems to foster independent divergent and convergent thinking.
The reason that scientific brilliance was mysterious to me as a trainee is that there was nobody explaining or connecting me to resources that systematize the scientific process. To remedy this, I find, develop, and now teach frameworks that break down the research process and make it more accessible to mentees. For example, we follow a framework for hypothesis development and systematic mechanistic hypothesis testing. I also developed a process, PARLEZ, that details how to identify gaps in research, analyze the rigor of the prior research, and go about addressing those gaps. These frameworks help mentees deepen their analytical, convergent thinking. But just as important is divergent, creative, associative thinking. As a team we discuss the creative process, test out activities that stimulate creativity, and educate ourselves about the conditions that we need to create to support creativity. We thus blend both types of thinking, which I believe leads to brilliant moments when we have an idea that makes all the difference, or finally see puzzle pieces coming together to form a clear image.
Systems to co-create a supportive research environment.
To change perspective, relax, and create a learning space where people can connect, we take a full day away from the lab monthly for retreats. We use this time to go through processes to develop our vision, mission, and values. Other ways we support personal and professional growth include a book club (we’re currently reading “Hidden Potential” by Adam Grant) and a slot on our standing retreat agenda to educate ourselves on DEI topics. We also reserve opportunity for people to practice talks. We share home-cooked food, which has been a wonderful way to know each other and our cultures of origin better. This is also when we take time for challenging team discussions, and repeat or refine lab processes as needed, e.g. when there is significant team turnover.
Scaling mentoring systems to train undergraduate students and provide leadership opportunities to mentees.
Because I feel strongly about giving undergraduate students the chance to get a taste of the research world, so that they can make well-informed career decisions and because we as a team enjoy the energy and enthusiasm that students bring, we designed a training curriculum that exposes students to a range of techniques that we routinely use in the lab. We enroll larger cohorts of students and organize training sessions followed by practice opportunities. At first students practice their new skills during routine tasks (e.g. genotypings) under the supervision of our lab manager. When they reach adequate skill levels, they are assigned to a fulltime team member who carves out undergrad-sized projects that help their bigger scope projects along. It took us a while to work out the right project scope, but we’ve gotten so good at it that we can help excellent and dedicated students earn co-authorship. Team members decide whether they want to take students and how many. They then build mini teams, which turned out to be an excellent opportunity to build leadership and mentoring skills.
Coming full circle
Another aspect of my philosophy is that just as scientific brilliance is learned so is outstanding mentorship. This has inspired me to start GLIA-Leadership and led me to invest significant time into developing leadership and management skills through programs outside of academia, in turn enabling me to strategically build systems as outlined above. To help other scientists develop and deepen their mentoring skills I have also built trainings focused on leadership, mentoring, and management specifically tailored to research teams to tackle the topic of mentoring from both ends; and I have guided cohorts of postdocs and faculty through these programs since 2020. Teaching frameworks, concrete tools, and skills to future and current mentors, not only by my example in my lab, but also beyond my lab, amplifies the number of well-mentored people who embrace that scientific brilliance is not something that you have, but something that you learn.