Welcome, everyone. We will start this webinar today on getting the most out of the mentor-mentee relationship. My name is Anis Costalari, and I am an assistant professor of medicine, biochemistry and molecular biology at Mayo Clinic. I'm a staff scientist there, and I have the pleasure today to moderate this webinar, which is hosted by our Mentor Membership and Mentorship Committee. So today we have the pleasure to listen to three outstanding speakers that I am sure most of you know through different platforms, especially Twitter. So with no further dues, I think I will start to introduce them. We will start with Dr. Vinay Sundaram. He is currently the chair of our Membership and Mentorship Committee. He is an associate professor of medicine and director of hepatology outcomes research at Siddharth Saini Medical Center. Dr. Sundaram will talk about the right mentor can accelerate your career. Okay, thank you very much for that introduction. So as stated, I'm the chair of the Membership and Mentorship Committee, and we're very happy to bring this webinar to all of you, and hopefully this will be a good experience for learning and getting some of your questions answered towards the end. We will have at least 20 minutes of Q&A. So what I wanted to discuss was very briefly how the right mentor can accelerate your career, particularly discussing my journey in terms of the difference between my career trajectory before and after I met a mentor who was very engaged in helping me advance. These are my relevant disclosures, none of which are actually to discuss. So let me take you through my journey. And again, the purpose is not to highlight my accomplishments, but it's because I imagine many of you are maybe in my shoes. Traditionally, when you think about academic hepatology, you either have the scientist route, which is either a basic scientist or a clinical investigator, where your salary is traditionally dependent on external funding. Then the other route, of course, is the clinician educator route, which is where I am. And in this situation, your salary is really dependent on seeing a high volume and growing the transplant center. And in such a case, the question is, of course, you know, how do you separate yourself? How do you obtain some recognition and develop your career in a setting of being expected to see a high volume of patients and not having a high degree of protective time? So let me talk to you about my journey first, and then ultimately how I arrived where I am. So I was an internal medicine residency at University of Virginia, and that's where I met my first mentor. Initially, when I went into residency, I wanted to be a private practice gastroenterologist really to make money. And Dr. Caldwell, who is a preeminent hepatologist, convinced me that I would probably be better off entering hepatology, and I was very glad that he convinced me as such. And during this time, you know, he mentored me primarily on being involved in research projects. I was able to publish several papers, not as first author, mainly as middle author. And the goal, again, was to demonstrate productivity so that you can get into a fellowship. And then I did get into a gastroenterology fellowship at University of Pittsburgh. And based on my academic interests, I was placed on a T32 training grant. Now, for those of you unfamiliar, the T32 training grant is designed in order to give you particular research skills so that you can apply for funding in the future. What was interesting here, though, was that they didn't have anybody in the division who was a hepatologist who was actually funded. So in order to qualify for the grant, you need a funded mentor. So ultimately, I found a mentor who was a pediatric hepatologist. And so the research that I did was in pediatric acute liver failure, which was interesting, but not really related to my clinical practice. During this time, I was able to earn a master's degree in clinical research, which I think was very beneficial to me. And I did also publish some papers. And then I moved to Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston for a transplant fellowship. This was entirely related to family because my wife pursued her fellowship in Boston. This was a very clinically heavy fellowship. And as a result of that, there really were no opportunities to do research. It was really meant to learn about clinical care. And then finally, again, because my wife wanted to move to Los Angeles, I was able to get a job in 2013 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. And this job was a clinical job. And that was very clear to me from the Department of Medicine, that your goal here is to meet your RVU targets, build the transplant volume. And you can do research, we encourage it, but you're not going to get protected time to do that. So it's kind of on your own unless you can obtain external funding. So then this led me to the question of where do I fit in? Because my career goals were kind of different from the work atmosphere and work expectations. So as I mentioned, I did have an interest in academic hepatology. And during fellowship, I was put on a T32 training grant. And I still had those desires. I had skills with regards to my master's degree. And so I had desires in order to develop an academic niche and try to publish around that. And ultimately, just to gain some recognition within my institution and externally. But of course, that didn't fit with the expectation of the job. Again, the job expectation was to see patients and that's where I would provide value to the institution. I was given some administrative time, you're given a little bit of teaching time, but really not enough to develop a research program. And in addition to that, I did not have any on-campus mentoring at the time. There were other hepatologists who were primarily clinical, or if they did research, it was primarily clinical trials in fields which I just didn't have an interest in. So what did I do? I tried my best in order to advance my career. I had skills, as I mentioned, with a master's degree. And I taught myself how to analyze certain public registries like the UNOS database. And so the end result was I did publish a few papers as first author. And these were some of the papers, as an example, which were published in moderate impact journals. And I was working very hard in order to publish these papers. I've been doing my own statistics. I was writing the papers, et cetera. And so it took me a long time to publish these papers, but the end result was I was getting nowhere. In terms of recognition achieved, again, I highlight these because this is what most institutions look at when they're determining your eligibility for promotion in terms of has the applicant been externally recognized. And this includes invited reviews, invited editorials, no. Lectures at academic institutions, nope. Lectures at national or international meetings, nope. Editorial board invitations, no. Committee meetings or committee assignments or leadership opportunities, no. So as you can see, despite working very hard, my career was not really going at the level that I was really hoping for. And then I got very lucky. I found a mentor. And as I mentioned, I did not have any on-campus mentoring. I went to a wedding for my wife's friend, and I met a hepatologist who happened to know the same family getting married, and he was based in London. And it worked out rather well because this was not like a academic meeting where certain people who are very prominent have a number of people who want to talk to them and they don't really have time. I was able to get plenty of time in order to talk to him since I was probably the only other hepatologist at this wedding. And so after having talked to him, he was willing to mentor me. And I want to just go through what characteristics he did and he did not have. So the main characteristic that you need in a mentor, in my opinion, is not someone who's on campus. It's just somebody who's engaged and available. And that's what he was. In addition to that, you should look for someone who is knowledgeable in your topic of interest. They don't have to be experts, but they do have to be knowledgeable enough in order to determine, you know, what is the unmet need and where can you start to carve out a niche for yourself. And then he was able to provide generalized supervision. And he was not afraid to give me constructive criticism. That again is very important. Some of the characteristics the mentor did not have. So he was not a local or on-campus mentor. And again, I cannot emphasize this enough that nowadays in a virtual world, on-campus mentoring is not a requirement in order to succeed. In addition to that, he was not an expert in the skills that I had. He actually had no knowledge of public registry analysis and minimal knowledge of statistics. And so those were the skills that I brought to this relationship. And then finally, what he was not willing to do was to go through all of the details in terms of coming up with an idea and coming up with a detailed study design. And this was not, for instance, a mentor in residency who says, you know, I have this project. Why don't you analyze these charts for me? And I'll put you on the paper. This was a situation of I have to come to him with the ideas and the study design, how I want to study it. And then it was up to him to provide some generalized supervision and help to refine my ideas. And so these again were what he ultimately provided. He was able to help me to find an unmet need in an area that I was interested in. My areas of interest were always in portal hypertension and end-stage liver disease. And so we carved out some research in transplantation, specifically in acute on chronic liver failure. And then in addition to that, figuring out how to study this topic and being able to leverage the skills that I already had in order to study this topic further. And then in addition to that, the importance of narrowing the focus of your publications. So if you saw in my previous slide, I was publishing kind of all over the map and the end result was I wasn't getting anywhere. Focusing your research efforts and kind of narrowing what you're doing will allow you to be considered a content expert versus publishing in a variety of areas without really focusing on a particular topic. And then finally, what was also very important was that he allowed creation of opportunities to network with other experts in the field. And what was the end result of that? Just again, to highlight some of the publications I've had since meeting my mentor, I was able to publish in areas very focused in transplantation and ACLF, and these were in high impact journals. And again, it's not to illustrate my accomplishments, but to illustrate how just meeting one person helped to really accelerate my career. And then beyond that, because there's only so much you can do from a public registry, the networking that I was able to gain from people who were part of the E.F. Cliff Consortium in Europe allowed me to start a retrospective U.S.-based consortium for which our first publication has recently come out. And then in addition to that, some of the preliminary data we published using registry-based studies allowed for funding of a multinational study for which I was assigned to be regional director of North America. So again, these were all specific opportunities which would not have happened had I not met a good mentor. And the end result with regards to recognition achieved, again, all those boxes I had highlighted before where the answer was no, the end result was that the answer became yes to all of this. And so what I want to conclude with is that by illustrating how important mentoring was to me, hopefully you'll recognize that not only for me personally as chair of the membership mentorship committee, but for AASLD in general, I'm driven very much by the governing board. Mentoring is a top priority for them. And particularly last year's president, Dr. Ray Chung, had specified that with the availability of a virtual world, he wants to create as many opportunities as possible. And that initiative is going to be carried on through at least the immediate future. And furthermore, as Dr. Chung always says, you can never, ever have too many mentors. Some of the initiatives that I'll go through. One is this one-on-one personalized longitudinal mentoring opportunity. So this was something that was initiated last year. We have 100 mentors and mentees who have signed up. We are in the process of doing the mentor-mentee matching, and then we expect to launch this in April. So it'll start in the second quarter. And then based on the success of that program, we hope to reopen the application if things are going well, maybe even in the summer of 2022, or at least in the summer of next year. But that's just something that AASLD is fully supporting. And hopefully we will have this as a long-term opportunity. Again, the goal is so that everybody who wants career development can find a mentor regardless of where they are. Your only requirement is that you are an AASLD member. There is no upper age limit in terms of whether you can ask for a mentor. The only limit will be the availability of the mentors who have signed up. In addition to that, we are planning on creating a platform within the AASLD website to allow for virtual meetings. For instance, if you don't have Zoom or Teams available for your own personal use, we will try to create that. In addition to that, we started our first virtual mentoring workshop with the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. This was at last year's AASLD meeting, and we plan on having several of these as well. So please keep your eyes open for emails for when these invitations come. And then the Women's Initiative Committee, which I'll allow for Jennifer Fleming to probably discuss in more detail, they're also going to have very focused on mentoring opportunities. So I thank you again for your attention, and I'll end here. Thank you, Dr. Sundaram, for this insightful talk. I would like to remind everyone that they can ask questions in the Q&A chat, and everyone will answer at the end. So our second speaker is Dr. Elliot Tapper, who is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. Dr. Tapper is the Director of the Michigan Cirrhosis Program, and the Chair-Elect of the AASLD Practice Measures Committee. Today, he will discuss on being a mentee. Privileged to be here with you. I'm going to talk today about being a menteer. And before I try to delve into exactly what this means, I'm going to tell you where it came from. It came from my relationship with Neil Sengupta, who was a co-fellow of mine. And a co-fellow of mine. And when we worked together, we learned an enthusiasm for each other's research. We worked on each other's projects. We taught each other about stats, study design. We wrote tons of papers. And over the course of our fellowship, we and our early faculty, we learned some lessons that I'm going to distill down for you today, but you can also find them in this gastro paper cited at the bottom here. So, the key concepts of mentoring are that we have the same respect for everyone. That the input or advice that you receive from a friend or co-fellow is equal, if not superior to that which you can receive from a full professor. That you're open to collaboration, tending to say yes within reason to most of the opportunities that come your way. Because even as a middle author, or playing a supporting role on a project, you can learn a lot about new methods that can inform the thing that you are truly passionate about. And you got to hold that other's success is the same as your success. And that by working in a team, everyone can meet their stated goals. Now, of course, you do need mentors, but I want to talk about how we define this. Because I think that the conventional way that we conceive of this is not particularly helpful. And that is that we view that the senior professor imparts special knowledge upon the mentee to help them grow. But it's unhelpful because it robs the mentee of agency, self-determination, and the responsibility to learn how to extract what they need from the mentor from their gain. And two, it's a gross oversimplification. Because the reality is that in a field such as ours, where we undergo such a rapid metamorphosis, where on day zero, we don't even know what we're doing, we're stuck in the sigmoid colon. Within a matter of months, we are able to do so much more than we did before. And the idea is that the kind of person that knows what it's like to be in your shoes and get from step zero to one is unlikely to be the same person who knows what it's like to get from step two to three, and so on. And this creates a demand for multiple mentors and mentoring relationships across the spectrum within a very short period of time. But unfortunately, there are functional limitations on the supply of mentors in what I call the mentorship desert, where even if mentors are numerically plentiful, there are structural limitations that prevent our access. First, there's a tyranny of the RVU, whereby clinical responsibilities increasingly pressured by administrators rendered time for mentoring activities less and less available. Second, the kind of person that you're exposed to in academic medicine has been there and done that. But you need to get on base to establish a track record and the kind of products that will help you do that, that are doable within the timeframe of residency or fellowship. They are not multi-center RCTs or creating your own knockout mouse. And unfortunately, not all mentors remember how to help you in that earlier stage. They've simply forgotten. Third, not all mentors are created equal. You've got to ask around. What's their track record? How many people have they successfully mentored? What were those relationships like? And sometimes what you hear is just no good. And finally, it's also true that not all mentees are created equal. Many a mentor has found themselves ghosted on the eve of a deadline for a review article that they only agreed to, to help out that mentee and with that broken heart, they are now less willing to open the door to the next potential mentee that would come their way. So, because of these functional limitations, we must develop skills within ourselves so that we can attract the best kind of helpful relationship and avail ourselves of the opportunities, of opportunities when others are able to help us. Now, we can't do it alone. We can't depend on others. But so, for this reason, we have to build up our own skills. And now this philosophy, me and Sengupta, we call mentoring. It is the set of skills by which you learn to navigate the research system and become resourceful. The mentor is always curious, scanning the horizon for questions. And one of the best places that they find inspiration is by reading constantly, looking critically at the methods for new ideas, searching the introductions and following the references back to the original publications of that procedure or concept so that they know the gaps in that field. And they use these gaps to generate specific questions that will allow them to make their own unique impact on the field. They do not ask for a project. They come up with the idea that gets them motivated to get it done. They seek collaboration from peers as well as those higher up in the food chain, constantly learning from others, asking people what they did, how they did, what went well, what didn't, so that they can benefit from others' success. They love to hear what made things work and they love to be a part of projects that work. But when those projects fail, they still embrace that opportunity because from introspection comes knowledge, the power of knowing how best to phrase your question, what method one must use to get that paper a full review and so forth. Mentors above all view deadlines as the first and best opportunity to set a reputation as a doer and someone who is dependable, who never over promises and under delivers. Mentors make their questions clear. Now there's two main mechanisms by which I would suggest that you clarify your mechanisms, your questions, sorry. The first is to craft a one-pager, to try to explain why your idea is worth someone else's time. So in order to do this, you create like an elevator pitch, a few sentences on the problem, the impact and the research gap. Demonstrate that you've read some papers about it. Form a research question that is testable, that is falsifiable and know what methods, what data sources are required to answer your research question. A one-pager is a critical element in communicating research concepts, but another opportunity that often comes our way is to give a talk. We're often asked to give talks as residents or fellows or junior faculty. This is an excellent opportunity to delve deeply into research and understand the gaps in the field and to develop your questions and get immediate feedback from other clinicians and peers in the room who will help you develop your question furthers. So in my experience, when I was a fellow, I was asked to give a talk on a controversy in hepatology. I heard people poo-pooing ammonia levels. I kind of wanted to understand why. So I went deep on the physiology of ammonia levels and I learned that there were significant things that we could learn from ammonia. Not just that it's hard to measure and that it doesn't correlate with great encephalopathy, but that it reflects homeostasis, that the manifestation of encephalopathy is driven in part by ammonia, but also inflammation. And that ammonia comes from things like sarcopenia and renal failure. And I learned a lot about what it is as a biological biomarker. Now, I got a lot of feedback in that room from ways that I could better phrase my thoughts, other questions that I may have missed. And I published this, in a matter of speaking, like the slides from the PowerPoint from way back in 2013 as a tutorial. But if I wanted to be more rigorous about it, if I wanted to turn what I did into a paper, if I wanted to make things count twice, well, I need a team, right? If you're like me, you love the sound of your own voice. You're not gonna be very critical. So you need friends to put red ink on the page. So two people in that room today, a resident at the time and a co-fellow, they helped me edit. We went back and forth and we submitted a review together as co-fellows that basically summarized what we had learned together while going over the gaps in that PowerPoint. Mentors though, are always curious. And they seek to extend their research by creating a body of questions that build on one another. So if we found in my reading that an ammonia level could reflect homeostasis, then perhaps it was a biomarker of mortality risk. My co-fellow pictured here, the Dr. Velas-Patwarden thought that maybe we could do a retrospective cohort study where everybody who had an ammonia level check could be followed to see if a high ammonia level portended a worse prognosis. So we needed to get together a band to do this project. And when you're gonna do a project, you need to anticipate and overcome rate limiting steps. And here's two. The first is the IRB. Everybody groans, oh, I gotta do an IRB. It's not that hard. You find somebody who has done it. You take what they did, all of the boilerplate about HIPAA waiver protection and so forth, and you copy and paste that into an IRB form. The protocol is already informed by the background reading that you did. And if you work together in teams and you do this, you can get an IRB accepted very quickly. Now, in terms of data collection, you gotta get a team together who is dedicated to go into the chart. But once they go into the chart, that's the most time-consuming thing. They have to have an attack plan. So the attack plan is formed by creating the shell tables for the paper that you intend to write. So what do you need to know about these patients when you're in the chart? Well, you gotta read papers. And when you look at what the field says they are interested in knowing, they're interested in knowing about age, sex, MELD score, etiology of liver disease, the presence or absence of acute or chronic liver failure, child class. Once you know these things, then you have a shopping list so that when somebody goes into the chart, they're making that the first and last time. We were able to publish this paper, something that we were proud of. We're all co-authors on the team. Everybody played a supporting role. The more supporting roles you have, the faster it goes. So mentors are building teams. And one of the ways that you build teams is with things like co-authorship. And when you're doing it, and if you're doing it in an efficient way and you're overcoming those rate-limiting steps quickly, you're having fun, you're making lasting friendships, and you're building a research family that will hopefully get back together to focus on everybody's projects. Now, sometimes when you're working on research, you're building an actual family. So here's a picture of me submitting my K award. And this gives you the two main lessons. The first is that it's possible to have work-life balance, but it does take some ingenuity and balance. And mentors give credit. So I have been, I talk a lot about self-reliance here, but I have been very fortunate to have mentors across the whole spectrum, co-mentors across the whole spectrum of the career cycle. And with that, I will close. Thank you for your attention. Thank you, Dr. Tapper, for your helpful tips and this great presentation. And now we'll move on with our third speaker, Dr. Jennifer Fleming, who is an ICES scientist and Associate Professor of Medicine and Public Health Sciences at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. And today she's going to talk about work-life balance. Great, thank you for that introduction. And I wanted to say hi to all the attendees and thanks for coming to listen to us. So my topic is a little bit different from the previous two presenters. I'm going to be talking mostly about work-life balance as opposed to how your mentors can help academically. So what is work-life balance? Well, there's no real definition, but if you look, this is one that's commonly used is that work-life balance includes satisfaction and good functionality at work as well as at home with a minimum of role conflicts. But I think as time has gone on, there's a term that's evolving, which is more probably appropriate as opposed to balance is more work-like integration or how can you get your work life and your home life to be in homeostasis? And this is important to most physicians. A recent AMA survey suggests that 90% of physicians believed that work-life balance was important. And I think at the trainee level, it's really important to understand that this is an active process. You're not going to achieve balance by just letting it happen. There needs to be planning, prioritizing, and there's always trade-offs when you're working between your home life as well as your work life. And it's really important to understand that your mentors are a great resource to help you start to actively plan strategies to achieve this very fine balance. So over the next couple of slides, I'm going to tell you a bit about me and how I came to where I am now to kind of set the stage for how I evolved my work-life balance over time. So as background, I came from a non-medical family. For my undergraduate degree, I did biology and psychology in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Then I really didn't know what I wanted to do. And it wasn't until the very last year of my undergrad degree, where I was working in a basic science lab that I was working with two medical students. And they were kind of like mentors to me because I really didn't know anything about medicine. And after spending the summer with them and hearing their stories and how exciting their training was and what their plans for the future were, that's where I really started to think about medicine. But I hadn't done my MCATs, I hadn't done anything. And so my only real skills were working in a lab. So I actually moved to Boston and spent two years there working in an immunology lab while I applied to medical school. I got accepted to medical school back in Halifax, which I completed there. I then matched to internal medicine at Queens University, where I am now. I had married a medical school classmate during residency, did my GI at Queens as well. And then through mentoring at Queens, I was recommended to continue to pursue academic training. So I did a two-year hepatology fellowship and did my master's degree in clinical research all at the same time at UCSF. And Dr. Turow was my mentor and had a very big impact on my career and continues to this day. After I finished my fellowship training, I had my first child between finishing at UCSF to my first faculty appointment. I had a seven-month maternity leave. In Canada, that's actually quite short, but for a lot of my American colleagues, this is quite long. I then started my first academic appointment in January, 2014, and I was hired into a clinician scientist role. And I continue that role today where 70% of my time is academic, 20% is clinical, and then 5% for teaching and administration. I then had my second child early on in my faculty, again, taking seven months off and was fortunate enough to be awarded an ASLD career development board in 2018 and was recently promoted to associate professor in July of 2020. In addition to everything else that I do research-wise, there have lots of other commitments that I've become involved in over time. And I think one thing that I've learned over time is that you think you're busy as a resident, but the responsibilities and the things that you get involved in just exponentially grow as you come on to faculty. So that's why it's really important to try and balance both home and work because you're only going to get more busy. You're not going to get less busy. So this is my crew. This is me, this is my husband, Rob, and these are our two kids, Sam and AJ. They are six and eight. So this is my family unit. And what I try to do on a daily basis is juggle between doing what's best for my family and keeping the family healthy, as well as continuing to do the work that I love at the hospital, at the Research Institute with involvement with my colleagues, as well as mentoring other junior faculty. But then I have all these other interests outside of medicine that will help keep me balanced. So I love sports. I watch a lot of basketball, football. Before COVID, we traveled a lot. There's a picture there reflecting friends and family, which I spend a lot of time with. I also enjoy a lot of physical activity and try and incorporate that into my daily routine. My family, we have a cottage that is close to our house. So in the summer, we are there on most weekends and spend a lot of time with our friends who are also on the lake. And I also enjoy watching TV shows, movies as well. So learning how to integrate all of these competing interests to keep your home life and your work life balanced, as I mentioned, it takes planning and prioritizing. So this is kind of a typical schedule for me. And this has evolved over time. And I think that you'll probably note that a lot of your mentors are either up really early or they stay up really late. And as I said, that's because there's a lot of competing interests. And so you are trying to fit as much as you can into your day in order to keep everything going. So I'm a morning person. I like to wake up early. Sometimes if I'm writing grants, that's when I write my grants. That's when I like to exercise, try and get my kids off to school. Then during the weekday, a lot of academic time, but also other academic commitments such as departmental rounds, journal clubs. And then I do a half day of liver clinic. I do a half day of endoscopy. And then throughout the year, I also participate on the inpatient service for GI. And I'm on call six to eight weeks per year doing a GI call. And what about the weekends? Personally, I try to keep my weekends open and not filled with academic commitments, but depending on what's going on in your life, if you have grant deadlines, if you have papers to review, things like that, sometimes it will creep into the weekends, but I really try myself to protect the weekends for myself and my family and my outside interests. So how can you at your stage take advantage of your mentors to help you achieve work-life balance planning? In general, I think that scheduling meetings specifically discuss work-life issues is something that you can do with your mentors. Personally, I usually take the first 10 to 15 minutes when I'm meeting with a mentee to really just kind of catch up with them, hear what's going on with their life. I tell them what's going on with my life. And I really find that this is, not only does it help you build a stronger relationship between the mentor and the mentee, but you also get insight into what do your mentors do? How do they deal with their home life? How do they deal with going away for meetings, grant writing, things like that? So I really, even though it feels kind of like quote unquote superficial talk, I think it's really important to engage your mentor in talking about their life outside of work when the opportunity presents itself. You can also ask them about your current or future plans for your own home life and family. And I don't think any mentor would have any problem talking about this, as long as you felt comfortable talking about it. And the other thing, as many of, as my other two co-presenters had mentioned, getting advice from more than one person or more than one mentor is really important because not everybody is going to have the type of homework setup that you were going to have. And so that you may seek out different mentors who have different interests that may be similar to yours to help you figure out how to try and find that balance. And also taking opportunities to socialize with individuals outside of work, not as easy during the current pandemic, but hopefully getting back to normal soon and spending times. For instance, our division here at Queen's, we like to do road biking. And so we spend a lot of time, either before work or on the weekends, we'll get together and bike. And we always do a charity event every year, which is really great for team building and then getting outside of the regular work environment. So what are different things that you can talk about your mentors that will help you try and sort out your own work-life balance? I've kind of divided it up into issues specific to work and then issues specific to home, but there's really kind of a blending of these two between. So first is time management. So asking your mentors, well, when do you write grants? How do you find the time to block off time? And everybody has different ways that they will do that. How to say no, especially when you're junior in faculty, a lot of times you'll be asked to participate in multiple different initiatives, either within your own division or within the School of Medicine and trying to figure out what is the right way to decline opportunities, which may not lead to significant advantages for you at that point in your career. And that's an art that you need to develop as well. Getting rid of time wasters. And by time wasters, I mean things that take a lot of time during your day, which prevent you from being productive both at work and home. For me, for instance, that's commuting to work. So when we were trying to figure out where we wanted to live and where we wanted to buy a home, I wanted to make sure I did not have a long commute to work because I wanted to be able to get to work quickly and get home quickly. And so that I could spend as much time with my friends and family that I can. Multitasking is something that you develop over time. I think some of the virtual aspects of COVID has lent this to be a little bit more efficient where you can participate virtually and potentially also be taking care of other tasks at the same time and figuring how to do that. Or if you are commuting, say if you're a commuter, then you commute an hour a day, maybe that's when you're working on reading papers or reviewing things and kind of doing two things at once as much as you can. At home, I think it's important for everybody to get enough physical activity. I think physical activity not only is good for health promotion, but also not only your physical health, but also your mental health. So figuring out how you can get that in regularly. Household management is a big thing. If you are in a home situation where you are taking care of dependents, depending on your partner's situation, if they're working, if they're at home, who's picking up the kids, who's dropping them off, who's walking the dog, who's doing the grocery shopping, who's planning the meals, all of that sort of stuff is important to manage and it's not something that we're taught in our regular academic pursuits. So something that you can talk to your mentors about. And I've learned a lot from my mentors about how I currently structure my household management. There's also a need to find strategies to unplug or disengage from work. In the current era where we have our smartphones, our emails are there, our texts are there, people can get in touch with you 24 hours a day. So finding ways where you can take mental breaks, whether that be, you know, turning off your phone, going on vacations and not looking at your email, all of these things will evolve over time. I don't have the perfect answer for this, but it's important to think about that and figure out strategies and talking with your mentors about what's worked for them. And finally, prioritizing your personal relationships outside of work. Our friends and family are crucial, especially when we're very busy. They help us to feel whole and important. And so making sure that you can make time to prioritize personal relationships, whether it's phone calls, a Zoom meeting. For me, a lot of my friends and I do physical activity together. So once a week, me and six of my friends all do a Pilates class together. So that's part of the multitasking too, where you're getting physical activity in, but you're also getting that socialization in and having it be regular, I think is very important. Finally, I wanted to talk about a few things that you may want to consider if you're at the stage of your career where you're trying to plan your first faculty appointment, because different institutions or groups of individuals may have different cultures when it comes to promoting work-life balance. So certain things that you may ask institutions or individuals who work at institutions that may help you to plan work-life balance would be specifically related to options for flexibility within your schedule. So one would be non-traditional clinic or endoscopy hours. Is it possible that, you know, you could do clinic from 10am to 2pm so that you can see your kids in the morning and pick them up after school or be available for their after-school activities? Is that something that is promoted within that institution? Here at Queen's, recently, we started having evening endoscopy hours where we run endoscopy lists from 3pm till 7pm. So it adds a little bit of flexibility into your day. Academic time certainly increases your flexibility. If you remember from my calendar, all the green spots were academic time. And so depending on what's going on, I'm able to schedule in a dentist appointment. That's important. I'm able to go see my kids do their track meet for an hour because of that flexibility. So I think if you're choosing an academic role description, that will help you maintain some of that work-life balance. Are you a morning person? Are you an evening person? Figuring out when you are most productive to get the best bang out of your buck of the time that you're spending doing academic work is important. There's also the early morning or the early evening meetings. And if you're in individuals who have dependent children or other family members, those can be very difficult to attend because that's before school or after school pickup. Are there ways that you can try and participate in those meetings, even virtually with you not having to be physically present and still be able to maintain that balance? And finally, different institutions may have options for physical activity or childcare on site, which can also promote that balance. So if you have the resources within your institution to take a half an hour and 45 minutes, then go to the gym or go for a walk around the waterfront. Or if your childcare is on site, that helps to allow you to multitask and to make the most of your time. So with that, I am going to close and I'm happy to discuss. And as Vinay said, I am also involved in the Women's Initiatives Committee, and we are planning a women's leadership in medicine mentoring program. And I'm happy to talk about any details of that if anybody has any questions. Thank you very much, Dr. Fleming, for your beautiful talk. We do have a few questions, and I do have other few questions. So I will start to read them. The first question is, it is often said that you can have more than one mentor if two mentors don't like each other and that you are a mentee to both. How should one navigate the situation? Maybe Dr. Sundaram, you can answer to that. Sure. That is an unusual situation, which I haven't personally encountered. So I guess number one is just figuring out, determining the nature of the conflict, how serious it is. And in particular, is it really a conflict in terms of how they approach the same topic scientifically or what they believe in? And if it's something that you feel that the conflict is just too strong, such that you're going to have completely different messages from two different mentors, I would just suggest choosing the mentor who you believe is the one who is most engaged in your career, the one who's most available. As Elliot said, not all mentors are created equally. And so it is very important that whoever you do choose is someone who is invested in your success. But I would start with just understanding the nature of the conflict and determining if it is really a conflict, a scientific conflict versus perhaps an interpersonal conflict, which may be, which could be overcome. Thank you very much for your answer. The next questions, maybe it's for Dr. Tapper. So thank you for the presentations, three of you. A few questions. How do you find the focus? Everything is interested. That is a great question. So the first thing to say is that most mentors who've been in this, they have found a focus. They focus their entire lives on one isoenzyme. Okay. And that has been very useful for defining them a niche in which one can achieve grant funding. So what I will say is that it is very important to find a niche when it comes to achieving funding. Okay. Funding. Okay. And if we're in the middle of faculty, then that at that level, I would say it's thinking through where the greatest gaps are and how, and if it's a particularly uncrowded space, then that would help you make the decision. But then the bigger question is earlier on, do you need to listen to this advice to focus on anything? And I would say you do you, you, if you find the stuff that sparks joy, as long as it is being able to deliver without over-promising that you have the time and attention to adequately devote to it, that that doing so does not detract from your overall enthusiasm for that topic. There's this concern that you hear from older people don't be too diffuse, but you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. I certainly got that advice and I definitely looked at multiple baskets. And as long as you're committed and then you and you, and you don't drop the ball, then take up as much as makes you happy. I would also like to just add to that. You know, when, when you are choosing, choosing a focus, make sure it is something that clinically drives you. For instance, you know, in my case it wasn't that I was just told study acute on chronic liver failure prior to this. I always had a very strong clinical interest in end-stage liver disease, liver failure, and transplantation from a clinical standpoint. So I think that's also going to be very important is don't do what somebody tells you to do. Make sure that it is something that you really are interested in clinically. And it's something you think about, you read about, and you want to really learn about it. Thank you both for your answer. I do have a question for Dr. Fleming. Are there any grants for parents who are clinicians and scientists and, or scientists to support these, especially for young faculties with young children? As far as I'm aware, I have not seen any grants specifically for young faculty who have family. I don't, the other attendees may, may comment. I think the most important thing when you're starting off as junior faculty, and if you are at a point in your life where you are starting a family, it's really having your division head on board and be supportive and recognize that a lot of individuals at that stage of their career actually have two full-time jobs. So not only are they a clinician, they're a researcher, they're also a parent or a caregiver, and that finding protected time to do academics is so important early in your career, especially if you have these two full-time jobs. So if you are looking for a faculty position, you can talk to other members within that division to figure out how supportive the division head is. It's usually the division head who is the one who dictates the amount of clinical time and what your commitments are. And then talking to individuals from different institutions, because like I said, different institutions will have different cultures about how they support individuals who are early in their career, who also are, have other people that are dependent on them. And like I said, it's that kind of early morning, late evening, where it becomes very difficult. And that's a lot of times where you have, you know, committee meetings or research meetings and things like that. So trying to find ways to support young faculty to be involved, that also recognizes that the typical, you know, nine to five type schedule may not work for everybody. I think I just wanted to add that I know that Mayo Clinic has internal, very little ground for women scientists that have children or family to support, but I'm not sure. I ask this because I'm not sure if other institutions or if NIH has any, but anyways, that would be great for men and women. That is very interesting. I haven't heard of that. And maybe it's something that other institutions could try and model because I think it's so important now, and not just for women as well. I mean, men are involved in child rearing sometimes just as much or as more than the women, depending on your family situation. So what I really try and do, especially if my junior faculty are coming in who are men who are starting their families, is to also help them to recognize that they are a caregiver at home, and that they need to be able to prioritize being feeling like you're able to be there for your family, but also being able to be at work. And I think historically it's always been, oh, well, this is a female problem, but I see lots of junior male faculty who are in a very similar situation to me. So I think that it's important that that's recognized too. Very good point. Dr. Tepper, how do you find a mentor and how do you know who's the right person? Oh, that's a great question. So one is they could be just someone who has recently been in your shoes, right? So they don't necessarily have to be someone who is directly interested in your area. For example, like I recently, we had a fellow, Jeremy Louis Saint, he was very interested in how to optimize virtual connectedness for patients. It's not my area, but I knew how to accomplish certain goals. And so it's about methodology, right? I had a mentor, Akbar Walji, who is a IBDologist, but about methodology again. So methodology, proximity, age, right? And then also we talked a lot about mentoring, but then there's other sort of related concept of sponsorship, where it could just be someone that could help you open doors. And that's where it makes sense to talk to somebody who can open doors and somebody that knows what it's like to be in your shoes. If I could just pivot from this for a second to address the sort of non-research mentorship through the lens of working with APPs. So somebody had asked a question about working with APPs and it gets at this. So for example, like most APPs are clinical, right? That's the definition of the job, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a role for innovation or a desire to innovate. So I work with APPs here to develop unique projects that may or may not be publishable, but make us all happy. So for example, we lacked an urgent care facility. So we are creating an APP led urgent care facility where I can use my sort of QI hat to try to help implement. There is an APP who was very interested in fatty liver disease, who had a particular flair for counseling patients. And so hooked up with somebody who was a researcher in fatty liver disease to be, to have a sort of pseudo specialization in fatty liver and create a fatty liver clinic where they could live up to their full potential. So I think that it's about, when it comes to mentoring and clinical lines, it's about what your specialization is, like what your clinical passion is, creating a special space for that. And there it's easy to find a team work. Thank you. So we have four minutes left and two more questions for now. The next question will be, I suppose for Dr. Sundaram, will the mentorship program be for MD, DO, MDBS only, or will other clinicians and non-clinicians, clinicians, ASLD members be offered the mentorship opportunity also? And at the same level, there is another question. Are there NPs and, or PAs in the inaugural mentorship program for ASLDs? And I would add to add, I'd like to add, are, is there space for basic science, pure scientists? Okay. Since we're running out of time, I will make the answer brief. The answer is yes to everything. Anyone who's an ASLD member can, can sign up for this. There is certainly space for basic scientists. And in fact, when the form was created, that was one of the questions. And similarly, there are advanced practice providers. I know that there are, there are those who have signed up as mentees. I am not sure how many APPs have signed up as mentors, but there have been also physicians who have signed up specifically to mentor APPs. So the answer is yes to all of that. Thank you. Dr. Tapper, maybe you want, you'd like to add something. That is a good answer. Okay, great. Sorry. The next question would be, I guess, for Dr. Fleming, it seems like many mentors, mentorship relationships involve working together on research with our ways to find mentors to discuss career planning and work-life balance without collaborating on research. And at the same time, not being a time burden on the mentor. I think that's a great question because I think your research mentor may not be the mentor you want to help you schedule your work-life balance, depending on how they're doing that. So I think different opportunities that I have taken advantage of is if you are involved with other potential mentors in other ways. So for instance, I am a academic advisor for our academic performance. But again, I also take time there to talk to them about, you know, how things are going at home, work-life balance. So just because you're not in a relationship, which is related to research, doesn't mean that you can't take the opportunity to get some insight or advice about work-life balance. So I think that's a great question. Sometimes that may mean, you know, even a senior resident or a fellow, if you're a more junior resident, you know, say, hey, do you want to go grab a coffee after rounds or something like that and spend 10 or 15 minutes, it can be very informal. And it doesn't necessarily, I think, always have to be a formal type of mentoring relationship to gain those insights. And sometimes it's just about taking the opportunity to try and learn about somebody else outside of work. And whether that be, you know, grabbing a coffee, grabbing a drink, going for dinner, or just, you know, taking an elevator ride in the hospital with them, you know, sometimes you can get some great information just from very short interactions, and taking those opportunities. And I think is one way to try and do that. Thank you. And there is one last question from a student. Thank you. And there is one last question from Alex Young. Thank you. How important is basic science in a professional career? I have found my interest in clinical research, but all that make me lose opportunities. I don't know who would like to answer this question. I can answer that very quickly. For my knowledge, all none of us are basic scientists. All of us are doing clinical research. And I won't speak for myself, but I will say two out of the three panelists are extremely successful in their careers. Thank you. I don't see any other questions in the chat. I have others, but I think that we're running out of time. So I can send them to you by message. And if anyone would like to ask other questions, all our speakers have their emails or Twitter handles on their presentations. Everything is registered. So if you want to go back to this session, to this webinar, you are welcome to do so. And of course, contact everyone if you need. And with this, I would like to thank everyone for participating, the panelists, as well as the audience. And I hope that we will have other sessions in the future. Bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.

mentorship

career development

work-life balance

finding the right mentor

mentor-mentee relationships

work-life integration

time management

personal relationships

Mentorship Committee