Academic Career Skills for Junior Faculty Researchers

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PROJECT SUMMARY Background: Responding to RFA-CA-19-010 for the NCI Awardee Skills Development Consortium (NASDC), we propose a three-day workshop on research career skills for NCI-funded junior faculty in cancer control and populations sciences. We have successfully developed and hosted NCI-funded workshops to train early career investigators in research skills (R25 CA181000). Our proposed NASDC workshop mainly targets two skills sets listed in the RFA: 1) administrative, managerial, and mentoring skills and 2) leadership and collaboration skills. However, based on our formative work, we recognized the need to also include training in skills for coping with the social and emotional challenges of a research career (handling inevitable rejection, balancing responsibilities, and managing uncertainty of funding). We believe that enhancing all these skills will contribute to the NASDC goal of helping junior faculty to “maintain long-term productivity in their research careers, thereby maximizing outcomes from NCI investments.” Approach and setting: The proposed workshop combines three evidence-based approaches: 1) “mentored mentoring,” directly observed mentoring opportunities with expert coaching, and career-development lectures from the alumni program of our Workshop on Research Methods in Supportive Oncology (R25 CA181000); 2) didactics and exercises from the Dana- Faber Cancer Institute's Leadership Bootcamp for early career faculty; and 3) coping skills drawn from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). ACT may be particularly well-suited to manage the social and emotional challenges of a research career given its framework of acceptance and moving forward in the context of personal values. To increase potential collaborations among participants and ensure the provision of appropriate mentoring expertise by workshop faculty, we will limit participants to cancer control and populations sciences researchers (behavioral research; epidemiology and genomics; health delivery research; implementation science; surveillance; and survivorship). The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) will host this three-day workshop in Boston in collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), another Dana- Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DFHCC) institution. Each day of the workshop, participants attend didactic sessions and meet in small groups for three different mentoring experiences, with coaching from R01-funded investigators in cancer control and population sciences. We will work with the NASDC Coordinator Center on the promotion, production, and evaluation of five workshops over three years. Faculty: We have assembled an outstanding team of experts in cancer control and population sciences (established independent researchers, grant reviewers, and journal editors) to plan and serve as workshop faculty. As leaders of highly-productive and well-known programs within cancer control and population sciences at DFCI and MGH, the PIs (Drs. Pirl and Temel) possess the requisite experience and leadership skills to organize this workshop.