This is the last in a series of blog posts about the Transforming Research Initiative, the faculty-developed strategic plan for research at IUSM that was completed in 2013.
The report listed six key goals for the research mission. We’ve covered four of them in the previous posts: research themes, team science, research communication and cores/centers/institutes. This week, recruitment and retention, and mentoring. (Once again, you can download the executive summary here.)
Goal 5: Recruitment and Retention
Recruiting and retention issues are with us always and we have instituted several initiatives to improve our efforts in this area. We continue to use funding from the Lilly Endowment-supported Physician Scientist Initiative to recruit accomplished researchers and to support projects such as the new centers for musculoskeletal and diabetes research.
Working with the Showalter Trust, we were able to add the Showalter Scholars program to our retention arsenal. Four young scientists are selected each year and receive $75,000 over three years to help fund their research.
Other efforts that support recruiting and retention include initiatives within the Office of Faculty Affairs and Professional Development, which now has four staffers specializing on recruitment and onboarding.
Goal 6: Mentoring
We’ve undertaken several initiatives to improve our mentoring efforts, starting with the Peer Review and Mentoring Committees. Those committees were created to provide investigators with advice from successful scientists to improve their grant proposals, both new and resubmissions. The committees also offer project management and biostatistics support. (For an account of how a grant application moved from the 54th to the 5th percentile after a PRMC review, see this inScope article.)
We also introduced the Independent Investigator Incubator, or I3, created and led by Aaron Carroll, now the associate dean for research mentoring at IUSM. This effort makes senior faculty “supermentors” available to younger researchers.
To encourage more applications for T32 awards to mentor pre- and post-doctoral trainees, we initiated annual support to PIs for new and competing renewal training grants.
All in all, I think we can feel good about the work that’s been accomplished in the last couple of years, effort that has made the TRI a working document. And like the TRI itself, these programs and successes have been the result of countless members of our research community pitching in to strengthen our research enterprise — efforts on which we can continue to build, because our work isn’t done.
