Hello Everyone
Paula Saffie (@psaffie) and I are excited to announce Year 2 of the Mentorship & Training Task Force. This is a task force that was started last year by @psaffie and @fbbriggs that had great success, which we hope to continue. For those of you who have a passion for mentorship and training the next generation of scientists, this is the Task Force for you!
The goal of the Task Force is to grow and cultivate a supportive community environment that provides access and resources to training for individuals of all career stages who have interest in Parkinson disease and related conditions. We hope to create an infrastructure that allows for easy access to mentors (across a range of disciplines) for those who are seeking training or guidance on professional development and/or scientific topics. The aim is to have a flexible training environment, ranging from time-limited question and answer to formal collaborations.
We are still in the beginning stages of Year 2 of the Task Force. However, some preliminary output goals are:
- Develop and deploy a call for competitive grant applications that are intended to provide resources and support to trainees of the community
- Identify mentors of the community and create a pipeline for matching mentors with mentees
- Brief webinars that target certain training topics that are made widely available to the community (professional development, scientific)
- Maintain mentor-related activity on the platform in order to increase visibility and access for trainees
We are excited to those who have already signed up to support the task force (@fbbriggs @danieltds @Vidash @AmgadDroby)! We are looking for more community members to join us in our efforts to mentor and train the future scientists as well as facilitate research and collaboration on Parkinson disease and related conditions.
Based on interest, members will be assigned to a certain project or task(s) to be completed over the course of the year. We will identify a meeting schedule to monitor progress but the hope is much of the work can be completed independently or in teams. The workload will be very manageable.
We will have our first meeting in July in order to solidify the goals, team-based projects, and assignments (@jgottesman @gginnan). If you are interested in contributing to this initiative, we would be thrilled to have you. Please indicate your interest below or to reach out to us with any questions!
Mike and Paula
