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!
Thanks @malosco for giving the kick-off post! I would like to encourage people to join, with a personal training and mentorship example.
This freshly publish manuscript shows in a practical way how training and mentorship could align to bring to light a research that wouldn’t be possible without collaboration. Special mention to Sara Bandres-Ciga that is not in this community, and @mike@peixott@schuh.afs@hamptonl !!!
When I begun working in this article, I barely knew how to use python or Terra (the GP2 platform at that time), and after good mentoring, training and 3 years of hard work, this paper is out, bringing insights for PRS comparisson from 7 different ancestry cohorts, and almost 50.000 PD cases and controls, increasing our understanding of heterogeneity of PD risk accross populations.
If you want to do research, but you are scared that you your knowledge is low, but you are highly motivated please contact us training@malosco ! If you are a grateful mentor, that want to motivate other, please also join us!
Some of the things i love to see. This is a fantastic motivation for me, @psaffie. I must admit that it can be intimidating sometimes. The irony of the situation is that whenever I feel scared, @jgottesman gets to remind me how much I fit into this. I hope to tell more of this story within the space of a year.
Unfortunately, we had a scheduling conflict and will need to find a new time for our task force call. Apologies for the inconvenience! Please indicate your preferred date of the two options below:
