Mentorship & Training Task Force

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Hello everyone,

We are Paula Saffie (@psaffie) and Farren Briggs (@fbbriggs), and we are thrilled to announce that we are leading the Mentorship & Training Task Force! This is a broad and fascinating initiative, and we firmly believe it can only succeed with the collaboration and support of our community members. Together, we can address the actual and real needs of our community, building a stronger, more connected research environment. Let’s join forces and make this vision a reality!

Our Task Force aims to curate and centralize resources and opportunities for mentorship and training, creating a space where the community can connect and benefit from existing tools and resources, identify needs in professional development, research, and education, and subsequently develop strategic action and implementation plans to address the evolving needs of the community.

The key output goals for our Task Force are:

  • Understand the needs of DCoP users, including their career stages, professional development needs, scientific training requirements, and short-, medium-, and long-term goals to identify possible mentees.
  • Identify members of the community with mentoring, leadership, teaching, and various analytical skills to identify possible mentors.
  • Facilitate mentorship teams and study groups, providing a collaborative environment for knowledge exchange.
  • Gather and organize information about training materials, ensuring easy access for the community to enhance their skills and knowledge.
  • Collaborate with other task forces where appropriate (e.g., work with the Networking and Outreach group to identify additional mentors/mentees).

By joining our Task Force, you will have the opportunity to support and empower researchers within our community. Your efforts will contribute to the professional development and training of your peers. This collaborative effort can enhance overall growth of PD research and connections within our community.

We are seeking 4-6 individuals to join the Task Force. Members are expected to participate in monthly meetings to monitor progress and engage in both synchronous and asynchronous communications. The workload will be manageable, with tasks distributed evenly among members.

Tentative Timeline:

Month 1-2: Compile a list of resources of available training materials (i.e. coursera, YouTube).

Month 1-3: Develop a training & mentoring needs assessment tool (survey) to gather comprehensive insights into the specific needs of DCoP users, which will enable us to tailor our initiatives to effectively support the community.

Month 1-3: Develop an expertise assessment tool (survey) to systematically gather information on the breadth and depth of knowledge, skills, and teaching expertise of the community. For those interested, this will allow us to create an readily searchable database to facilitate connections.

Month 4: Launch surveys. Disseminate list of resources (ask community for input)

Month 5: Summarize surveys

Month 6: Strategize next steps (i.e. partnering with other Task Forces on specific initiatives, launch team mentoring networks, etc).

If you are interested in contributing to this initiative, we would be thrilled to have you on board!! Please feel free to indicate your interest in the thread below or to reach out to us with any questions!

Farren and Paula

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Hello @psaffie and @fbbriggs, thank you for leading this important initiative. I would very much like to participate in this Task Force. If you are considering having a “test mentee,” I have someone who might be great. We can discuss. Look forward to next steps!

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Hi Paula and Farren!
Please count me in in this effort. I think many of the resources here described would greatly benefit my lab! I also have somewhat experience in both mentoring students here in the lab and more recently, in GP2.

I would love to collaborate!

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Hello,

I am interested in this topic, specially because I have some experience in mentoring and I think that I can help and learn a lot.

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Hello! I have interest in participating in this task force!

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Count me in👍
Would love to help

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Hi @Vidash @danieltds @paularp @malosco @peixott ,

@psaffie and I are excited to have you onboard. There was a hiccup with the original post, so it was temporarily closed, and only re-opened 2 days ago - thus, our delay in reaching out to co-ordinate. I’ll follow-up with a pvt DM to scheduling.

To the rest of the DCOP, if you are interested in joining at any point in 2024-2025, send me a DM and I’ll loop you in!

Best,
Farren

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Hi all (especially: @psaffie @paularp @danieltds @malosco @peixott @Vidash )

The M&T Task Force had its kick-off meeting September 10th, 2024. This task force aims to foster and support PD research by providing resources/tools that will support mentorship and training. All of our materials are in this Google Drive Folder. You can review our kick-off slides and meeting notes, with the latter containing a great summary of the many excellent ideas/points discussed. There are many directions in which this taskforce may go/evolve, but to start, these are our initial action items:

Immediate

  • Compile a list of existing training resources (i.e. GP2 tutorials) that reflect diverse learning styles and language/programming agnostic

  • Document best practices for mentees/mentors for pair and team settings

Near future

  • Comprehensive list of DCoP expertise and/or point person for various training materials (i.e. identify a volunteer who could be a point person to for existing WGS tutorials; who to tag for various discourse posts/questions) and be interested in mentorship activities (i.e. who is looking to connect with potential mentors)

    • Evaluate current intake/onboarding forms to see what is there and how best to optimize for this endeavor

Possible Near future

  • Develop/disseminate a mentorship & training needs assessment tool to understand the current DCoP needs and forecasting for future DCoP expansion

We invite you (the entire DCoP) to share your thoughts and add to the training and mentorship folders! And if you are interested, you are welcome to join the taskforce at any time!

~F

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Hello @DCoP_Innovators with special call outs to @psaffie @fbbriggs @jgottesman @gginnan,

I enjoyed the Mentorship & Training Task Force Kick-Off meeting on 9/10/2024. Thank you @psaffie and @fbbriggs for spearheading. I do have one idea that I was hoping to get feedback on from the Community and move towards implementation (also happy to wait to discuss at the next meeting for this task force).

In my opinion and as I have expressed, one of the real values of this community is our collective expertise and resources that can be used to train next generation scientists. I would love to see this operationally take place: Can we identify a trainee (e.g., graduate student, post-doc, early career faculty, faculty new to PD etc) who has a specific scientific question in mind that will use one of the PD data sets (see Data Wrangling Guide) but needs mentorship on execution (e.g., acquisition of data, analyses, writing, and/or content input etc).

As some of you might know, we published a study on the association between tackle football and PD using Fox Insight Data, see here: American Football Play and Parkinson Disease Among Men - PMC

There continues to be tons of traumatic brain injury data collected in Fox Insight that is relatively untouched. I have a PhD student (second year) who has an interest in exploring this data. She is quite ambitious, independent, and a quick learner with a solid statistical foundation. However, she could use mentorship on acquiring and merging the data, conducting the analyses, and content. I wonder if we can use this opportunity to create a model for how our community can serve as a mentorship/training resource? Maybe we form a mentorship team for her? Open to ideas on best model. Its also a great chance for members of the community to come together to collaborate on a scientific project.

I would be very interested in everyones thoughts on this and how/if to proceed.

Mike

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@malosco, I really like this model. How would you see the DCoP mentors/mentoring team contributing in the context of her academic mentoring committee?

My thoughts for team mentoring would be bringing together DCoP members of different levels (trainee to sr. scientist) that can share/discuss opportunities/challenges/needs. However, I am sensing a different model where we can bring together a cohort (mentee team) of new DCoP members (i.e. your student) and be team mentoring by a rotating group of DCoP members (mentor team; i.e. members can rotate off after a year). The mentor team can then work with the mentee team - so that it is overlapping in effort.

What do you/others think?

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@malosco and @fbbriggs, I really appreciate your thoughts on this. It sounds like a great collaboration opportunity, especially with clear objectives, measurable goals, and a well-defined timeline. My only concern, given the nature of this project, is the time commitment involved. With that in mind, I’m on board to move forward, but I believe we should establish a detailed timeline and scheme, along with clear expectations and commitments from both the trainee and mentor from the start.

If we approach this as a pilot project, we would need to identify the right mentor, define specific tasks, and create the right environment for it to succeed. How do you think we should go about finding the mentor? Would you be able to outline the key skills or requirements that person should have? Thanks again for the great idea—let’s keep rolling!

Paula

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@fbbriggs @psaffie @jgottesman I have a PhD student ready to go! She wants to examine some data from Fox Insight. I wonder if we give her access to this forum and connect her with those who have expertise in Fox Insight data including myself? She can then come to us for guidance on accessing the data, using the data, content, etc. Thoughts?

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That’s great! She can register at: https://rcop.michaeljfox.org/. If/when she has questions she can post them here and we can do our best to get answers!

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Great!
Should we make her a timeline and goals to achieve in a certain time? I think @fbbriggs has more experience on the mentorship side.
Happy to help in whatever is needed

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Hi Mike, did the trainee register? Wanting to explore how we can facilitate/contribute.

F

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Hi! - how do we get her registered? @jgottesman @gginnan What should the plan be? We need to identify who would be interested in the project?

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Hi Mike,

She can register by creating an account at rcop.michaeljfox.org. I think then if she wants to make a post about what she’s working on/looking for in terms of collaborators/mentors, we can try to facilitate those connections?

Farren/Paula/Greg please weigh in if you have other thoughts!
Josh