Psychiatric faculty mentorship programs are key to this expert’s journey
Psychiatry and behavioral research professor Yvette Sheline has crafted a program to provide mentorship opportunities catered specifically to psychiatry researchers.
For over two decades, Yvette Sheline has been part of a national effort, funded by an R25 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health known as the Advanced Research Institute, to help provide mentoring to early career faculty. This yearly workshop helps the participants present and hone their ideas through what Sheline, the McLure Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Research in the Perelman School of Medicine, describes as a “boot camp.”
Yvette Sheline is the McLure Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Research in the Perelman School of Medicine.
(Image: Courtesy of Penn Medicine)
Participants share draft proposals for research projects they hope to fund with colleagues—both peers but also later-career researchers. These colleagues provide feedback on their topic, structure and even what reviewers at funding agencies may be looking for before submitting them for review. Typically, funding agencies enlist other academics in the field to review and score proposals, and they competitively award grants to only a small percentage of the projects.
Under the guidance of Maria Oquendo, the Ruth Meltzer Professor of Psychiatry and chair of Psychiatry, Sheline worked to craft a similar program that would provide mentorship opportunities catered specifically to psychiatry researchers. At the same time, she also shepherded a separate effort helping prepare early-career faculty in Psychiatry at Penn to pursue significant research grants to support their work, known as the grant preparation success program.
“Typically, at this early stage in a career, you're really being awarded the grant based on, do we want to invest in you? Having a quality mentor and mentorship plan is an important part of shaping those plans,” Sheline said.
Academia often pushes faculty to produce research, procure funding for their research through grants, and set up lab activities, but there is not always training in these aspects of the job. In her early faculty days, Sheline had no formal mentorship plan.
“When I came back into an academic setting, as a beginning assistant professor, I didn’t really have any mentors,” she recalls. “I had to invent it myself, pull myself up by my bootstraps and seek out support for writing a grant and critiquing my work, which made me realize how important it is to have a mentor, because it took me quite a while to get my research launched.”
In the years since, Sheline has built a career where she has excelled in both her own research and in offering the type of mentoring guidance that she lacked at this crucial early stage in her academic psychiatry career.
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