Session Objectives, 2005 BWF-HHMI Course in Scientific Management (Selected Sessions)

SESSION TITLE: COLLABORATIONS

OBJECTIVES:This session will teach strategies for fining collaborations, working within them, and avoiding common pitfalls of team-driven work. Attendees will have an opportunity to discuss the risks and benefits of sharing work, responsibility, and credit.

TOPICS:

What are the rewards and risks of collaboration?

  • What can be gained from collaborations (e.g., access to postdocs, authorship on high-impact papers, opportunities to branch out beyond your own interests, and other benefits)?
  • What are the potential pitfalls (e.g., the problem of being seen as a truly independent scientist at tenure time, the time demands of collaboration, and the potential for your trainees to become involved in authorship disputes or to get little credit for their time)?
  • How can you get the best reception from those involved in your tenure review for your collaborative efforts?

How can I become a better collaborator?

  • How to work as a member of a dispersed team
  • How to lead a collaborative team
  • How to negotiate win-win solutions to disagreements that may arise during a collaboration
  • How to best play to your own personality strengths when becoming involved in multigroup projects

How can I get involved in emerging projects?

  • How to determine at what point in your career you should begin considering collaboration
  • How to look for opportunities to collaborate
  • How to reach out to well-established researchers, especially when a collaboration will benefit you more obviously than it will them
  • How to look for funding for collaborations

SESSION TITLE: GETTING FUNDED

OBJECTIVES:This session will provide a basic understanding of the NIH review process and offer information about negotiating a grant submission through the investigator’s home institution and internal review and through an NIH study section. The session will also provide tips on writing a competitive grant application, including examples of mistakes to avoid. The session will include a discussion of other funding sources, such as NSF, and provide some information about basic budgeting principles.

TOPICS:

The NIH review process

  • Structure of NIH
  • Types of grants offered
  • R01 study section review process
  • Criteria for rating grant applications
  • Funding cycles
  • How to actively engage in the process through selecting the right NIH institute or center (I/C), getting assigned to the right study section, and communication as appropriate with the I/C program officer

Writing a successful grant application

  • Review of the initial idea and abstract: Getting started on an application
  • Components of a successful R01 application and common mistakes
  • Specifics to consider, such as the relevance of the proposed research to the mission of the funding agency and writing grants using animals or human subjects
  • Internal peer review
  • What to do if you are not funded

Other funding sources

  • Overview of NSF programs and review process
  • Review of other sources of funding outside the NIH

Budgeting

  • Reasonable budgets: How much should you ask for?
  • Direct versus indirect costs
  • Managing salaries across grants
  • Equipment ownership
  • Basic money management, including tracking expenditures during the course of the grant to manage current funds and prepare for the next grant cycle

SESSION TITLE: LABORATORY LEADERSHIP SKILLS

FORMAT: This session will consist of six modules: Leadership Styles and Self-Awareness, Giving and Receiving Feedback; Working with Others; Working Through Others; Acquiring and Using Organizational Power; and Goal Setting.

OBJECTIVES:Participants will be presented with their results of two assessment surveys: the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and Skillscope. After receiving the results, the facilitators will answer individual questions and help the participants identify the skills they need to improve in order to become more effective leaders.

TOPICS:

Leadership styles and self-awareness

  • Explore various approaches and styles to leadership
  • Review MBTI and Skillscope personality assessment results
  • Examine what skills you need to improve for your own leadership development

Giving and receiving feedback

  • Models of giving effective feedback
  • How to receive feedback in order to promote open communication

Working with others

  • Decision-making processes and their impacts
  • Observing team behavior in decision making
  • Modes for handling conflict
  • Models of negotiation

Working through others

  • What are the elements that make good teams?
  • What issues usually derail a team?
  • What can you do to get a team unstuck?
  • What are three types of teams in most organizations?
  • Relating MBTI and Skillscope results to team activity

Acquiring and using organizational power

  • Sources of power at individual and organizational levels
  • Ways of gaining power

Goal setting

  • The relationship between assessment, job challenge, and goal setting
  • Ways to develop creative approaches to goals setting

SESSION TITLE: Mentoring and Being Mentored

OBJECTIVES:This session will explore why mentoring is important and how good mentoring, both given and received, can make one’s scientific life better, happier, and more successful.

TOPICS:

How can I be a better mentor?

  • How to know if you’re doing a good job or not
  • Mechanics and tools for giving trainees feedback on their performance and your expectations
  • What not to do
  • Mentoring tips from personal experience
  • Mentoring people from different backgrounds (race, ethnicity, and gender)

How can I get mentoring for myself?

  • Asking for help and feedback
  • Finding mentors outside your usual sphere
  • Getting the most out of mentors assigned to you by your institution

How can I encourage members of my lab to mentor one another?

  • Establishing a “teaching culture” within your laboratory
  • Helping students understand how and why their careers will be built around strong contacts with a few key individuals
  • Helping trainees identify and establish good working relationships with their peers, near-peers, and senior scientists, who will form the core of their professional networks

SESSION TITLE:PROJECT MANAGEMENT

OBJECTIVES:This session will introduce participants to the basic concepts of project management, with a focus on ones most useful to early career scientists.

TOPICS:

  • What project planning is and why it is a useful tool at all levels of scientific investigation.
  • An overview of basic project-planning principles with examples of how the principles apply to basic science investigations.
  • Using project planning in the day-to-day operation of an early-career scientist’s laboratory with examples.
  • Using project-planning principles from the “big picture” perspective to manage large multicenter basic research investigations, such as those encountered in cancer, HIV, genomics, and infectious disease research. Specifically, how project management allows you to manage large multicenter projects and how young investigators fit into this picture.

SESSION TITLE: TIME MANAGEMENT

OBJECTIVES:This session will provide strategies to manage day-to-day activities, and strategies to handle issues that take up a substantial portion of junior faculty’s time, such as teaching, committees, research.

TOPICS:

Time management tools, challenges, and practical considerations

  • The big picture: Goals, priorities, and tasks
  • Strategies for planning ahead
  • The art of multitasking
  • Strategies to maximize the time you do have
  • The Urgent/Not Urgent matrix tool for time management
  • Time spent in the office versus time spent in the lab
  • Delegating tasks versus doing it yourself
  • Choosing institutional/departmental commitments that you enjoy and are advantageous to your career
  • When to accept technicians, undergraduate students, graduate students, or postdocs into your lab
  • Life outside the lab: Family issues, making time for yourself, bringing work home

SESSION TITLE: TEACHING AND COURSE DESIGN

OBJECTIVES: An academic departmental responsibility for junior faculty often includes a teaching component. This session is designed to address three different teaching environments. The panelists will introduce strategies and best practices for teaching large lecture classes, teaching at liberal arts colleges, and teaching medical students.

TOPICS:

  • Teaching at a large research-oriented university. Topics includedthe importance of scientific teaching, the value of active-learning methods, and resources for teaching assistance.
  • Teaching at a medical school. Topics included the general structure of medical education, teaching at different student levels (i.e., medical, graduate, undergraduate) in a medical school, basic sciences in medical training, and medical school curriculum design.
  • Teaching at a liberal arts college or university.Topics included how to take advantage of smaller class sizes to develop effective learning opportunities, creating new courses and redesigning existing ones, pedagogy outside the classroom, and teaching science to nonscience majors.

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