Forging your path along brilliant mentors
With Dr Kristin Hope
Kristin has had two important guiding principles in the choices she has made in her career: the desire to work on something that would make a difference in people’s life and clarity about what interested her.
About Kristin
Kristin is Senior Scientist at the University Health Network and an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto. She also holds an Ontario Institute for Cancer Research Investigator Level II Award and is a Medicine by Design Investigator.
Listening to our conversation will prompt your thinking
What would synergy with your PI/ Postdocs/ PhD students look like for you?
What will matter to you most when you start building your research group?
Have you considered how supportive an institution is when applying for a position?
Some reflections and questions to ponder based on my discussion
Synergy between PIs and Postdocs
The choice Kristin made for her Postdoc work was a deliberate decision of identifying a research area that could seed future work for an independent position, but also of moving to a research group where she could combine her own research interests with the interests of the PI.
She was honest and open with the PI in letting them know what really interested her. Finding an effective alliance with a PI for her Postdoc position was created through establishing a synergy between them and merging their interests. Not hiding her aspiration for future research independence was very likely an important factor for the PI to recruit her. Seeing her drive through interest and curiosity would have been an important factor for the PI to recruit her.
The way Kristin talks about her transition between PhD and Postdoc, gives the impression of a certain ease in knowing what she wanted to carry on working on. She says that questions arose naturally about what she wanted to further explore.
For projects developed in partnerships between a Postdoc and a PI, there needs to be early frank conversations to lay the foundation of ownership and follow-up research directions.
If you are a Postdoc or PhD student:
o Have you thought how you can merge your own research interests with that of a PI’s project?
o How do you communicate to them the alignment and synergy between their research directions and your own research curiosity?
o Is your PI aware of your intentions when it comes to taking research forward after the end of your contract?
If you are a PI:
o What do you really want to see in an applicant when you are recruiting a Postdoc?
o Are you communicating with them clearly and honestly your approach to letting them develop progressively their research independence?
o When do you start having conversations about the next step in research direction and what your Postdocs can take forward as their own?
Cultivating patience
What has motivated Kristin over the years has evolved. Early on, of course the puzzle of biological questions was the main driver. As she progressed in her leadership roles, her interest in building teams and mentoring others has deepened. This was something she had already started to develop during her Postdoc, and she is now finding great joy in working with early career researchers.
Cultivating patience is something she has learned along the way. When you are supervising research, you are likely to spend a lot of time at the start of working with a new researcher, teaching them and trouble-shooting experimental procedures. You could feel so eager to see people become autonomous and less demanding upon your time, that there is often a risk of feeling frustrated if you see people not develop competencies at the speed you wish they would.
In her calm approach, Kristin sees this time investment through mentoring as part of the process of enabling growth in others. It is the building block of building the team. She perceives this as the patience needed that will reap many rewards. Enabling others to become self-sufficient is probably the only way to develop a productive team.
As a new research leader, welcoming the talent of other people may not feel easy. Going from being in control of all your research procedures to handing the reign and trusting someone else to do the work in their own ways may feel like a hard transition. Building trust steadily as you build relationships with your team members is at the crux of establishing a productive team. For some PIs, the letting go of control can feel very challenging.
o What are you actively doing now that promote the building of trust between you and your team members?
o What do you need to remind yourself when you are losing patience with the pace of work of your team members?
o What is it that you may be avoiding doing that could promote the autonomy and self-sufficiency of some team members?
You are the architect of your research group
As a new PI, holding on to the vision that you have of the type of work you want to achieve is a priority. Communicating this vision with great clarity is part of the process of engaging and motivating your team. Kristin shares that as an early stage research group leader, you need to honour your own vision, and become strong and confident to hold on to it.
Kristin has been influenced as a Postdoc by the exceptional leaders she has worked with. This has shaped her own approach of establishing a strong research team culture. Her experience taught her that to have a strong research environment, you need to communicate that you value deeply what the research group can do together.
As a PI, she has learned to tailor her approach to her team members and to pay great attention to individual needs. The insights gained from this careful attention is what is needed to know how to motivate each person. When a team member is not reaching out to you and interacting much, it could be easy to believe that they are all fine. They may not be! So always checking in with research team members and taking your blinders off to really listen is one of your key responsibilities as a research leader. Kristin sees her role as making things easier for her team member. Her phrase “how can I help you” is something she feels need to be repeated over and over. Saying it once at the beginning of a project between a PI and a PhD student/ Postdoc is just not enough. This is a message that she feels her team members need to hear over and over. Kristin says that your team members need to realise that you are an advocate for them and not a judge.
Building the interactions between team members across the whole team is quite a complex chemistry. She described paying attention to the personality of her team members and creating initial partnerships between team members based on her initial perception of individuals. There is an organic process in fostering these interactions between team members.
In her recruitment process, Kristin is also mindful of how a new recruit will fit into the team and how the types of partnership with others in the team will help this person to settle in the group. She says that you should not expect to just let people arrive in the group and find their way of navigating the research culture culture, and the team dynamic on their own. Socialising new recruits to the ways of working and the culture of the team is a critical induction process. Kristin involves the team during the recruitment process and before the start of a new appointee, to explore together how someone joining the group will be a good fit to working with everyone.
The choices you make in your recruitment may also need to be communicated to the team, particularly when you are working on increasing diversity. Your team may not understand why you have recruited a particular person on a role. Taking the time to bring some transparency about the logic and thinking you have about a particular recruitment choice is part of an important message of openness with your research group.
Obtaining clarity about the institutional support for working parents
In her research environment, she had had few encounters with working mums leading research groups. So, when she interviewed for her PI position, she really needed to know, what would be the ethos for working parents in the institution she was joining. She wanted to know before joining the institution:
How it would support her if she were to become a parent.
What would be the perception of the institution leadership about her taking a maternity leave.
Understanding how parents are supported for parental leave is rarely a consideration that new PIs may make when choosing an institution, but it is a critical one for anyone intending to have a family. The approach that an institution has about how it supports parental leave is a good indicator on the wholistic approach that it has in supporting the wellbeing of its staff.
The eagerness of setting up your research group at the end of a Postdoc or fellowship, and the limited number of opportunities for academic positions are likely to not make you consider as a deciding factor the overarching culture of the institution and how it deals with welfare issues for staff members. You may come to regret this later on!
Conversations about parenthood with colleagues may or may not be open, depending on the local culture of the institution. If we see academic colleagues talk openly about their family situations, the challenges of parenthood or caring responsibilities, these conversations become normalised and we do not need to hide our own caring realities. When we see a mum leave a departmental meeting to go and collect her kids from school, or a dad sit in a zoom meeting with a sick kid on his lap, we normalise the complexities of academics’ lives beyond the research environment.
As an early career academic, seeing your colleagues in the complexity of their family lives manage their academic role is an important contribution to supporting diversity of the research environment. Being asked by colleagues and peers about her family and her role as a parent was important to Kristin. It enabled her to be more open and honest about being a mum, and this in itself is a way of empowering others see that combining parenthood and research life is possible.
Kristin acknowledges that valuing the wholeness of your life as a parent instead of seeing your parenting role as something that you have to overcome in your research life is a valuable mindset to have. Kristin goes on to recognise that departments need to do more in their approach to considering the complexities of people’s life beyond the lab during recruitment and promotion panels. The expectations of achievements placed on individuals is most of the time blind to the personal context in which they work. The brutal assessment of academics’ achievements without an overall consideration of their context creates a situation where exceptional scientists may not be promoted, get fellowships or lectureship, and may indeed leave research. In the UK, there is a move now towards the use of narrative CVs in recruitment processes. The idea of this new approach is indeed a shift towards considering the complexities of people’s lives in navigating their research careers. There is a huge amount of work ahead in getting the narrative CVs to shift old practices in promotion and recruitment. Let’s hope it challenges the status quo!
“understand that people have those peaks and valleys in their career and to support them through that”
