Mentorship Goals

Mentoring is one of my favorite parts of this career and I accept a wide range of trainees from high school students learning blood assays for the first time to senior medical fellows questioning the management of complex endocrine pathology.

If your goal is to run your own lab. That is the path I took and it is the one I am best equipped to help you take. Trainees aiming for independence get a defined project that is theirs to take when they leave, negotiated in writing early. I expect you to write your own fellowship or K award and I will protect the time for it. You are first author on your primary project. I introduce you to the people who will one day review your grants and write your letters, including through the Cancer Grand Challenges consortium. See Training Opportunities for what this looks like at each stage.

Our members leave the lab with a broad array of clinically relevant skills including a practical understanding of blood analyte testing methods, histology preparation and pathologic examination, whole body physiologic assessments of glucose and lipid homeostasis, rigorous clinical trial design methods, and a thorough understanding of endocrine feedback loops, cell signaling pathways, and traditional molecular biology. All trainees are taught the principles of Rigor & Reproducibility and Responsible Conduct of Research.

Each mentee gets a personalized career development plan including an expected timeline of milestones to facilitate an efficient training period. My goal is to ensure your success in whatever field you wish to enter. Many of our trainees go into academic research and I plan their training backward from that. Others go into medicine, industry, or consulting, and those are equally good outcomes. We collaborate extensively with startups, biotechs, and pharmaceutical companies, so if that is your goal, we will get you there too.

Recent trainees have gone on to faculty positions at Charité Berlin, NYU Grossman School of Medicine, to Senior Scientist positions in Industry, to residency and fellowship at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Memorial Sloan Kettering, and to MD/PhD programs including Tri-Institutional, UT Southwestern, and Harvard.

My mentors taught me to nurture relationships and create a comfortable work environment. I aim to accomplish these goals by normalizing mistakes and failure, discouraging competition, and helping lab members navigate conflicts in healthy ways. I do not measure people by hours logged. I expect focused, sustainable work rather than presence, and I encourage regular exercise and take vacation seriously enough to make it mandatory. I regularly monitor for burnout, depression, and financial stress. Lab members can always speak with me about harassment, bullying, sexual misconduct, race, and racism at work or home. I have no tolerance for prejudice, hatred, or violence in any context.

My lab is a melting pot of culturally diverse individuals, and I am committed to supporting trainees from underrepresented backgrounds, including those with a disability and/or from disadvantaged backgrounds. In this regard, I am the faculty advisor of the Association of Diverse Physician-Scientists in Training (ADePT), which is an organization within the MD-PhD Program for students from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in science and medicine with the goal of encouraging and facilitating community-building, advocacy, and mentorship. I am also a small group leader within the Diversity Cascade Program where teams of underrepresented minority faculty, alumni, fellows, residents, postdocs, and medical students meet for mentoring up and down the training “cascade.”