Thank you for being stalwart and being here today. So, my name is Marilyn Pow, and I am the Clinical Director and Deputy Scientific Director at the NIMH. And we're going to — I'm going to introduce everyone, but I'll just say a word about myself. So, I actually train in pediatrics and child psychiatry, so I love pediatrics. CL is my true love, if I could do anything I wanted to do. But I ended up in this interesting research career and so you're going to hear a little bit about everyone's story. Maybe you didn't think you were interested in research, but you never really know. So, that's really the point of this, is that there's all kinds of ways to do research. And just building your network always as you're going along, coming up and meeting people, talking to people. You never know what door is going to open and what's going to be interesting. And for me, I always wanted to be an academic pediatric CL psychiatrist. I thought I was going to stay at Hopkins forever where I did my training. And then, you know, life happens, as many people will tell you, that suddenly you're married and you have kids and your husband is working at NIH down in Bethesda and, you know, commuting. And, you know, maybe the chair isn't really interested in pediatric CL and suddenly your work is not valued in the place that you're working in. And so, you realize, okay, there might be other places to look. And I looked at everything at that time when I decided to make the transfer to D.C. I looked at a full-day private practice. I looked at infants and children at the Lurie Center. I looked at Children's Hospital. And ultimately, the best place for me was Children's Hospital to do peds CL again. And lucky me, I had a mentor, David Mrazik, who was the chair of the peds child psych department. And he was himself a CL researcher, a very successful R01 funded one. And so, that was just coincidental for me. But he really mentored all of his faculty and he would have research assistants available to his faculty. And he would send all the faculty what he called the grant informer, which was a monthly publication of all the grants that were available to his faculty, both soft grants and hard grants. And then he would help you try to start some of this work. So, we don't learn how to do research necessarily if you go up a straight clinical track while you're a trainee. So, it's just like any other set of skills. You have to start and learn another way on all these different skills to become a researcher. And it's never too late. And so, I actually learned. I stayed at Children's Hospital for eight years and then I came to the NIMH, partly to run their pediatric CL service in the clinical center. Okay, how many people actually know there's a hospital at the NIH? Okay, yay. So, there's a 200-bed hospital there and they actually need clinicians. And so, being a good clinician will take you a long way and take you many places also. And so, I became the pediatric CL director at the NIH. And while I was there, I learned from people like Holly and other people how to do research on the job. But I really came because I realized in myself I was a good administrator. And when you, because when you run CL services, you start to work systems and you really know how to be organized and run systems. So, I actually came to the NIMH originally as an administrator to stand up their data safety and monitoring board at the time because I had gotten some experience in IRBs while I was at Children's. So, the two things I learned at Children's were how to do quality assurance and how to be on an IRB. Institutional Review Board is actually where you read a lot of protocols. And through that, I also learned about research and human subjects protection. And then I became an expert at human subjects protection. And that's actually what got me my job at the NIH. So, you will be learning and you will see in these other talks, it's the same, you think you're going this way and then life happens and other opportunities come up. So, we are also going to have Dr. Holly Lisenby, who's the director of translational research, director of the non-invasive neuromodulation unit in the experimental therapeutics and pathophysiology branch in the intramural program. So, she has two hats. And then Olu Adilore, he's also the associate head for faculty development at the University of Illinois Center for Depression and Resilience. And he has a whole lot of other programs he directs that I'll let him tell you about. But he's a researcher in the field now, so he can tell you about networks that he's developed. So, just to say these views are our views and they don't represent the views of the government. This is what I have to say coming from the NIMH. And we don't have any financial conflicts to disclose. Everyone has their own disclosures as well. So, hopefully by the end of the session, because this is being recorded, you'll be able to name three types of scholarly projects that trainees can conduct, identify NIMH supported research networks and describe how the National Network of Depression Centers creates and fosters connections across the network to advance research. We designed this to hopefully hear about different sections, how to launch a career in research, how to build your own professional network, as you've heard mine already and you'll be hearing from Holly and Olu. And then learning about these different NIMH funded research networks and how you could possibly play a role and then leveraging existing networks such as the National Network of Depression Centers. And then we wanted to leave a lot of time for you to ask questions also. So, and we'll keep it pretty informal so you can also raise your hand and ask questions during the session. So, what skills do you need to launch a research career? So, I talk a lot about the fact that we don't necessarily know how to do research and it can be research with a little R, which we all think we want to do. If we want to collect systematic information, after you do clinical work for a while, that's what happened to me. After I saw a thousand patients in pediatric CL, I said, oh, there actually aren't a lot of patterns here and information that I would like to disseminate to other people because these are pearls that maybe I could pass on. So, that's research with a little R, what I consider. And it starts with something as easy as writing case reports. And so, maybe you find a faculty member to mentor you on how to write a case report. But in case you can't find a mentor, there are actually formulas for how to write a case report. And these slides will be online, you can access them. And so, this is just one checklist on elements that you would need yourself in order to make sure you have that information if you wanted to write a case report for a journal. And case reports are actually coming back. I know that the Journal of Academy of Consultation Liaison Psychiatry has a case report section. There are many journals that are now having a junior academic early career version of their, or J-CAP Connect, other journals that are allowing residents and early career psychiatrists to publish and to try to help themselves advance their careers. So, that still is one metric that people still utilize. So, this is just the section and make sure you have a discussion. And the only thing I wanted to remind people is that you do have to sometimes describe your informed consent of the patient. So, in the old days, you could just look at charts and review things, and sometimes you have to get through approval if you're describing a lot of personal identifying information. So, and many patients, this is just to highlight that. Does the patient know? Because some journals will require that, so. All right, so case reports is a great place to start. That is definitely where I started. Wrote a lot of case reports in my pediatric residency. You can do it as a trainee and work with your mentors to do it. So, another form of early research that gets you learning the different elements is the Plan, Do, Study, Act, right? This is quality improvement. You're all supposed to be doing some version of this in your training also. And I, and there's no hospital that doesn't have this process. So, it's a good process to learn because it will get you involved in other aspects of the hospital and learn the systems as well. And that's a different network, but it's still an important network to get familiar with. Very often, it has to do with other disciplines as well, such as nursing. So, what kinds of quality improvement projects? I require all my principal investigators to submit a quality improvement, quality assurance project from their laboratories and we review one a month. And then they can come back in a year later and tell us if they haven't, if they're just starting one, they can talk about what they're going to do. And then they come back in a cycle because it's a continuous performance improvement activity that we have to be doing. So, we've had people do pediatric blood draw. You know, we have to, how do we measure how much blood? How do we prevent ourselves from drawing too much blood from pediatric patients? Some labs have done that as a process. The PET lab has done, you know, how do they keep their ligands from failing? And so, looking at different processes, there is no laboratory that could not improve itself. So, it's just a question of being able to think of the question that process that you want to improve. And then this is the template on how you might do that. So, you have an aim on what's something you want to improve. It has to have an action verb in it. You're going to improve. You're going to identify. So, and then you're going to evaluate it. And then you're going to analyze what are controllable factors in that and what are not controllable factors. And so, that helps you figure out how you're going to be able to modify your process. And so, and then you can, how do you, what are you going to use as your metric to tell that you've made an improvement? And then you present your data with whatever charts or graphs or tables. And then you just discuss what strategies you tried and what you learned. Now, you don't always come out with an improvement. You may not even have data by the time your year comes around. But you have at least gone through the process of thinking about how do we systematically collect data, identify a question, collect data, and report out on it. That's essentially research. Those are the skills that you need. So, this is a stepping stone to being able to do additional kinds of research. You can tell what changes you might make to your process. You're gonna label it differently. You're gonna catch the kids earlier. You're gonna warn the parents before they come to check the weights and the drinking before the kids come for blood draws. So, there are many steps that you might identify in improving the process. And so, then you just keep going. So, it's Plan, Do, Study, Act. All right, so now we are stepping into bigger research. So, the National Institutes of Health is made up of 27 centers and institutes of which the NIMH is one. But it's certainly not the largest institute. The largest institute is the National Cancer Institute which has its own line item budget. But we consider NIMH a mid-sized institute. Why do you care? Well, there are 27 institutes. Each one has its own mission, its own budget, its own activities and priorities, and its own way of doing business. It's a little bit like states' rights. So, sadly, there's a few things that are from above, but generally, it's states' rights. And so, each institute has its own goals and that's why it's important for you, especially in the mental health area, there are a number of institutes that might be able to support the work that you wanna do. So, if you're interested in substance abuse, you might also be looking at the National Institute of Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Alcohol and Alcohol-Related Diseases, NIAAA. So, that's why you wanna pay attention. In my world, I live in the consult world, if we're looking at the QT syndromes or QT prolongation, we're actually gonna be applying probably to the Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Or the Genetics Institute for other projects that we wanna do, biomarker projects and other things. So, there are several brain institutes, National Institute of Aging, so that's another place. Pain, for instance, doesn't have an actual home. It's covered a lot by the National Center for Integrated, Complementary and Integrated Health, so NCCIH. So, you have to do a little searching on the web for the different NIH institutes. Now, your most important contact. NIH program officer. So, I didn't know when I first started, this person at NIH wants to help you. They actually are, and maybe you'll attest to that later. So, there's the program people who are interested in trying to help you realize what's there to get grants for, and then there are the grants people who administer and give that. And they're actually separate. So, and then I'm even further separate. I'm in the intramural program, and I don't have anything to do with giving out grants. We do the research. About 11% of the research actually occurs on the intramural campus in Bethesda, and so we have our own funding to do research there, and I'm gonna come back to that. But this program officer, when I was at Children's Hospital, they're the person you can ask all the questions you want to, and they will provide assistance to you in helping you prepare your application, and they will try to help you shape your protocol or application to try to fit what NIH says its priorities are. So, if it's not on priority, it's not gonna get a lot of attention. So, they will try to help you or direct you to the most appropriate funding opportunity and provide technical assistance. So, and they can observe the review and sort of give you feedback and help you with resubmitting, and Holly can jump in on any of this if I'm not getting it right, because I don't work on that side of the institute. And then, and they're really your advocate, to be honest. They're trying to help you, and they don't give the money part. So, they can be fully invested in trying to help you succeed. So, there are five extramural divisions, the neuroscience and basic behavioral division, and then Holly, who's in charge of the translational division, and we have an AIDS division, HIV division, and then Office of Disparities Research and Workforce Diversity, and then a services interventions division. So, you can see they run the gamut from preclinical and basic work to psychopathology and treatment development to services delivery. So, this is just to put out the webpage in case you're interested in looking a little further at all the possibilities for training, okay? So, we take training pretty seriously. That's also a big part of our mission, and so there are several ways you can receive training funds from NIMH. You can directly receive them as an individual award, or you can get them through your own institution where T32s or KL2s are supporting you, and then you can also ask for, from an administrative supplement to an existing grant. So, I had that when I was at Children's Hospital. I was working in HIV, and I was an add-on grant to somebody who already had a grant. I had a minority supplement to help look at neuropsychiatric diseases in kids with HIV. So, that's how I got started, and you can see there are these different types of grants. So, just a word about the K999-R00. That's a pathway to independence. So, really what NIH is looking for is to see, can you run your own lab eventually? And it takes a long time to acquire those skills, but that's the ultimate goal. They're trying to see if they can groom you to be an independent investigator. So, these are the folks who can apply. They'll give you five years support in two phases. The K99 is a mentored part for two years, and the R00 helps you go to your new institution and get independent with the funding you bring, and I would say that even if you come to the NIMH intramural program, you can apply for these as well. And again, there's another award you can also apply for if you come to NIMH for intramural training. There's a K22 as opposed to the K23, so there are different intramural awards because people, there's a myth out there, if you come to intramural, you'll never learn how to write a grant. That is absolutely not the case. We definitely teach grant writing, and we definitely want you to compete for the external grants, the BBRF grants, or the NARSAD grants, just like everybody else, and you can apply for the K99, R00, or this other K to try to bridge yourself out of the NIMH if you decide you want to keep going. So these are the other mentored career development awards. You can chime in if there's anything you want to say about these awards, but most of you can ask more in-depth questions once we move on. So again, training opportunities, supplements for physician scientists, loan repayment is quite good for both, if you come to the NIMH, it's like $20,000. Right off the bat, ACGME accredited, but there is a competitive $35,000 for three years each year. So there's quite a number of supports to encourage you also to think about the NIMH as a potential site also for training. All right, so these are all in the slides for your availability, just in case you're interested in contacting anyone in the different divisions. You have Dr. Lisenby here, so you can also talk to her afterwards. And then just, sorry, you want me to go back? Yeah, let people take pictures here. But they are available on the site for APA. And then these are all the intramural training opportunities, so people can come from high school, they can come for summer internships, these are paid. Many, many students come between college and graduate school because they don't know what they want to do after they came to college, and they're thinking about medical school, or maybe they want to go to clinical psych grad program, but they haven't had enough papers, so they come for what we call an internship, but it's a post-bac intramural research training award. It's basically a research assistant job for two years, and they usually are quite productive and get lots of papers during that time and learn a lot about the research process. Almost all of them go on to the graduate school of what they have as their goals. So it's an excellent program, and all the institutes have that, so you can do it in any field. We have many pre-doctoral programs, post-doctoral programs, visiting fellows, and specifically in NIMH, we actually take PGY-4 residents. If you know you want to do research, and perhaps you're in a resource-poor university that doesn't offer a research track, you might consider coming to NIMH as a PGY-4. It's a transfer, so you would actually be graduating from NIMH, so maybe you don't want to leave your own institution, but you can come as a five, six, or seven. So you can come and do research and learn. It's a mentored program, so we have to find a match with a mentor to take you before we accept you. And then that leads to the clinical fellowship program. So I'll just put up here, Janet Clark is the director of our Office of Fellowship Training for both the basic and the clinical and all of those programs. Lisa Collins, who was here speaking with me yesterday on residency well-being, is the clinical fellowship training director over the PGY-4 program and other. And Hania is her associate program director. We do take medical student electives as well, resident electives, with some work through making program agreements with her programs. So you can find Dr. Clark on LinkedIn, and that's it. Yeah. Question, can you do it in the mic, because they're recording? Just a quick question, like, are these opportunities available for people who are non-US citizens? Some of them are, and some of them aren't, yeah. Depends on the grants, yeah, yeah. Anyone else? Okay, so it's my pleasure to turn it over to Holly. Thank you, Marilyn. Good afternoon, and so my name is Holly Lisenby. My first name is Sarah, but I go by Holly, which is a nickname for my middle name, which is Hollingsworth, which is my grandmother's middle, maiden name, so TMI. So these are my disclosures, and as Marilyn said, I wear a number of different hats. I run a research lab in the Intramural Research Program at NIMH, and I also direct an extramural funding division that gives out grants, including grants to trainees, and I'm part of the NIH Brain Initiative. So like Marilyn, I'm going to start by telling you my journey in research and along the way that we try to impart some lessons learned. So I started in research early on as an undergrad at Duke University, so blue devil. I should put that on my disclosure slide. And my first research mentor as an undergraduate was Greg Lockhead, who was a psychology professor. In this day, there wasn't neuroscience, there weren't departments of neuroscience, you couldn't major in neuroscience, but experimental psychology was the closest thing. And so what Dr. Lockhead taught me was how to do research as an undergraduate, and it's with him that I published my first paper. And he taught me about how research is an active process. Whenever I would meet with him, he'd say, what are you going to teach me today? And I thought, wait, isn't it the other way around? But no, I really learned research is an active process. He also taught me about generosity in academia. Basically, we worked on this project, and when it was finished, he said, well, you know, you're going to be the first author on this. I'm already tenured. I don't need any more papers. You need it more than I do. So I would have to say it pretty much taught me early on what an ideal mentor is. And then I met my next mentor, who was a psychiatrist, my first psychiatrist mentor, Keith Brody, who at the time was president of Duke University. And that's what opened my eyes to a pathway towards becoming a psychiatrist and going to medical school. At Duke Medical School, we had one year dedicated to research, and I worked in the lab of Jay Weiss, and that's how I learned how to do animal research, and it was really an exciting process to design, conduct, and write up studies. Then I went on to psychiatry residency at Duke, and an early mentor was Rich Weiner, who opened my eyes to the field of brain stimulation, starting with, of course, ECT, and seeing patients miraculously recover after being treated with ECT. And I remember asking Rich, how does that work? And he said, you know, we don't really know. And I thought, that's what I want to study. I want to study mechanisms of action of ECT, and later that expanded to other forms of brain stimulation. Now, one of the tools that we use to study mechanisms of action of ECT and brain stimulation is brain imaging, and that's something I learned about from another early mentor, Ranga Krishnan, who was an expert in the early days of neuroimaging. And I've used these tools throughout the course of my research career, and it was with Ranga that I published my second academic paper, again, a very generous mentor. I got to be first author on that, even though I was just a resident. After residency, I then went to Columbia University on a T32-supported postdoctoral research fellowship, and my mentor was an expert on ECT, so was following that ECT path. But my project was to study transcranial magnetic stimulation, TMS, and no one was doing TMS at Columbia at that time. And so I remembered Greg Lockhead, that what am I going to teach my mentor today? So I had to seek out expertise in TMS at another institution, which turned out to be NIH, and in a different department. So these are all neurologists. One of them is a double-boarded neurologist psychiatrist. So this is Mark Hallett, Eric Wasserman, Alvaro Pasqualeone, and Mark George, who was the winner of the APA Research Award at this meeting. And they were doing TMS. They were all at NIH at the time, some in NINDS and some at NIMH. And that's how I learned TMS and brought that technology back to Columbia. And also, I just love this photograph of Vahia Masian, the late Dr. Masian, who was a physiologist and an early expert in the field of TMS, and I spent many happy hours in his lab learning some of the fundamental neurophysiological mechanisms of action of TMS. And I also love this picture to impart how joyous research can be. It's really an exciting process of discovery. So you can see that each of these people in these photographs were part of my building my own research network. These were my mentors. And they spanned departments, and they spanned institutions. So next, as a postdoctoral fellow, my project was to develop a new treatment called magnetic seizure therapy to use TMS to induce seizures as a safer, more focal form of ECT. And it meant I had to work with engineers. So now I'm going again to interdisciplinary work. And these engineers were in, you know, across the ocean. They were in the U.K. So this is Tony Barker, Reza Jelenos, and Ian Freeston, and I'm standing in the middle. Barker, Jelenos, and Freeston were the three authors in the first TMS publication ever, which came out in 1985 in The Lancet. They developed the first TMS device. And Reza Jelenos became my engineering partner and built the first MST device, which is pictured here, which we used to do the first magnetic seizure therapy in an animal, which was a non-human primate. Then my first R01 research grant was to study the cognitive safety, the neurophysiological effects, and the neuroanatomical effects of MST in the rhesus monkeys. So I had to seek out more interdisciplinary mentors. This is Herb Terras, Charlie Schroeder, and Bruce Luber, who were experts in primate cognition, neurophysiology, and neuroscience. And together we had an interdisciplinary team. And I was presenting a poster on my monkey MST work at a national meeting when I met Thomas Schlepfer, pictured here, and he said, oh, that's really cool. I bet I could get approval to do that in humans. Would you want to, you know, collaborate with me? At the time he was based in Bern, Switzerland, and it did take us a year to get IRB approval to do the first human, and I flew the device out there, and we treated the first patient in this lovely city of Bern, Switzerland. And it goes to show that you never know who's going to come by your poster and what type of research collaboration it might lead to. After doing the first MST in Switzerland, I was able to get FDA approval to do it in the U.S. And then when we developed in the next generation the high-dose MST device, again, I worked with a new network of international collaborators, George Kirov, who's the one in the middle with the TMS coil being held over his head by Ellen Scott, and we treated the first patient with high-dose MST in Cardiff, Wales. And after doing the first high-dose MST in the U.K., I was able to get FDA approval in the U.S. So, again, these early collaborators are spanning disciplines and spanning countries and continents. And also, they were now, my research network was now international. An important thing to keep in mind as you go through your research career is you become a mentor yourself, and the people that you mentor can become collaborators and colleagues, and that certainly has been the case throughout my career. And here are some of my early mentees who have become key collaborators, many of them to this day, especially Bruce Luber, who is a staff scientist in my lab. He's the one with the TMS coil in his head. And Xi Deng, who's in the graduation gown, both are in my research unit at NIMH today, and the others are great collaborators. Now, what does every single photograph that I've shown you of a person so far have in common? Men. Yeah, that's right. They were all men. And it actually wasn't until I became part of a professional networking program for women in executive leadership. This is the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine program, which is for women who are interested in leadership positions in academic medicine, and it's a wonderful program operated by Drexel. And it really was pivotal in my career, and part of the program is you get connected with a learning community, which is a small group of women that you are networked with now. They were all from different disciplines. I was the only psychiatrist in this group, and being able to be exposed to multiple disciplines and having that tight network really led to the next leadership role that I had. Through ELAM, I met Nancy Andrews, who at the time was the first woman to be dean of a top 10 medical school at Duke, of course, my alma mater. And if you haven't read this New England Journal of Medicine article that she wrote about climbing through the glass ceiling, I highly recommend it. She talks about how she had just been named dean, and she and her husband and their children moved to Durham, and they were going to a local school to meet the principal to get their children enrolled, and the principal had been told the new dean of Duke Medical School is coming. And so she and her husband walked in, and the principal went right to her husband and said, congratulations, you must be the man of the hour. And she talks about how she hopes that when her children grow up and are entering their professional careers, that that sort of thing won't happen to them. But Nancy Andrews recruited me to be the chair of psychiatry at Duke. And she was a fantastic professional mentor, and it was a wonderful experience. And my networking with people outside of psychiatry really helped me be a more effective citizen of a medical school, where you have to represent your department, but also serve the other departments and the school as a whole. After doing that for five years, I was recruited by Tom Insel to the NIH. And that's where I then had new mentors and professional role models. After Tom left NIMH for Google, I then worked for Bruce Cuthbert, who was the interim director, and now I work for Josh Gordon, who is the NIMH director. And it's been a wonderful opportunity to be both on the extramural side and the intramural side, where I get to work with fabulous people like Marilyn Powell, Susan Amara, and the branch chief, Carlos Zerati. And so this now has become my network of senior leadership mentors. So now I'd like to turn to some research networks that are supported by the NIMH and talk about how they might be of use to you in your careers. So the first one I'm going to talk about is the Early Psychosis Intervention Network, or EPINET. And EPINET advances services, outcomes, and discovery through a national learning health care partnership. So what it focuses on is early psychosis clinics, and it links those together through standard clinical measures and data sharing. So these clinics serve individuals who have early stage psychosis and implements evidence-based services to improve their outcomes. And data is collected so that they can study the outcomes and continuously improve. These clinics are linked through eight regional hubs, shown here. And each hub, with those different acronyms, feed data into the National Data Coordinating Center that then feeds data into the National Data Archives, or NDA. And you can see on this map where those centers are located, some are right here in California, but they're also scattered across the U.S. Another network that NIMH supports, and this is the biggest network that we've supported to date, is the AMP Schizophrenia Program, which is Accelerating Medicines Partnership for Schizophrenia. And our aim of this program is to improve understanding of disease pathways and identify new and better targets for treatment of individuals at clinical high risk for psychosis. This is a public-private partnership. The APA Foundation is one of our partners. Also the FDA, the NIMH, and then a number of pharmaceutical companies shown here. And this network is global. I'm showing you here on this world map the sites that are enrolling patients. We're going to have, when we finish, close to 2,000 individuals with clinical high risk. And you can see here the photographs of the principal investigators and so on. Like EpiNED, the AMP Schizophrenia is feeding all the data into the National Data Archives, which is publicly available. Now why am I highlighting that to you? So when you're early in your career, it can be hard to be productive in publishing database papers because, you know, where do you get the data from? And so the National Data Archive provides data to the public for free. To qualify the individuals, you have to be based at an institution, you have to make an application, but it's available to you for free. And it's coming from hundreds of projects that are supported by the NIMH, including the two I just showed you. And this provides, the NDA provides the infrastructure for sharing the data, the tools, the methods, and analyses that enable collaborative science and discovery. And in addition to the two projects I mentioned, you can find in the National Data Archive the data from the ABCD study, which is the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development, the Human Connectome Projects, which is a massive imaging project, the NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-Term or HEAL Initiative, and I'm showing you just some of the logos there. So it's a useful resource to learn data analysis and to be able to publish. I mentioned that I'm part of the NIH Brain Initiative, so I want to point out in June, we invite you to join us for the annual meeting of the Brain Initiative to learn about it. You don't have to be a brain-funded investigator to attend. It's open to the public. You can either come to Maryland or Zoom in for free, and more information is at this website. And it's really, there are some programs there that are targeted to trainees. Brain Initiative has funding opportunities for trainees. They have a K-Mentored Career Development Award specifically for trainees. They have loan repayment programs and a variety of other programs. So my take-home points are, so I do translational research, as you heard from Maryland, and it's inherently interdisciplinary. We're translating across fields. And so if you're interested in translational research, my lesson learned is to seek out colleagues from different fields, institutions, and even countries. And you can build your own professional network starting now from your mentors, your peers, and subsequently from your mentees. And over time, mentees can become collaborators. Finding mentors who look like you can be challenging. It was for me in the gender sense, and this can be facilitated through professional mentoring networks, and I mentioned one to you. And these formal research networks funded by the NIMH, like EpiNed and AmSchizophrenia, offer opportunities for trainees to gain research experience. I mean, take a careful look at that map. You might be training at an EpiNet or at an AmSchizophrenia site, and that is a way to participate. And so there are opportunities to gain research experience and grow your professional networks. And then follow the data. So public releases of data from large research networks are available in the NDA. The data is waiting for you to take a look at it. So I think that is my last slide, and I'm going to hand it over to Olu Adjelore. Thank you. Questions? Thank you, Holly. And I'd also add that in addition to the wonderful resources that NIH provides, there's a UK biobank. If you have electronic medical records, increasingly they're making that available for research, so there are increasing opportunities to use existing data sets to leverage your research. So with that, I'd like to introduce myself. I'm Olu Adjelore. I'm a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Here are my disclosures. As mentioned before, I wear a number of hats in my department. I'm associate head for faculty development. I also direct our mood and anxiety disorders program, so I oversee a clinical division of an interdisciplinary group of clinicians providing both inpatient and outpatient treatment. And then I also work with our Center for Clinical Translational Science as a director for a clinical research core to support the research needs of a number of investigators across our campus. And then I direct my own lab with my colleague, Dr. Alex Liao, called the CONNECT Lab, which stands for Computational Neuroimaging and Connected Technologies, where we do a lot of work at the intersection of computational neuroimaging methods as well as digital biomarkers to better track and treat different neuropsychiatric disorders. And when I first started off my career, I thought I'd get to this point where I'm at now in this fashion, where it's sort of this nice linear path upwards and, you know, getting promotion and moving forward in my career, but in reality, it looked something like this, where there was a lot of, you know, blind alleys, backtracking, but, you know, overall, the trajectory is upwards, but it wasn't as straightforward and as linear as I initially had hoped. But my first research experience occurred summer after my freshman year as an undergraduate in my hometown of Pasadena, California, where I got a chance to work at the Huntington Magnetic Research Institute, working with Brian Ross, learning how to do, like, basically how to be a bench scientist. I was working with rat and pig kidneys, doing magnetic resonance spectroscopy, so looking at changes in metabolites in these organs, and I was really fascinated by the methodology, but I was not fascinated by the organs we were looking at, and I was like, this would be really cool if we could do this with the brain. And Dr. Ross actually started working with Dr. Miller, who was at Harbor UCLA at the time, and they had done, they had published some of the first MR spectroscopy papers in the human brain, looking at patients with Alzheimer's disease, and so that was sort of my first hint about how we can use these MR-based technologies to look at brain abnormalities associated with different neuropsychiatric disorders. So basically, I got the bug that summer after my freshman year, and when I got back to Harvard, I connected with people at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, which is shown here. Right before it closed down, they did this incredible exhibit where they turned all these old psych wards into this art exhibit where they laid flowers down the hallways and actually showed some of the art of the patients that stayed there. Actually, very similar to Holly, the first person I worked with was a psychologist, and then I worked with a psychiatrist. And the psychologist I worked with was Dr. Larry Seidman, who was interested in understanding cognitive dysfunction in patients with schizophrenia, and so this was my first interaction dealing with clinical and translational research, working with actual patients. And so I had a chance to do some of the cognitive testing myself as an undergrad, working with patients with schizophrenia and their unaffected relatives, and this was very primitive, very old school. I kind of smiled to myself when I think about the ways we had to actually administer these neuropsych tests with like a little, like it looked like a puppet show with like a curtain that would go up and down and little toys that we would show the participants. And then I got the chance to work with Dr. Alan Hobson, shown here on the right, who was a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist who had done some of the seminal work in trying to understand the basic neurophysiology behind how we sleep and what happens when we dream. And I got to work on a undergraduate thesis project with him, and I think the thing that I learned from Dr. Hobson was how to be a clinician scientist. So in his lab he had his small little office, and on Wednesday afternoons he would see his psychotherapy patients in the lab. And I was like, oh, that's kind of cool, he gets to be a doctor and a scientist at the same time. I think that might be something I'd like to do, because at the time I didn't know whether I wanted to go the MD route or the PhD route, so I joked that I ended up doing an MD-PhD because I was confused. And so I went to Stanford to pursue an MD-PhD, and I got a chance to work with Robert Sapolsky, who does amazing work in behavioral neuroendocrinology. And I sought him out because he was actually a guest lecturer in one of my undergraduate classes and probably was the best lecturer I had in all my classes. And so when I got to Stanford I was like, I don't care what I'm doing in your lab, I just want to be in your lab. And so I got a chance to work with him, trying to understand some of the mechanisms behind how stress hormones can exacerbate neuronal injury and neuronal death in models of stroke and seizure in a rat model. And so I did a lot of animal work, I got very good at becoming a rodent neurosurgeon, taking out hippocampi, taking out adrenal glands. But my office was across the street from Jordan Hall, which housed psychology. And I had MD-PhD colleagues in there working with John Gabrielli doing incredible neuroimaging work, and I was kind of jealous that they got to actually look into human brains and do this really cool neuroimaging stuff. So when I graduated from Stanford and sought out research track residencies at UCLA, I was very interested in neuroimaging, but I also wanted to connect it to the work that I was doing related to endocrinology, neuronal aging. And so I got a chance to work with an amazing geriatric psychiatrist, Dr. Anand Kumar, who basically spotted me, I think, the first week of my intern year when I was assigned to working on the geriatric psych unit. And he said, oh, you're a research track resident, aren't you? I'm like, yeah. He's like, I want you to work with me. And I'm like, what do you do? He's like, I'm studying diabetes and depression. But then what sort of rang in my head was that he said he was doing neuroimaging in these patient populations. And I was like, that sounds like something for me, because it kind of blended multiple interests. And so it was interesting, because I had to shift gears. I had gotten very good at becoming a basic neuroscientist during graduate school, but then I was picking up a completely different skill set in residency. So in essence, I had to start from scratch as a resident to learn this completely new methodology, to learn this completely new style of doing research, moving from basic to more clinical and translational work. I kind of joked that the level of statistics that I needed to do the work I did in graduate school, I could do everything in Excel. And that didn't pass muster when trying to do this more sophisticated clinical and translational work. So I actually took on extra training post-residency to do a postdoctoral research fellowship that gave me additional training in biostatistics and epidemiology. A lot of the things that I didn't pick up during my PhD, but I picked that up during a residency. And it was nice to have a mentor who was very understanding and could help me sort of navigate my clinical training, but also allowing me to pursue my research goals at the same time. And a number of the things that he helped me do during this time was to connect me with different career development programs that allowed me to establish some of the research networks that you've heard about today. So the first one was actually at this meeting, at the APA Research Colloquium for Junior Scholars. That was a great opportunity to meet other like-minded people who were getting training in psychiatry, but were also interested in research. I got critical feedback on my research ideas, what I wanted to pursue for a career development award, as well as see what other people were doing and how they were navigating this process. And it was very helpful. And that was actually the beginning of establishment of peer networks, which have served me tremendously to this day, as I'll talk about. Another related program that I did was the American Association of Geriatric Psychiatry Stepping Stones Program, which connected me to the geriatric psychiatry research community, which was very strong, very supportive. These are the people that would write you letters of recommendation when you're going for grants, or awards, or memberships, or other types of scholarships. And that geriatric psychiatry community, which Holly is a part of, she can attest to, is a very supportive and nurturing community. Because there are not enough of us, they really want to grow the field. And so I felt a lot of support throughout my career development from the geriatric psychiatry research community. And related to that, there are two programs that I participated in, one called the Summer Research Institute, which was designed to help people who are, before getting their career development award, get that K award. It's like an intensive boot camp. One of the ways I've thought about it, it's like American Idol, where you're pitching your scientific idea instead of singing a song, but everybody is Simon. Everybody's critiquing what you're doing. But that is a safe space for you to get that critique, so that when it's time for you to submit your grant, you're in a good position for success. And so that was really helpful in the transition to getting a K award. And then additionally, they have a sister program called ARI, or the Advanced Research Institute, which is for people in the K to R transition. So as you are wrapping up your career development award and you're trying to work on getting your first major grant, your first R01, the Advanced Research Institute helped folks like me, who were in that transition, get to that stage. And so it was really helpful not only to learn from mentors that were involved in these programs, but also the peers that I was going through these programs with. And those peers have become my collaborators on multiple grants, on multiple projects. And the things that we do in our lab, we focus a lot on network analysis. So I wanted to look at the network of collaborations and colleagues that I work with. So each link, actually, in this collaboration network represents an NIMH-funded project. And a lot of those folks, a lot of the nodes that you'll see in that network, are people that I went through SRI with, people I went through ARI with, people I did the APA research colloquium with. And so the people that you are meeting at these types of conferences and gatherings could be your next collaborator, your next co-PI. And so I really encourage you to take advantage of these types of opportunities to get yourself out there, introduce yourself, get to know what people are doing, and have people know what you're doing. And then I want to talk about one other network that we've been increasingly involved with at the University of Illinois in Chicago, which is the National Network of Depression Centers. And this is a national network of academic medical centers with expertise in dealing with mood disorders. And if you are at one of these, I encourage you to go to the website, the NNDC.org website. If you're at one of the institutions that are part of this network, then there's a lot of opportunities for you to get involved in research, in different clinical projects. They are organized by task groups. I'm actually part of the Geriatric Mental Health Task Group. And as a result, we've been able to publish papers, do a lot of interesting collaborations with industry. And so this is a great sort of low-key way to get involved in research. There's a lot of support within these task groups. And if you have any questions about the NNDC, I'd be happy to answer them afterwards. So here are my take-home points. Again, to take advantage of the mentorship programs that are affiliated with a lot of the professional organizations like APA, those are incredible opportunities for career development and growth. Another thing that is really good to do at your institutions, when you have speakers that are doing exciting work that you really like or wanna know more about at your institutions, introduce yourself to the grand round speaker, exchange emails. It's a great chance to network and get connected with people at other institutions, doing work that you're interested in doing or getting into. And then again, I can't emphasize the importance of making your own research network through the peers and the folks that you connect with at these types of meetings. So with that, I'll stop and take any questions. So I took a few minutes here, let's see. Okay, one other thing I would like to say, we didn't mention there are other learning places like the VA. So the military actually has quite a number of grants, CDAs for young investigators to also apply for. So that's another place that you can apply for grants. I think the overall take home message for folks, let me just say my own story. So I came as an administrator, I learned on the job, and then we had a suicide in the hospital. And that's a devastating event for any hospital. I was the chief of the CL service. I happen to be covering that day because the director of our NIMH was out of town. And so what do you do when you're at NIMH? You start looking for the research around suicides in hospitals. And at the time that that happened in 2005, there really wasn't any data. So we started with a lit search on suicide in medical settings. Then we wrote a paper on what is the institutional response? What are the medical things you have to do in the short term, medium term, and long term? Because actually it takes a long time for a hospital to get over an event like that. So we wrote a paper for psychosomatics about that. And that has launched me into 15 years of research on suicide risk screening in medical settings. So we ended up, you have to partner with other people, as you've heard everyone say. You can't do it by yourself. So you partner with other clinicians. And Lisa Horowitz, who's a PhD pediatric psychologist at NIMH, has really been in charge of this. But we developed the Ask Suicide Screening tool, which hopefully a few of you have heard of. Raise your hand. That is used for universal screening in the hospital in medical settings. And it has been validated in a lot of different settings. And actually is one of the few tools that we ended up validating back up to adults. So very few tools start for kids and move up to adults. But so that is a story of how you can get into research because there's some pivotal moment that happens to you, some clinical questions, some basic person you run into, some burning question. The main thing is you have to be interested in learning and open to new experiences and be brave. So I think you have to kind of love the process because it is a little bit of a brutal process. So that's, I think, one thing you heard that wherever it takes you, you're just open to remaking yourself all the time, learning new things, meeting new people. And so finding peer networks to find your peeps, the people who are turned on by the things that you're turned on, whether it's consultation liaison or pediatrics or adult or geriatrics or engineering. You find the people who are asking the same kinds of questions, computational stuff that's going on now, AI, how are we gonna incorporate that? There's always new questions. So it's a question of getting a question you can wrap your hands around and that you want to pursue for some time. You did hear a lot about mentors. So how do you, people get asked a lot, how do you find a mentor? And so, of course, there are many programs for mentoring within all of these professional organizations, but sometimes it's an organic process. The ones that you really do best with, you find yourself, you say, that's somebody whose career I would like to find out more about. I'd like to understand how they did that. And you connect with them and you talk to them. You can't always, the forced ones are useful and they connect you to people that might be influential, perhaps as a sponsor, but they might not always take you on as a mentor. So Sheryl Sandberg, in her book, Lean In, she does talk about, are you my mother? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work. So you just find another one that you are lucky enough to really connect with. But the formal programs do help and open your eyes. And I did also land in an executive leadership program at the NIH. I had no idea what level, I was all focused on my institute and the hospital. I had no idea there was an NIH-wide enterprise and that there were all these other levels and jobs at the NIH. So that really opened my eyes to more opportunities. So being open is a really important message, I think. So be brave. So that's really all we have to say from our end, but we're a small enough group that we can have a conversation and you can ask questions. We're here, honestly, to be honest about how it is. It's not all bed of roses, but it's fun. I think most of us who like research just like it. And so that's what keeps us going. Can I ask a question of the audience? How many of you here are research fellows? And how many are residents? Okay, and medical students? Faculty? Who did I leave out? Okay. Fellow, great, okay. Great. Yeah, so we got all stages here. Hi, I'm Richard, I'm from UCSF in the research track. I had a quick question. It sounds like you guys have all made many connections and I'm just wondering, have the most fruitful connections that you've made been kind of cold introductions or have you asked others to help make those introductions for you? And I guess that was the first question. My other question was, there are some residents amongst us who want to do more clinical fellowships, but one of our fears would be to kind of break research momentum during a more clinical fellowship and I'm just wondering how one might navigate around that. Should we each answer this? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I could start. So most of the connections I made were pretty organic, but on the flip side, acting as a mentor, I've had people reach out to me cold. High school students were like, I'm working on this summer project, do you mind giving me some feedback? And I'm happy to do that. But most of them occurred organically through these activities that I was doing, like the APA colloquium, those types of things. Some of them might have occurred usually at conferences, even like people just coming up to your poster and saying, I'm doing something similar, can we exchange emails and ideas? That kind of thing works pretty well too. With regards to clinical training, it's funny, we were talking about this at lunch because I did not do a formal geriatric psychiatry fellowship. I ended up doing a research fellowship, but then all my clinical activities were in geriatric psychiatry, just because of that concern from my mentor who said, you need to work on getting your K, don't worry about doing a clinical fellowship, you need to get your K. And so for me, and it's worked out. Sometimes I regret not doing a formal fellowship, but that lasts for about a second. Yeah, I'll also answer that. By the way, can you hear me? Okay. So in my current position, I help my trainees by making introductions for them because the cold email from someone that you don't know, unless they're really generous with their time, like Olu, might just be ignored. And so I use my network to facilitate those introductions so that it's more likely that the person's gonna respond. And then in terms of the clinical fellowship, like Olu, I do specialize in geriatric psychiatry. I didn't do a traditional clinical geriatric psychiatry fellowship. I did a research fellowship and my clinical activity was geriatrics. It was enough, at that time, I was allowed to take the boards for geriatric psychiatry. I don't know if that's true now, but I will say my career was pretty linear and almost exclusively research focused from the beginning. After leaving residency, then clinical work was 20% or less and different people have different balances. That's not the only pathway, but that was my path. And I think you heard from Dr. Powell another path, which also led to- I boarded in everything. So I boarded in PEDS and then adult and child psych and then I grandfathered into CL, but then I took the CL boards later because I wanted to be on the faculty for CL fellowship. So if you have any desire, I think I would do the training out of training because it's really hard to go back. It can be done, but from a financial standpoint, it's very difficult. So I like to counsel to take the boards of you if it's not that much time off because I like to keep all my options open. So if you think you might ever want to go down the educational track and you can do research in your fellowship year and if you work it out with your program directors. So I like to keep as many doors open as possible, but that's my approach to it. And I am not the R01 funded researcher. And with regard to the emails, if you came to a talk like this and you said, oh, I saw you and I want to, can you talk to me? That's a little closer than a totally cold email. I think I do both. I also respond to high school students who want me to look at their poster, but I do think it's better if you get a warm handoff as we speak, yeah. Hi, my name's Seth. I'm a medical student at Baylor. Thanks for the talk. I wonder if maybe each of you could speak to your experience in being early on in finding interest in research and doing maybe literature reviews and just dabbling to that point of saying, this is what I want to study. And I think some of the factors that I think about are, do I have the skillset? Like you mentioned biostats and epidemiology, like, man, do I have enough skillset to make the jump? And do I have the mentorship? Do I have the time? And then is this gonna be a worthwhile project? So I was just wondering maybe if you could speak to that transition point in your research experience. I know for you is with ECT and wanting to study the mechanism of action, but I'd appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, if you find something that you're passionate about, right? I mean, I think that helps answer the question of whether it's worth the time, right? Because it's the kind of thing that you would spend time reading about anyway, right? I mean, that's what I find myself doing, like even when I'm on vacation, right? I'm reading papers that come across on Twitter or whatever that looked really interesting. So it's stuff that I would pursue anyway. One thing that you brought up though about sort of whether you have the skillset, I think that's where collaborations are really important, right? Like the work that I publish now, there's no way I could do every single piece of that. I rely on my folks with expertise in bioengineering or computer science or machine learning and statistics, even though I had to do extra training myself in statistics, basically that training allowed me to know what to ask for when talking to my statistician rather than doing everything myself. Because these days it's very hard to have all of the knowledge and all the skills to do all the aspects of sort of high level science. And I'll also add, so ECT was not my first research project and it didn't play bridge here. You know, the analogy play the hand you're dealt or maybe it works for poker too, I don't know. But from a pragmatic perspective, it makes sense to look at where are the research strengths at your institution or at your school. And who would be willing to mentor you on a topic? I think at the early stage, the quality of the mentoring could be more important than the topic because the topics can change over time. So my first topic with my first wonderful mentor, Greg Lockhead was the subjective nature of randomness. And we were studying people making up random strings of digits or placing dots in a random location on a 2D figure, not anything related to what I do now. But I learned a lot of skills. I learned how to apply, I had been a math major so I learned how to apply the statistical tools that I was learning in math class to a behavioral experiment. My second research was on stress induced immunosuppression in rats, also not something I do now. But it taught me how to do animal research and how to design and implement those types of experiments. And so I think that the topic can change over time. And you're at a great stage of exploration because you're early in your career. So keeping, one of the things you said, keeping doors open, you can keep the topics open. And then I'll just conclude by saying, as a medical student, you have each patient that you see is a walking textbook of medicine or psychiatry or oncology, whatever the field is. Each patient brings important, clinically important issues. And you can learn from that. And from that exposure, you can get research ideas. Like Dr. Powell, you were talking about, you were seeing all these patients and it was stimulating your research ideas and then the patient with the suicide set you off on that track. So being, it's not just doing literature reviews, but it's about your clinical experiences can stimulate your research ideas. Yeah, I would say following what Olu started with, you do need to listen to yourself. So when you pick up a journal, I used to pick up pediatrics and there would be all these otitis media articles and what antibiotic was the best one to use for that. And then there would be psychosocial effects of managing cystic fibrosis. And I always went to those articles. So listening to yourself, what would you do for fun? What would you read for fun? What's interesting to you? So that tells you one thing. And then the grow where you're planted is also a really big thing. So I actually did a decade of research in HIV-AIDS because when I was at Children's Hospital, that's where the supplement was in doing psychiatric characterization of adolescents who were acquiring HIV behaviorally as opposed to being born with it perinatally. So my interest is CL and the interface between pediatrics and psychiatry, and it took me in a lot of different directions. I came to NIH and I said I was never going to do cancer, and I ended up doing psycho-oncology for a decade and creating, voicing my choices for youth that are dying. So it took me in a lot of places I never expected to go, partly because of what I was seeing and where I was landing. So grow where you're planted is a really good idea, and trying to build on the strengths of the place that you're at and the people. Yeah. Yeah, I was just going to add to that notion because I was just thinking back through the different types of research projects that I did throughout my own career development that nothing was wasted, right? No experience didn't come back in some form or another, right? So my very first project was doing renal MR spectroscopy, but my K award ended up being in human brain MR spectroscopy, right? I was doing neurocognitive testing of patients with schizophrenia. My current R01 is looking at cognitive dysfunction in the context of mood disorder. So it rhymes or repeats in some fashion. Well, they build a math curricula for young children that way. They call it a spiral system. So it's really like that. So I think there are a few things. It's good to pursue how to write R, how to code, how to do some statistics. There are probably a few courses that you might benefit from taking along the way while you're doing medical school, but you can always go back and retake courses later. I mean, really good scientists remake themselves every few years. That's what sabbaticals were originally about. And I see many, I watch all the PIs at NIMH and the intramural PIs who are the most successful are bringing in new people to bring in new ideas and remaking themselves every decade. Now it's shorter, I think, because everything moves faster, but it used to be every decade. You live a long time. If you're in a career for 50 years, you're going to remake yourself a few times. Yeah. And in the same way that Holly's mentor asked her, what are you going to teach me today? That's how I feel like I'm learning from my own students now and bringing in new methods and new techniques into our lab from, I'm learning now from my students. This one's more from a non-researcher background. I'm a clinical fellow doing a clinical fellowship who's also interested in research. And I have, one of the ways to partner has been partnering with a statistician within the setting I'm at. I was going to ask, are there any central networks of where you would be able to engage with statisticians, particularly for those of us who may be going into an academic adjacent environment for clinical work, but want to do a continue increasing our understanding of how to do QIs, how to work through the data that's sitting right in front of you in the hospital. So some institutions have a statistical core support, and I'm wondering, does the CTSA have that? You might want to speak to that. Yeah. So, but then you're talking though about, you said academic adjacent, so I'm not sure if you would have- The satellite hospital. Yeah. But your main hospital has that. Yeah. So if you have a center for clinical translational science funded by the CTSA, a lot of them will have a statistical core that will provide consultation for folks just to address the needs that you're talking about. I'm sure in Boston they have a few. We do have one. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure you can access it. We have one that's been happening, like a dedicated statistician when I was back at MSU. Right. Who you could collaborate with, who does want to do it through the APA. But for clinicians, I think you really do need to find a mentor who's doing something close to what you want to be doing in order to help you, because you can really get buried in the clinical work. And so you really need some beacon of hope out there kind of pulling you along to say, you know, you can do this for the clinicians. All right, well, we're a little bit early, but we're here if you want to come up and ask us individual questions or you want to ask any other questions. Can I ask a question? I'm curious of those of you who are here, what are the barriers or challenges that you're facing in your research careers or at your stage? So, hi, I'm Sipten Kazmi, so I'm a fourth year medical student at St. James. It's a Caribbean school. So one of the issues for like, so my, I'll be very honest, like research is so new to me and I never saw myself doing research until I did this very small research and then we did a poster on it, this APA, and it kind of like gave me like the research bug. But at the same time, I do like clinical psychiatry as well. So I don't see myself going fully into research, but I want to still stay connected to it. Now, the issue is with a lot of Caribbean schools, especially my school is a little bit smaller, there's not much support in the sense that they're very open to helping when I have like a research topic or if I have, I want to do something, but a lot of the connections and institutions that you guys kind of talk about that we don't have that in our schools. So we have to kind of like coming here, for example, or meeting people that are connected. Like for example, the research I did was someone I knew in Austin that happened to be like, yeah, I'll help you out, you know, kind of do what you got to do and I'll kind of help you out. So there's not like a structured way of kind of getting that help, especially like NIH to me seems like, oh my God, like there's no way I'm getting something at NIH. So we have taken Caribbean students as medical students for research electives. Exactly. So that's kind of my, like now coming here and learning about that, it's like, what's your kind of advice or something for someone like me? Yeah. So I would suggest you go to somewhere like Duke or, you know, NIH or there's a link to the clinical elective program on the NIH website for the clinical center. And so we, I definitely have, it's one of my most popular fellows was started in a research, his research at Caribbean Institute. And I remember the phone call because he just picked, he picked up the phone and I answered because I was the training director at the time and he just said, you know, he was interested in working with Dr. Rappaport in child psychiatry. And then he told me his story and he was like a army surgeon for 10 years, army surgical tech for 10 years, and then decided to go back to medical school. And so I found that so compelling that I took him as a research elective and he subsequently became a fellow and is still working for us actually and runs a huge practice in town. So yeah, so count yourself out. Yeah. So on that point, and also I didn't know about this before I came to NIH. But you can do electives, the research electives at NIH as a medical student. Once you're a resident, you can come and do, finish your residency at NIH and then transition into a research fellowship position like Marilyn mentioned. If that's what you're interested in. And that's a really valuable opportunity, especially for those of you who are doing residencies at places that don't have a research track. So I don't have much to add to that. I would just say, yeah, apply. Apply for an NIH elective. Can you do it in the microphone? I think one of the challenges I'm facing right now is being authentic. And you mentioned, like, what would you study on your vacation, right? And yeah, I want to maybe study and dig into those things. But then on the other end, being in medical school and applying to residency in a few months, throughout med school, there's this idea of playing the game, right? And people, you know, what are the projects I can kind of get on and get publications? And then that, I've seen that kind of shape people's interests, maybe more than what they actually wanted to go after. So I don't know if anyone can speak to that. Yeah, I was going to say, that's not necessarily the case. I mean, I think playing the game is an important part, right? Because people do, when you're applying for residencies, they do look at, like, whether you published or whether you presented at conferences. And I forgot, that's one of the other things I do. I direct our research track residency. And we tend to look at MD-PhDs first, but those PhDs can be in anything, right? So one of my mentees at this meeting, attending the colloquium, did his PhD in immunology. But then when he did his clinical rotations, he fell in love with psychiatry. But I'm not going to hold it against him that he did his PhD in immunology. So if you publish in one area, but your passion is in something else, that's understandable, especially at your sort of early stage of development, your interests are bound to change. I'll also add, like Marilyn said, you know, careers can be long. And they're building blocks to get to where you want to be to study what you want to study. But I think even going through that process, even if you're studying different topics, it's absolutely essential to be authentic. Because when you're able to be your authentic self, you're more creative. And when you feel like you have to be some, you know, fit into some sort of mold, that's stressful. And you know, why put yourself through that? So I would encourage you to be authentic at every stage. And I think you can choose your research lit reviews in the area that you're more interested in finding the, because you'll be more motivated to finish it and do it, and read about it, and it'll be better. I mean, of course, you know, if somebody asks you and you want to help them out, sure. But you can do both, I guess, a little bit. Just following what Olu said, we have the Outstanding Resident Award Program for folks that are nominated. We ask every residency to nominate their best research-capable second-year psychiatry resident. And then we invite you to come to NIMH in your third year. And probably half, or at least, are MD-PhDs. But the PhDs are in history, anthropology. I mean, they're not only, you know, neuroscience PhDs. So we understand that creative people come from all different disciplines. I also want to add something about playing the game. So the currency of the game is papers and grants. But this workshop is about networks. And when you want to play the long game, it's been my experience that the people who game the system by getting the papers and grants, by stepping on other people, they don't develop that network because they become people that others don't want to work with. So I think it's important. You do have to have papers. You have to have grants. And to have a thriving, rewarding academic career, play the long game and develop those networks. At least that's been my experience. When you're interviewing for your residence, you're going to have to talk about your paper. And so people are going to pick up that, you know, we definitely see people who just write a lot of papers about any old thing and they're good at it. But it doesn't impress us necessarily just to be published anywhere just for the sake of publishing. That's not sufficient. It has to kind of fit in and be a little authentic. You're going to ask a question? Go ahead. Hi. My name is Bianca. I'm a med student. And I have a question kind of along the lines of the previous one. I realized maybe a year ago that I was really interested in a research career. Similar to what you were saying, I read a book about TMS and I was like, oh, this is what I want to do. But, yeah, I'm not an MD PhD. I'm going to be applying for residency in the fall. I've been working on this research project for a year, but I definitely haven't been as productive as people who have been doing this for a longer time. Do you have any suggestions or recommendations on ways to approach the residency application process or ways to make that clearer? Yeah. I mean, I think to Dr. Powell's point, if it's something that you've been passionate about, working hard on, even if it hasn't led to a publication or a presentation yet, if that's something that you mention in your application and talk about in your interviews, that will come across. Especially if you're interested in continuing research into residency. Because that's something that we look for in people who, you know, because we also have people who aren't MD PhDs in our research track. But we're looking for that passion. We're looking for that interest, that dedication to working on a project while they're in residency. Yeah, I'll just add to that. I don't have a PhD. And I really, you know, learned along the way. And the research fellowship was really critical. I didn't go to research track residency. I think in your situation, I mean, you're hearing from someone who, do you direct the research track? Yeah, our research track, yeah. And so listen to Olu, he's saying apply. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and I think also doing your homework about where you're applying to so that you can convey why it is you want to go to that place because you can pursue research and you've learned about what it is you need, the tools that you need. So speaking articulately about why you want to keep doing research will also help you. Thanks. And a reminder for those of you who are already residents and not at research track residencies, you can always create your own research track by transferring to NIMH. Yeah, exactly. I was not, I'm not a PhD either. Yeah, and I would say one of the reasons that we are open on our research track to non-M.D. Ph.D.s is myself, when I joined my residency, I was one of five M.D. Ph.D.s in my class. I'm the only one that's still doing research, right? There's some people that they knew after their M.D. Ph.D. that that's not what they want to do. They just want to pursue a clinical career. And then there's some that decided that in the course of residency. In fact, we're trying to put together a study group for ACMP about the leaky physician-scientist pipeline because residency is like one of those big holes in the pipeline. Well, honestly, it's important to have a good clinical question if you want to pursue the research in some ways. I mean, unless you're doing straight up basic, sometimes the clinical, the residency really informs the M.D. Ph.D.s on a better question. They pivot a lot of times from the questions they started out with. And then people like the teaching and the education mentor track. But the PGY-4 year, you can come and you don't have to stay for three years. You can just come and decide you want to try this research thing out. And a lot of our folks, I just saw someone who came for the four year, he's out now. He runs a trials network of over 300 trials. So you never know when it's going to take. It's a little hard to predict. He's trying to do that in his research. Maybe you'll get your A.I. to work on it. I guess I'll also maybe take a stab at the question about barriers. I think for me and maybe many others, I'm particularly interested in child. At the same time, I also recognize that many of us who did do advanced degrees, adding a child fellowship on top of residency, on top of med school plus grad school, it just is a very long pipeline. And by the time you're our age, we're thinking about family and maybe already have families. And it just ends up having a lot of competing interests when you're thinking about even a child research fellowship, which would maybe extend out three years or something like this. But at the same time, I also know that at least at our institution, there are a lot of mentors who are willing to really try to think about this creatively. There might not be great solutions, but at least they're thinking about it. And then I think the other part of it is I am at least research-based trained as an immunologist, but I very much love neuroimmunology and so had really wanted to stay basic and still want to stay basic but have growing interests in clinical areas and clinical research. And there's been kind of conflicting messages about really kind of choosing one or the other to really kind of be great at one or the other. And so that's maybe another barrier that's been kind of posed recently. Yeah, one of the things we've done at UIC, we have a child research track that tries to compress some of that time to address what you're talking about in terms of, you know, if you're coming in with an MD-PhD, you've already spent a long time and then you're going to do a long residency and then a fellowship on top of that before you actually get your real job. It seems like a long time, and so we've tried to compress that a little bit. With regards to your second piece about basic versus clinical, I think it is hard to do both. I think you do have to kind of commit to one, you know, domain versus the other. But what I'm doing now actually in my own research, I'm sort of coming back to, you know, my basic roots as a graduate student by having my own grad students that are combining work that we do in our lab, which is more clinical and translational, with collaborators that are more basic. But I'm not doing the basic work, and I think it would be very hard for me to do that. I want to respond to the issue of the child clinical training, and we were talking about this earlier. We need you. Yeah, please do it. Clearly there is a shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists who do research. There's also a shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists who do clinical care, and of those it's a much smaller proportion that do research. And so with my NIMH funding hat on, we want to fund researchers in child and adolescent psychiatry who are developing new treatments, developing understanding of pathophysiology, of childhood onset disorders, and we don't get enough applications. Not enough people are applying. So it's a high priority for our institute. So when you're thinking about kind of the of course there's the realities of having a family and what that means in terms of your time commitments at this stage of your life, but if it's something that you can manage, it is a not only going to be very rewarding, but it's a research gap area. And so when you're thinking about what areas to specialize, we've talked about following your passion or your authentic interests, but there's also a pragmatic view. If you enter a field that is a research gap, you can really have an impact, and it can influence your ability to build that grant portfolio and support your lab. That's a real area of interest. Even in the intramural program, I just started an autoimmune brain disorders program, both pediatric and adult. So it's something that we are interested in. I'll just say, you know, my husband is a clinical immunologist who does both translational and clinical work every day. He's his patient for the last 30 years. So it can be done. There are not very many people who can do it, but it's really important. We need people who can both see patients and do clinical translational work because that's where the treatments and the mechanism understanding is going to come from. Yeah, and I think that balance can evolve over time. Like, Lulu, you were saying that you were trained in both, and now you do it through collaboration. And when I was at Columbia, I was running a monkey lab and also running clinical trials on related topics. But then over time, I left the monkeys behind, and now I just do the human work. But it's still transdisciplinary because now I'm bringing in engineering as a big component. So it can evolve over the course of your career. NIH would be a good place to look. You heard it from the clinical director. People learn things that they didn't expect to? Questions? Yeah, we're at three. Thank you for coming. Thank you.

Marilyn Pow

NIMH

career trajectories

research opportunities

professional networks

pediatrics

child psychiatry

mentorship

interdisciplinary collaborations

translational research

brain stimulation therapies

career development

NIH