Advances in Medical Education and Practice (Sep 2022)
Clinician-Scientist Faculty Mentoring Program (FAME) – A New Inclusive Training Model at Penn State Increases Scholarly Productivity and Extramural Grant Funding
Abstract
Sinisa Dovat,1 Chandrika Gowda,1 Richard B Mailman,2,3 Leslie J Parent,4 Xuemei Huang2,3 1Department of Pediatrics, Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and College of Medicine, Hershey, PA, USA; 2Department of Pharmacology, Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and College of Medicine, Hershey, PA, USA; 3Department of Neurology, Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and College of Medicine, Hershey, PA, USA; 4Department of Medicine and Microbiology and Immunology, Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and College of Medicine, Hershey, PA, USACorrespondence: Sinisa Dovat, Tel +1 7175316012, Fax +1 7175314789, Email [email protected]: Clinician-scientists have a high attrition rate at the junior-faculty level, before they gain independent funding. We identified the lack of skill set, clinician-scientist community and collaboration between clinician-scientists and clinicians with predominantly clinical duties, as key problems in our medium-size college of medicine.Methods: We designed a novel two-year educational program, the Clinician-scientist Faculty Mentoring program (FAME) specifically to target junior clinician-scientists. The program enrollment included both lab-based, “traditional” and “non-traditional” clinician-scientists, with predominantly clinical duties and limited time for research. The curriculum included the novel educational tools: Emerging technology seminars and mentored work-in-progress research seminars, integrated with mock grant review.Results: The first class enrolled 17 clinician-scientists with diverse clinical subspecialty, previous research training, and protected research time. After two years in the program, the self-assessment of FAME scholars demonstrated strong improvement in grantsmanship skills, career development, emerging technologies, and the sense of community and collaboration. Compared to the period before initiating FAME, scholars increased annual scholarly output by 65% and new extramural funding by > 20-fold (
