Like so many scientists right now, Christine Sieberg, PhD, has been waiting on the NIH. Her grant application to continue her work on the psychology of chronic pain was submitted over two years ago. It scored well but not well enough, was resubmitted with critiques addressed, delayed three months because of the federal shutdown, finally got an “amazing” score in September 2025, then sat at the NIH for nearly a year with no news. In July she finally received word that it was approved.

Early-career scientists are being hit especially hard by funding conundrums. Sieberg sees it first-hand not just in her own lived experience, but also as a mentor and educator at Harvard Catalyst.

A licensed clinical psychologist and researcher at the Center for Health Outcomes and Interdisciplinary Research (CHOIR) at Massachusetts General Hospital, Sieberg is associate professor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Catalyst faculty for postgraduate education in clinical and translational science. She has served as mentor for the Grant Review and Support Program (GRASP) and program director for Career Catalyst since 2019.

We caught up with her when she was still waiting on the NIH to hear her advice on navigating the uncertainties in science today. This is part 2 of our interview; read part 1 here.

Building resiliency has, appropriately, been the theme for the four primary Harvard Catalyst postgraduate programs (Career Catalyst, GRASP, First Grant Bootcamp, and K12) this past year. What’s the secret?

There’s no magic answer. We had a community-building workshop recently, and I did an exercise with the participants on when to persist, when to pause, and when to pivot. Not everyone needs to persist in something that’s not working, for many reasons. A pause might be okay. Maybe there’s another opportunity.

For me, as a clinician, I’m going back to more clinical work during this funding gap. I’m a U.S. citizen and an associate professor, so I can have a little bit of a pause while waiting for grants to come in. But not everyone is in that circumstance.

So when can you pause and when do you pivot? Pivoting could mean taking on a full-time clinical position, or another opportunity in say, consulting, policy, or industry, which isn’t necessarily easy to get. What are your values? How do you define success? What do you want? Sometimes we get into this rat race of academic medicine, and it’s hard to understand that you may want different things, right? That’s what I’ve been trying to get my mentees to think about.

I think the vision for bringing these four programs together in our community-building initiative is to ask how we can help people stay here at Harvard University. How can we have them move through one program to another? Maybe they’ve done First Grant Bootcamp, and then they move to GRASP because they got the grant and now need a path to independence. It’s thinking about what we call developmental mentoring, which is akin to building the house, the framework for your career. It’s the big picture, multi- faceted. Science mentoring from your PI or skill mentoring is very much like decorating the rooms in the house. It’s focused, granular, and largely independent of broader context.

What’s your advice for early-career scientists on how to persist?

I think good advice for any of us, but especially early-stage investigators, is just building your collaborations. You don’t know where there might be an opportunity, who might have money, who’s looking for another postdoc, or who has some effort needed on a grant that fits your unique skill set. I connected with the Boston Center for Endometriosis kind of by circumstance; I was a pain psychologist, and they needed that skill set. The collaborations I have made there have resulted in numerous funded projects over the past decade, and together our interdisciplinary research has advanced the field of endometriosis.

“I’m always telling people to put themselves out there. You should always be sending an email, going to conferences if you can afford to, finding someone else who’s in an adjacent field to yours to collaborate. Get out of your lab, your center, your department, go to grand rounds, participate in Harvard Catalyst events.”

So I’m always telling people to put themselves out there. You should always be sending an email, going to conferences if you can afford to, finding someone else who’s in an adjacent field to yours to collaborate. Get out of your lab, your center, your department, go to grand rounds, participate in Harvard Catalyst events such as webinars, courses, and training programs. Don’t downplay your strengths. There might be opportunities within other Harvard-affiliated institutions for you to get 10 or 20 percent effort on a grant or a new funding opportunity. How can you market yourself? You should always have your elevator pitch ready, which is a big Catalyst theme. Let’s take advantage of all the amazing resources we have.

How many mentors does a postdoc need?

A postdoc needs a mentoring network. At Harvard Catalyst, we emphasize this across our programs. You have science mentors of course, but you also may have peer mentors. You have people in your field, but maybe you also have people outside of your field. Maybe you have an executive coach. We get people to think outside the box so they can start to identify where their gaps are. Maybe they have great science mentoring, but no one to help with work-life alignment challenges. We help people fill in the gaps.

In academic medicine, I think we’re often in our silos, especially in a very large, decentralized place like Harvard Medical School and all the affiliated hospitals. It’s so easy to get in your silo and stay there. How can we step outside our comfort zone for mentoring and maybe find a new connection or collaboration? That’s really been at the heart of what I’ve been trying to bring to Harvard Catalyst and the offerings available through GRASP and Career Catalyst. We have amazing science happening at our medical school and affiliated hospitals, and we have amazing mentors. But not everyone can do it all, right? You might need these other pieces of mentoring.

What should somebody look for in a mentor?

I think you want someone who can put your needs above theirs. Of course. If you’re in someone’s lab or center, you’re a community member, but you want a mentor who’s going to put you first in terms of your career development. It doesn’t always happen, but it’s really important.

As a mentor, I really strive to think about the values and needs of my mentees, and it may not always align with what I want for them. It can be surprising. Maybe you’re mentoring a clinical research coordinator and they don’t want to go to graduate school, or a postdoc wants to go into industry. That can be hard when you’ve invested time, money, and effort, and you have exciting projects. I’ve seen a lot of mentors or supervisors take it very personally, because they want something different for this mentee.

But that shouldn’t be the goal. What are the mentee’s values? What do they want? Let’s help them get there. It may sometimes conflict with what the mentor needs in their center or lab, but hopefully at the end of the day, everyone’s happy.

You enrolled in GRASP in 2017 as a K grantee. Anything about your own experience that was particularly memorable?

Yes. I think the specific aims workshop incorporated in GRASP is the reason I got my first large independent award. I was halfway through my K23, and I had been working with my amazing mentor David Borsook, MD, PhD, thinking about research aims. I had received some foundation funding to take the endometriosis pain work to the next level, a related but separate topic from my K grant, and was thinking about submitting an R01 application when the Department of Defense put out an RFP focused on endometriosis.

I wrote a letter of intent and I got invited to apply. I didn’t even have a full six weeks to turn the letter of intent and the specific aims I’d drafted into my first full R01-equivalent grant. The specific aims workshop was so good. You’re all around a table, maybe 6-8 people and you, and you’re presenting your aims and they’re tearing everything apart — you know, in a nice, encouraging way. It was such a great environment.

“I really credit GRASP–the program overall, and the specific aims workshop in particular–for helping me quickly get my grant application to where it needed to be.”

I got the grant. In fact, I got an almost perfect score. And I think I peaked too soon because I’ve never gotten such a score on any other grant! I really credit GRASP–the program overall, and the specific aims workshop in particular–for helping me quickly get my grant application to where it needed to be.

Getting that first grant is now harder than ever. How is GRASP adapting to funding challenges at the federal level?

Starting in the fall, GRASP will be more oriented toward mentor groups, similar to how Career Catalyst is designed, but still focused on transitioning from career development award to independent investigator. It’ll be a little more hands-on. I’m excited by this because I think people need peer networks and mentoring networks to get them to the next step of their science and their career.

We have data showing that the people who do well in GRASP are the ones who are not only sticking to the work plan outlined, but who also are acknowledging what’s not going well. In therapy sessions with my patients, I often talk about Chinese finger traps, which many of us played with when we were little. The inclination is to pull your fingers apart to free them, but that just makes the trap tighter on your fingers. But if you push them together, the trap releases. It’s very counterintuitive. We have to approach our problems, not avoid them.

I use this analogy with my mentees in GRASP too. If they’re feeling trapped by work-plan deadlines, we work to push toward the barrier. Pulling away just makes things harder in the long run and could jeopardize their grant. We all get behind. I’m behind right now on a million things. It’s okay. Let’s figure out and problem-solve. That’s really what we’re trying to do. I think that’s why GRASP has so much success, because we’re forcing mentees to think not just about the science, but about the next step.