For Lydia A. Shrier, MD, MPH, learning how to be a mentor started with her mom, who pursued a career in medicine at a time when women were actively discouraged from doing so. With her mother as a role model and guide, Shrier believed that she would find her path in medicine even if she didn’t have it all figured out at the start.

Shrier tries to carry that belief forward to the early-career scientists she mentors as part of Harvard Catalyst’s Clinical and Translational Research Academy (CTR Academy). As a distinguished mentor for the academy, Shrier facilitates peer support groups for investigators applying for their first K grant. She also serves as the academic liaison between Harvard Catalyst and Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), where she is a clinician scientist in adolescent and young adult medicine. A professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, her research focuses on interventions to reduce high-risk behaviors in youth.

Mentoring is woven into the fabric of science, but as a distinguished mentor for CTR Academy you have gone above and beyond what might be considered typical for your career. Why do it?

It’s such a big question. I have been the beneficiary of really superb mentoring, and found that very inspiring. I always thought that as I accrue experience and expertise, I have something to give to the next generation.

I was fortunate to have a role model early in my career who had been able to persevere despite facing barriers that I would never know. I am the daughter of a woman physician who developed her career during a time when there were very few women in medicine, and women were actively discouraged from participating in medical training and scientific research. Seeing my mom make it through that was very helpful to me.

My mom and I actually did research together on mother-daughter physician pairs, and one of the reflections from our findings was that women still face barriers, although many things have changed across the generations. Notably, sexual harassment and discrimination has become, I would say, more covert and less overt than for her generation, but it is still present.

In addition to your mom, do any other mentors stand out in your own career development, and why?

I would say that the mentors I remember are folks with whom I had an intellectual connection. Maybe we were partnering to figure out a research question or clinical dilemma, and I felt valued and supported in those relationships. Mentoring relationships grew out of those situations, where I could access the person with questions or they would offer support more broadly for my career. I can think of examples from medical school, residency, fellowship, and so on where that was the case.

“Being a mentor means I don’t worry about whether their choices benefit me in terms of funding or publications…My investment is wanting to see them find their path and be successful.”

When I was on the hunt for a primary mentor for my K23 career development award application, I was kind of going door to door, hat in hand, trying to find somebody who would be interested in supporting me on my research proposal. It took me about six months. The person who agreed, Bill Beardslee, psychiatrist-in-chief at Boston Children’s Hospital at the time, opened his door to me because he knew my mom. There was a point of connection, and from there we started talking and got excited about my research ideas about investigating the connections between depression and sexual risk behaviors in adolescents and young adults.

In my residency, one of my mentors was my attending physician in the pediatric ICU; I just admired the way that he thought through problems and communicated with families. He was an amazing role model, and I felt that that was the kind of clinician scientist I wanted to be. There again was that point of connection.

What should one look for in a mentor?

A mentor should provide a sense of safety; he or she should be a person who is invested in the mentee’s success. Being a mentor means I don’t worry about whether their choices benefit me in terms of funding or publications, for example. My investment is wanting to see them find their path and be successful. I see a mentor’s role as being someone they can talk to, ask questions, and strategize around dilemmas. Those are things all mentors should do, but sometimes we’re in a narrower space in mentorship where we’re focused on the science or a career within a particular discipline.

Harvard Catalyst’s mentorship cuts across scientific areas and across disciplines. It’s more focused on finding your career path in clinical and translational research and developing skills for grant-writing and strategy. It’s about these broader cross-cutting concepts and the “how-tos” outside of the science.

It’s also about work/life balance and mental health. I give an opening lecture on time management, and so many people come up to me afterwards wanting to talk about that one thing that they hadn’t thought about. The recipe for success isn’t only having a good idea, right? That is necessary, but not sufficient. You have to be able to communicate that good idea in a compelling way, along with all the other bits and pieces that go into preparing a grant application, and you have to do it on time and without losing your sanity. So that’s a significant part of what we support in the CTR Academy.

What is your advice to early-career investigators in uncertain times?

It’s hard to give a bullet-point response to that. I think acknowledging the difficulties–we can all see them–and yet recognizing that the work must go on. I personally feel a sense of obligation to stay in clinical research. As a physician scientist, I could go to take a full-time clinical job, help people, get a paycheck, and find gratification in that. But the world needs clinicians who do research. Now more than ever, we can’t quit.

“I think as clinician scientists we’re really privileged to be able to see both sides: to be able to interpret and contribute to the research enterprise and to understand the stories of the patients who inspire that research.”

But you have to be willing to deal with the uncertainties, to perhaps be more flexible, to use more out-of-the-box thinking than might have been needed in past times. There will likely be more experiences of failure, and you have to be willing to accept that.

Why does the world need ‘clinicians who do research’?

When I think about my own work, what I learned in training, in my research, and in my patient care all play off each other. My ideas and iterations on my science are bouncing between the clinical work, the research findings, and personal experiences. I can think of patients I took care of who were the inspiration for one line of my research. One patient had depression and was engaging in sexual risk behavior. I began to study links between negative feelings and sexual risk behavior and eventually developed a behavioral intervention that helps patients manage their feelings to reduce their risk behavior.

I could read the literature to understand the problem, look at epidemiological data, and determine what I wanted to study based on only that. But because I had that clinical experience, it put a face to the research. It put a story behind it. It helped me to think about things that maybe weren’t represented in the papers I was reading.

I think as clinician scientists we’re really privileged to be able to see both sides: to be able to interpret and contribute to the research enterprise and to understand the stories of the patients who inspire that research. Sometimes things happen in clinical care that you didn’t expect and you want to understand, and sometimes you have a research finding that makes you think about how it applies to your patient population. It’s a pretty remarkable dialogue that goes on between the clinical side and the research side.