Nurture Now

Nurture Now

Mentoring today means tailoring interactions to meet the needs of each student.

By Heather Boerner and Sarah Watts

Since childhood, Damilola Dada has dreamed of becoming a doctor or scientist—any area, so long as it had to do with public health. Now a graduate student in public health at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Dada's dreams are coming into focus, thanks in part to her mentor, Adrienne King, PhD, a physiologist and clinical assistant professor at the Georgia State University School of Public Health. 

"She's trying to maybe change my mind to switch my major," Dada says with a laugh. "She's going to have me work on some of her research projects. With that exposure, I may end up trying to do more environmental epidemiology."

Dada has been King's graduate teaching assistant for the past two semesters, with the hopes of continuing until she graduates. Partly this is because King's life reflects Dada's ambitions: public health, parenthood, leadership, all as a black woman. 

"It's good for me to see someone who looks like me doing the same thing," Dada says. "Her experiences are going to be a reflection of my experiences as I go further into this field." 

Mentoring is a critical component of developing the physiology pipeline and something APS has long supported. But as labs get more diverse, mentors need to tailor their mentoring to the individual student more broadly than in the past. 

King has learned that mentoring any student, but especially students from marginalized communities, requires the mentor to learn where the student is coming from so they can help provide the resources they need. "We make assumptions, and we could be offering the student the very wrong thing," she says. "It helps you be able to mentor other people better when you know their story."

As a profession, physiology has tended toward the academic, and past demographics were typically white and male. "Forty or fifty years ago, you go to a scientific meeting and there were no underrepresented students; the female population was extremely small," says Jeff Osborn, PhD, chair of the APS Physiology Educators Committee and professor of biology, physiology and neuroscience at the University of Kentucky. "That's not the case today."

Indeed, a growing number of graduate students in the sciences today are women, and the ranks of people of color are growing. Plus, rather than going into academic research, nearly 70% end up elsewhere—in education, industry or clinical care, according to research published in 2018. 

And that means, Osborn says, "We have to prepare students to move in every direction."

Physiology is changing with this demand. APS recently shifted its focus from sparking a love of science in K—12 students to supporting graduate students like Dada, who are finding their ways to careers that require physiological training. 

"Unless we meet the needs of the trainees who are coming out of graduate school or postdoctoral fellowships, 25 years from now, there will be no APS. People will go about their own business, in their own direction, in their own way," Osborn says.

Mentoring In and Out of the Classroom

Greg Brower, DVM, PhD, has been a mentor through APS for more than a decade. Brower is associate professor of medical education at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and a member of the APS Teaching Section Steering Committee. As a regular attendee of the Society's annual meeting at Experimental Biology, he has served as a mentor for science students selected for the Society's Martin Frank Diversity Travel Awards. These awards—open to graduate students, postdocs and early-career faculty—support underrepresented scientists' attendance at the annual meeting and include formal mentorship. 

Over the years, he's noticed increased diversity in both students' backgrounds and their intentions for how they will use their physiology degrees. This has affected the way he teaches and mentors. 

Today, Brower spends his days teaching medical students enough physiology to help them make clinical decisions quickly and accurately. That's changed his curriculum vastly. Now, he's no longer teaching physiology as an end to itself. Instead, physiology needs to be functional for the student.

"We're teaching the students to [solve problems] in a clinical setting—how you sequentially work through a problem, organize your thoughts and come to a conclusion," he says. "We still have classes and lectures and take a traditional approach to teaching physiology, but we accomplish that with team-based learning and high-tech medical simulation."

For instance, students practice listening to a "patient's" breath and taking a pulse through the use of lifelike patient simulators. Since most of his students and mentees are now digital natives—that is, they grew up in the era of cellphones and the internet and are adept with modern technology—reaching them and teaching them this way is critical. That's not just for his classroom.

Brower is increasingly charged with helping mentees connect to people working in industry, including startups, and the clinical world, which increasingly needs them, too. He also takes pains to introduce his mentees to researchers who could help them along their career paths. And he's stayed in touch with many of them. "Most scientists are busy," he says, "but we're also very interested in helping to train the next generation."

Happily, technology helps. "With the advent of email and Skype, there are so many more opportunities to be involved without having to go across country to mentor students," he says. "They used to bring individuals into a class for a week, and now they've transitioned into more of an online approach, going into a chat room and discussing concepts. We can disseminate [information] much more widely than we could before." 

Standardizing Scientific Achievement

More than a decade ago, Caroline Appleyard, PhD, FAPS, a professor at Ponce Health Sciences in Puerto Rico, noticed a big discrepancy in how her institution's physiology and biomedical sciences students were performing—not in the classroom or the lab, but at conferences, in networking, in leadership opportunities. Only some were presenting at international and national conferences. Others struggled with the English language and, importantly, confidence. And that translated into fewer presentations and, later, fewer PhDs awarded.

For Appleyard, who is known to be hyper-organized, this was a problem of the academic timeline.

"I like to project and know where things are going," she says. So she began sitting down with PhD students when they came into her lab and delineating the kinds of milestones they'd need to hit. If they did, she hoped it would ensure they would finish their PhDs and go on to scientific careers. 

"Obviously, in higher education and with PhDs there's a lot of individuality" to what students need, she says. "But we want to try to standardize the process of students attaining their PhDs in a timely manner."

This idea, in collaboration with colleagues, turned into a model program for how to increase the number of diverse PhD holders. Ponce's Research Training Initiative for Student Enhancement (RISE) program was born. Funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Appleyard's program is one of several around the country that are piloting new ways to improve PhD completion rates for students of diverse backgrounds. Each student selected for the program receives a salary, tuition, lab supply and travel funds, as well as career development and team mentoring.

The program isn't just Appleyard's brainchild. Through student surveys, RISE identified areas where students said the PhD program was lacking. It turned out that students wanted a hands-on course in molecular lab techniques outside their regular lab work—now a mainstay when entering the PhD program. And they wanted help improving their written and spoken English. These exercises help build confidence and give students access to more career-building opportunities in their respective areas of study, she says. 

The result is that more students are attaining PhDs in a shorter time frame. What the experience has taught Appleyard, she says, is that to improve outcomes, they couldn't roll out the support equally to all PhD students. 

"I've always been very much a believer that everyone should be treated the same," she says. "But I"ve come to a slow realization over the years that there's a big difference between everyone being treated the same and everyone having the same access, the same background. You have to take individual populations and find out where they need more help to achieve equity." 

Adding the Personal Touch

When King was in graduate school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the conventional wisdom was that she should choose a mentor with a large lab and lots of experience working with grad students.

She should not, for instance, choose someone like Shannon Bailey, PhD, who had never had a PhD student before. "But I looked at her, and I said, "She's a younger female, she has excellent training and she had funding,"" King says. "I knew this professor was going to be dedicated to me finishing my PhD in a timely fashion."

But it wasn't just that. Bailey was always available and helped talk King through her interests. That would have been enough to make her a good mentor, King says. But then, King's father unexpectedly died. When King returned to the lab, she saw her father's obituary hanging on the wall. 

"It"s bringing tears to my eyes," she says now. She remembers Bailey pointing to the obituary and asking, "Why didn't you tell me your father was the provost at Tuskegee University? I had no idea."

King looked at Bailey differently after that. Bailey could have "assumed that I was a low-income black person," King says. Instead, she took the time to get to know and honor King's family lineage. "It's not that she treated me any differently," King says. "But our relationship changed after that."

King felt safe asking more questions and opening up to Bailey. Even after she rotated out of Bailey's lab, King took Bailey up on her open-door policy. Bailey responded quickly to King's questions, and she nudged King to finish sections of her dissertation. 

King now follows in Bailey's footsteps, keeping her grad students to two or three so she can give them the attention they need. And she always tells her own story to minority students.

"They get to see a black female who has a PhD from a top-20 research institution," she says. "I've been the only [minority or woman in a room]. It's OK to be the "only" in the room. But I have to make sure that our students know they don't have to be the "only," and the best way to do that is they must continue their education so they aren't the "only" in the room."

As APS and the field of physiology become more diverse, mentoring will be more important than ever. Getting to know students and trainees as individuals will be an integral part of successful mentorship. It will require established physiologists to tailor interactions to meet the needs of the next generation of researchers.

This article was originally published in the May 2020 issue of The Physiologist Magazine.