Choose Mentors on the Cutting Edge Posted on May 2, 2006 Wayne Drevets (bio) discusses his multiple mentors.

Selection of a mentor is gonna be one of the most important decisions that someone makes with regard to setting their career path, and, in that regard, I think it’s critical to choose a mentor who’s on the cutting edge of the field or of the technological application that you’re interested in pursuing.

It’s also, I think, important to learn about the technology, and so if your mentor turns out, as mine was, to be quite busy, it’s important to have sort of additional mentors that teach you what you need to know about that area, that have sufficient time to spend on training you.

In addition, all research has become multi-disciplinary virtually in clinical neuroscience, and so as a result of that, no one mentor is gonna have sufficient expertise to train you on all the things you need. So I had a mentor that was an expert in PET imaging and the application of PET to neuropsychiatric illness. I had another mentor that was a neurophysiologist that was really the one that taught me about the technological issues related to imaging.

I had a mentor in neuroanatomy, who helped me interpret the data that we came up with and generate circuitry based models for understanding the pathophysiology of depression as reflected in our data. And I also had a mentor in psychiatry that taught me about the application of neuroimaging or of some biological technique to then trying to understand the pathophysiology of the psychiatric disorder, how one would then carve up the psychiatric condition into sub-phenotypes that would be more enriched for biological markers for illness.

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