T32s Posted on January 14, 2008 Jeannette R. Ickovics (bio) describes a tactical approach to getting and running training grants.

T32s, training grants, are really important; my postdoctoral colleagues have been among my closest colleagues at this point in my career. I think the perfect time for a T32 or maybe a good time to think about a T32 is somewhere early- to mid-career or maybe squarely in mid-career.

T32s are important for bringing doctoral students in and postdoctoral students, and in many institutions that’s highly valued and considered a gold star on your record if you can be bringing those training slots in. The down side is there’s no salary support on a T32, so you do need to have some other sources of support on research grants that will permit you the freedom and flexibility to then do a T32. So I think they can’t be too early in your career, and you wouldn’t be probably competitive too early in your career.

Once you have a T32 I think where the advantages really come from those relationships that develop, and you move from being a mentored person to mentoring others. And there’s certainly value in that. I have been very fortunate to have a number of wonderful pre-and postdoctoral fellows with whom I’ve been able to publish a lot, and I think it’s really important to share that partnership and recognize that it is a true collaboration. So often with fellows a first thing that they might do is run analyses for papers, and we both are co-authors on that along with the team. Very quickly I give fellows the opportunity to take the lead on papers.

We use a method on our research team, sort of a multi- phase process beginning with a concept sheet. And we write these two-page concept sheets, and anybody on the team can do them from an undergraduate through a graduate student or a postdoctoral fellow, a faculty member, or senior colleague. And what we do is we write a concept sheet, it goes to a committee, and it’s a way of clarifying ideas before getting too deeply invested in any one train of thought. It also is a way of giving everybody equal opportunity to be a first author or a co-author on a set of papers. It also is a way to preclude overlap of ideas so as a new fellow comes in, one of the first things we give them is a list of all the concept sheets and papers that have been written or are being actively worked on.

So there are a lot of advantages: it goes through a committee, it gets tossed around very early phase, and the ideas get developed, somebody says “Oh well rather than do that approach, or in addition that approach, how about add this set of variables that will really bridge this area or a more sophisticated analytic technique,” and so forth. And once those are approved by the team, then the paper-writing moves forward.

I hold myself to the same standards as my pre- and postdoctoral fellows and other colleagues, and that is you can only have one concept sheet open at a time, so that you have to follow through, get the paper completed and submitted. And at the point where the paper is submitted, then you can do the next concept sheet. And what we hope is that it creates a sense of responsibility and also some motivation for getting things completed, so you can get the next one up and running.

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