Listen here:
Janice E. Clements, PhD is the guest on the Faculty Factory this week for a discussion on the habits and hacks that have contributed to her successful career in academic medicine. Please listen to this episode via the podcast player above and read the full transcription of the episode below:
Transcription
Dr. Skarupski: Well, hello everybody out there in faculty world this is Kim Skarupski with the Faculty Factory Podcast and I am especially pleased to welcome today to the podcast, the person who sponsored the Faculty Factory Podcast, my boss Dr. Janice Clements. Hi Janice!
Dr. Clements: Good morning Kim. How are you?
Dr. Skarupski: I’m good, I’m so excited to get to talk to you about some really important topics. Everybody listening, Dr. Dr. Janice Clements is a professor of molecular and comparative pathobiology here at Johns Hopkins and more importantly to me anyway, she is the Mary Wallace Stanton Professor of Faculty Affairs, our Vice Dean for Faculty.
Dr. Clements started the Office of Faculty 21 plus years ago and started off very simple, actually with nothing right Janice? I think you had an administrative assistant and that was it.
Dr. Clements: I had half of an administrative assistant. (laughs)
Dr. Skarupski: Oh, those half people, there’s such an interesting situation with half people, but you’re right and then she built the office of faculty development under that the office of women in science and medicine the office of diversity and inclusion, office of part-time faculty so her field has grown just amazing over the past eight years since I’ve been with you.
But over 21 years, here we are today serving 3,000 full-time faculty, a thousand part-time faculty and she’s really built a wonderful legacy and history.
Dr. Clements and I were talking about wanting to address some important issues for faculty, even start say let’s take it like beginning to end, say pretend you’re not only here at Hopkins but you’re anywhere else in academic medicine and we’re going to talk, she’ll briefly talk to you about why a faculty orientation is important to you.
Because some of you may be thinking why, let’s just skip ahead and get rolling here but why is faculty orientation important? And then we’re going to go through a couple other things that she wants you to be aware of and we think are important for faculty.
So Janice, let’s talk, why is faculty orientation important? What’s the value of it?
Dr. Clements: Our faculty come from two sources they come from being postdocs and being, doing research and from their clinical and their residency program, and their learners. And they have to make the transition from learners and people who depend on others to being a faculty member, now people depend on you.
And that is actually psychologically a difficult transition and so that’s why faculty orientation is really focused on that.
It’s focused on telling the faculty you are now faculty. You are the people that direct other people, people look up to you and you have to realize that you have to change the concept of who you are.
You have to maintain some of the things that you had as a trainee, the mentors you had, you need to stay in touch with them, they can be your mentors for life, but then you have to find new mentors that will guide you through the faculty process of being a junior faculty getting established in your area of expertise, developing both your scholarship and your presence in the faculty and introducing you to important people.
In terms of mentors, you’re going to need a variety of mentors, unlike when you were a trainee where you had that one mentor that really helped you along, now you need a cadre of mentors that will do the things you need to do as a faculty member.
Dr. Skarupski: I like how you position thinking about orientation as partly a psychological shift because I’ve always thought that orientation is about getting the nuts and bolts, the resources, the policies, the programs, the regulations, but I think it is important as you point out that it’s a shift in thinking.
Dr. Clements: Right and so to facilitate that shift we have the leaders there, Paul Rothman the dean comes and welcomes the faculty and you get to know him, you see his face, he’s there with you he asks questions.
We also have the president of the Johns Hopkins health system and Kevin Sowers is very engaged in people and our faculty. And the third person who’s very important is Redonda Miller who is the president, the first woman president of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and she comes to not only talk to you about her role, but something about her journey too.
Because she started at Hopkins as a medical student and worked her way to being the president of Johns Hopkins Hospital. This gives you insight into who your leaders are, where they came from and who you might want to model yourself after.
Dr. Skarupski: Right, I like the not only this shift of thinking of “oh wow I’ve made it I am a faculty member I’m no longer a trainee I have to wrap my head around the fact that I’ve reached that the goal that I was always striving to attain and I want to now know the landscape, who are the leaders in the hospital, in the system, in my institution.”
And also learning the culture of how we behave. The culture is just a blueprint for living so how is this culture different from another culture? Because we learn in academic medicine probably everywhere that you’ve seen one academic medical center you’ve seen one academic medical center.
Meaning that we’re all so unique, so different so that orientation is an opportunity to understand the culture how do we do things around here?
Could you also just make a little brief notation or a comment about, we’re talking about trainees who are becoming faculty members for the first time ever, what about faculty members who are they’re already a faculty member at XYZ university and now they’re going to another university for a leadership role or they’re just they’ve been recruited away or looking for new opportunities so they’ve already been a faculty member.
Why would they want to bother again about a faculty orientation if they think, well I’m not a newbie I’ve been around the block a few times?
Dr. Clements: Well, because the culture at Hopkins is different and our rules are different, we’re very faculty focused. What they should know is that there is the gold book which actually governs faculty promotions and faculty reviews and it is actually a very powerful, it’s sort of a guidance, but also it protects the faculty.
You wouldn’t necessarily know about the gold book, you would probably get a copy of it or get a pdf of it, but you wouldn’t understand it but this invites your promotion it guides how you should be treated, your equipment and your review process and the things that need to be done.
It’s very important to understand the new culture at Johns Hopkins, it’s a protective culture for faculty. One of the things I’ve built during my time in the Office of Faculty are things that protect the faculty and help them to succeed.
One of the things we’ve worked on for a long time is salary equity. We started that in 2004 and so every year we look at everybody’s salary and we send the results to your chairman and we say to them these people are out of equity please deal with it.
In the last few years we’ve actually developed very clear faculty compensation plans and so that makes it even easier. You know your compensation plan, you know where you are and you can look at the report and gauge the equity of your salary.
These are the sorts of things we’ve put in place at Hopkins that are very different from other institutions.
Dr. Skarupski: Right. I love how when I first came here that you talked about that gold book being the good faith framework, that it goes both ways. That it’s not a hammer that you’re hitting faculty with, but rather it’s this good faith agreement that we are going to protect you.
And we put in place these mechanisms to support and grow and develop and protect you, and these are the expectations, so everything is clear, transparent and we’re all accountable to these expectations.
We have the silver book that tells you how to do it, the blue book for part-timers but I love that you created all those documents.
Dr. Clements: Right. The gold book is a contract. It just describes the faculty contract, and you should be aware that you do have a contract and be clear about what that is every year. We don’t have tenure at Hopkins but at full professor we do have contract-to-retirement so that is essentially tenure.
Dr. Skarupski: Right, so you’ve spelled out to me, if you’re a new trainee who’s just newly minted faculty person, even a mid-career faculty person who’s made the change, orientation is vital because you not only get a sense of the leaders, your expectations but a culture and how things happen so we can’t rest on the assumption that this institution operates the same way the other institution where I was used to work or we can’t assume that it works the same way as it was when I was a trainee.
I think you’ve demonstrated the value of an orientation not only here at Hopkins but any other institution. That’s a really important point to stop a moment and take a breath on how the institution works.
Dr. Clements: The other thing is that we do really showcase what the opportunities are in the office of faculty development and building mentoring teams, mentoring accountability groups, writing accountability groups called WAGS, all the opportunities that as a faculty member, it will make your life and your career more successful by having that information, that connection to other people, help you focus on your career in a way that is precisely for your career. Something like precision faculty development.
Dr. Skarupski: Yes. I love it, that’s the fun thing that I get to do so yes, I love that we are highlighted in the orientation.
Janice, could you segue now into, let’s talk about annual reviews. That’s another thing that in my early career I always kind of rolled my eyes at. “Kim your annual review is due please complete the attached form and I said, ahhhh.”
When I honestly sit down and look at it, it is a good time for me to say “gosh last year I said I was going to do 1, 2, 3, and I actually did 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or I didn’t do 3, why did I saw I was going to do 3, now I want to do 6 and 7.” So actually it is a good moment for me, even though I resent it and it seems like work, I realized that, no this is good to look back and take pride in what I have accomplished to set realistic goals and get better about calibrating my time and effort and really kind of having a real conversation with my director about shared expectations, where am I going, what am I challenged by, what do I know, what resources do I need and I’m thinking now after Covid, it’s more important than ever.
Can you talk to us about how do you prepare for an annual review? Why it’s important? What do you suggest to faculty about that annual review process?
Dr. Clements: The annual review process is mandated by the gold book and why is that important? We do not want you as a faculty member to get lost and this is essentially a time, a very special time that you sit down for an hour or so with your department director and you and he or she discuss what you’ve done, what you plan to do.
It’s really very valuable and how do you prepare for it? My recommendation is not to wait until a year to look at your CV to think about your goals. I would say every three months, put on your calendar two hours to think about where I’m going.
It sounds like goofy and like “oh I know where I’m going” unless you are thoughtful and deliberate about it, put it on your calendar, sit down and think about what you’ve done and then set your goals and then by the time the end of the year comes, you’ve got all those intermediate meetings with yourself.
You’ve got the goals that you’ve done and you’ll be really prepared for it, it’s the time to ask for things you need, ask about leadership roles.
Dr. Skarupski: I love that you talk about the thinking and spending time on yourself and it’s reminding me that Dr. Rachel Levine our senior associate dean for faculty educational development always says when we co-present, she says “oh every week I schedule time for deep thinking” and then I remember the first time she said that I said “well what do you do?” and she said in her deadpan manner “I think.”
And I love it. And it’s just, it seems like, “I’m too busy to think” well for crying out loud I mean if we can’t think that’s the nature of our life is what goes on between our ears we need to schedule that time, it’s like charging our batteries.
We’re academics so that we can we live the life of the mind and when we’re so busy being mechanical and robots and rushing around we’re not engaging that thing that we love to do which is to think. You’re investing in yourself and so we have to, just like the whole example in the airplane when the oxygen drops you take care of yourself first.
If we don’t take care of ourselves, we won’t be able to take care of our labs and our patients and our colleagues and our family members, so that investment in ourselves to think and prepare and update your CV as things happen.
There’s nothing worse than waiting a year and say now “where did I give that talk?” “what was the name of it? what were the dates?”
As soon as I get something, I update my CV, so that just avoids stress later on, when I’m trying to do it on an annual basis.
Janice can you just speak before we move to the next topic about sometimes I hear from faculty who when we advise them, how to be proactive and to take charge of the annual review, they say “well I think I’m going to take charge of it and I have this plan of what I want to talk about but then when I get to be with my department director she goes right to my RVUs and my productivity and it’s all about you know the bottom line and I kind of feel like it may be hijacked a bit.”
Can you give some inside advice or some recommendations on how to own that process when you get in the meeting?
Dr. Clements: You have to listen and then you have to say “Now I would like to talk about the academic things. I have been very productive I’ve done these things, now I need to talk about the other things that I need from you.”
Because what your chair was asked for, she or he, was what you were doing for them and for the department but you need to have that time to get input for you, so you have to somehow be forceful enough to say that.
Dr. Skarupski: That’s right and the best way to do that if we don’t feel courageous is to practice that. So we talk in our leadership programs about rehearsing that. Nothing makes you feel more confident than rehearsing. You talk to any athlete or musician or artist just practicing and then before you know it you get to that meeting you’re like “oh I’ve been here before, I’ve rehearsed this so many times I can almost do it in my sleep.”
We get more courageous, when we get more comfortable, we get comfortable when we practice things.
Dr. Clements: The other thing too, is don’t forget your mentor, when you’re doing another overview you might want to practice it on your mentor.
And then you can go through what you’re going to ask for and they can actually give you good guidance perhaps you’re not asking enough, you’re not being reflective enough, you’re not talking enough about how much you’ve done and where you want to go.
Dr. Skarupski: Perfect and Dr. Clements we’re on the heels of Covid so you know this is probably the next year or two we don’t want to have any institutional amnesia, good practice for us as faculty members is to get into that rhythm of saying “well during Covid, this is where I pivoted this is, I totally had to transition here as you know, this didn’t happen, this did happen, we doubled down efforts over here, we had to do this or that.”
Having a little bit of mercy and grace to recognize where we all, everything kind of shifted and changed, but then having a plan for what’s going forward.
Did you want to say anything about the Covid and the herculean efforts of our faculty and how we can remember to reflect back and not forget those sacrifices and the changes?
I mean some people had negative effects and I’ve talked to some faculty members, bless their hearts, who said “oh my gosh I’ve been crazy productive I’ve never written more because my lab was shut down and so I had to be at home and I’m writing papers.”
Do you want to speak a little bit about the pandemic effects?
Dr. Clements: Yeah, well the pandemic had very uneven, as we pointed out, consequences for faculty so our clinical faculty that were hands-on medicine, pediatrics, they really were doing the heavy lifting during Covid and they are very worn out.
On the other hand our surgical faculty were blocked out of doing surgery, so they had the frustration, and they had the feeling of not being able to do the things that they normally do.
And then the research faculty were closed out of their labs, now some people could be productive, but people with small children at home, everyone has a different experience. And hopefully we’ve all learned more about ourselves and how we adapt to change because that’s what we’ve all had to do.
Dr. Skarupski: Yeah, so this is another reminder to faculty listening don’t be so brave at your annual reviews and for example do not not talk about these things.
I guess what I’m trying to emphasize is what Dr. Clements said is that annual review and regular meetings with your mentors should be at least acknowledging these impacts positive or negative, yeah they’ll have long-standing effects so we don’t want to ignore them or forget them and so adjust and just keep that on our the radar, so I think you’ve said that really a lot better than I just did.
But now what is this, the idea of reappointment reviews? Can you describe for some people who’d be listening to this who aren’t from Hopkins and certainly those of us in Hopkins, what is a reappointment review?
Because I know some faculty members hear that and they get a little nervous like “am I in trouble why am I getting re-appointed?” What does that mean?
Dr. Clements: In the gold book if you are at the rank of assistant professor or associate professor for seven years, your department has to prepare a plan and work it out with you and they send it to the reappointment review committee.
This is a committee of your peers, senior people, but your peers, that look at you in in a very constructive way, to say where is this person? Is the department director doing the right things? Should this person be put up for promotion? Does this person need more resources to excel?
So this is really an opportunity to get outside your department advice, you get the commentary from the reappointment review committee that your department director gets, so you see that and then you get down with your department director and assess it and make plans of it.
Dr. Skarupski: So, the point of the re-appointment review again, is not some kind of, you’re in trouble or…
Dr. Clements: No, no, no. It’s really, it’s really for your development.
Dr. Skarupski: Right, it’s protecting faculty members who might back in the olden days before you instituted this policy, they may have languished as an assistant professor or an associate professor for 10, 12, 20 years and while some people may be fine and they don’t want to be promoted, or they are not driven by or expect to be promoted, or want to be by virtue of whatever it is they do, there are some people who have in the past historically have fallen through the cracks and they’ve gone unnoticed and they just go about their business and they’re not really being developed.
So this policy that you put in place was to protect and develop and lift up and move along and elevate and retain, so it’s a good thing when you get a re-appointment review to say “hey how you doing, what’s going on, are you okay, what’s the plan? Let’s reassess, let’s kind of marshal our efforts to help you get and achieve your next goal.”
Dr. Clements: And many times, the feedback from the reappointment review committee is “this person is ready for promotion and or this person would be ready for promotion with these next steps.”
So you get very directed advice and so it’s really very good and the chair is really obligated to work with you on those recommendations.
Dr. Skarupski: That’s right, well this is great, we’ve talked about faculty orientation, we’ve talked about a couple of things that happen as a matter of course. Annual reviews and reappointment reviews, now we’re going to switch a little bit to talk about a couple more topics that we hear a lot from faculty members who are especially newbies starting out.
How to build a lab, so a lot of faculty members come here, they’re again, as Dr. Clements said they’re coming from a training environment, and they have had the good fortune of being in wonderful productive labs which is how they got to Hopkins or wherever you’re listening around the world.
But Janice you’ve been in a basic science lab and you’ve been NIH funded your entire career, based on your own personal perspective and being a vice dean for faculty over decades, how do you tell a faculty member, how do they build their lab if they’re basic scientists or even if they’re in a clinical department?
Dr. Clements: Yeah, I’m doing basic science. You can’t do it alone, you need your mentors, make a plan about what your first year is going to look like. Perhaps it will be to get an R1 or a K award but for those things you need the advice of your mentors and other junior faculty or other mid-level faculty, so you’re in a department, take advantage of getting to know the other faculty and building bridges with them to help you build that.
Because each department has a different culture and so within that culture you can learn how to build your lab, to recruit a technician, how do you recruit people? You need to interact with HR. You need to recruit graduate students, you have to get into these graduate programs, if you’re in the in the basic sciences you have access to the BCMB program but other people have access to other programs as well. There’s the pathobiology program which is very focused on more of the practical and applied sciences, and you can get great students.
You have to decide which programs are best for you, the other program open to all faculty is a cell and molecular medicine program. It has faculty from all over the school, the students that go into that program are interested in more translational science, so basic science that then takes them into more of a relevance to the clinical, and there’s also the human genetics program.
So, in my case, I was a molecular biologist who became a virologist and I found that the life of the biology, biological combination required basic science as well as learning about the impact of viruses in people, because I was studying HIV.
So, I built my lab based on human genetics, so you choose the programs that fit what you are going to do. So that’s one aspect, the other aspect is once you get all those people in place, how do you keep them engaged?
How do you keep everyone in a productive mode? And the one way I did it was I had lab meetings every week with everyone in the lab, not just the students but the technicians and everyone who was involved in research. And that built a community feeling in the lab that you had that to look forward to and prepare what they had done for the week, that doesn’t preclude sitting down with their trainees probably weekly or bi-weekly depending on what stage they’re in to check in.
So, it’s a big job, starting your lab and getting it going but don’t do it alone, use your mentors, use your colleagues in the department and don’t be shy about asking for advice.
Dr. Skarupski: I love the recommendation about meeting with and talking regularly with everyone in the lab. You’re saying a lot of what Doug Robinson said on the podcast a little bit ago.
He does all kind of cell research here at Hopkins, Douglas Robinson, and he shared two things about how to build a vision in your lab, what is the vision, who are we, not only what are we going to do but part of the product if you will, the money and the papers and the grant, the grant funding and the discovery, but also the product is the people.
So you’re saying the same thing that you have to invest in the people and so that was part of his creating a vision of who are we as a lab and getting together formally and meeting, so building those relationships and investing in the people.
And then he talked about how to put together SOPs, standard operating procedures, that you rely on as like if you will the gold book of the lab, that when somebody leaves he always does an exit interview with them, what could be better? What processes need to be improved?
But having these lab guidelines that everyone understands, what the roles responsibilities are authorship expectations and guidelines and handling disputes early on, but if you have standard operating procedures up front and invest that time in improving them and putting them together, then you’re going to save potentially a lot of problems downstream.
Can we shift now to grant writing? I told everybody you’ve been a lifelong funded NIH grant awardee and doing research. That is such a common challenge here at Hopkins and everywhere I’ve been. People really struggle especially new folks, how to write a grant, what does a funded grant application look like?
How do I do it? Some of us are under the mistaken impression that writing a grant application is the same as writing a paper, a manuscript, a peer reviewed publication, there’s so many elements to, it’s complex or it just takes a lot of time and effort.
Can you speak to maybe high level or however kind of level granularity you want about grant writing? What recommendations do you have for, especially new people, who are really terrified by the idea of getting and writing grants?
Dr. Clements: I think there’s a lot of things that we should do. One of the things is, where am I getting that grant from? So, if it’s the NIH you find out who is the program officer from the area you’re writing the grant. If it’s some other group, call their grant people and find out what they’re looking for and introduce yourself.
Because from the point of view of the SRA, the scientific research officers, they are judged by how successful their grantees are, so they want to know you, they want to help develop you, especially as a faculty member.
Right now, there’s this big push at NIH to invest in the junior faculty but you have to do your job, learn who you are, who you’re grant writing to, talk to them, build a relationship and then they will know you and then they have you.
I’ll just tell a quick story, my junior faculty member who I’ve been mentoring wrote a grant and it was for an RFA and she wrote a very let’s say broad and deep and unique grant. And it fit many of the things that the NIH is prioritizing. It got a good review, but not a great review. But since the SRO knew her, they called each other and they talked about it and she explained what these were and how they didn’t understand it, and he saw what the priorities were.
And so while she wasn’t awarded the grant during the first round, a month after the council meeting where they’re making decisions, she was contacted to say “we are very interested in you as a new investigator, your exciting proposal and we are going to fund.” Having that relationship is very important.
Dr. Skarupski: Right. When somebody first told me that I thought well I’m not going to bother them, are you kidding they worked at NIA, I was writing for national institute on aging, and they’re not going to want to talk to me, I’m a nobody, and so it sounds counter-intuitive, so you have to be building relationships, there’s nothing wrong with emailing quickly, you don’t take advantage of people’s time, you have very concise bullet points, introducing yourself, you’re helping them as well.
Dr. Clements: You’re right. So that’s the first step, knowing where to send that grant. The second step is to think about your specific aims, that is the key to a grant. Once you’ve gotten those honed down, then you can write a good grant, now you can’t do that alone.
Especially as a first-time grant writer, you have to put your ink down and then you have to go to your mentors, you have to go to your colleagues, you have to go to senior people with expertise.
So that means you have to start about two months at least and if not three before you’re going to do this grant and get every piece in place.
You have to get that input, get your specific aims written, and then the next part is your preliminary results, that is so important, that shows that you have invested in this area, this what you’re doing in this area and that to me is the second most important piece is having the preliminary.
Once you have the framework, the grant almost writes itself. Make sure you do it far enough in advance that people have the time to read and critique it.
Dr. Skarupski: That is the most important thing is building enough time you it’s very rare you’ve got to be a special human being to be able to write a grant in a weekend.
We all know people who have done it but it’s not their first grant by any means. You really have to build in as much time as possible because those specific aims that is the huge effort, that is the 80, 90 of your efforts is on that one page, making it tight, telling a clear story, walking the reader through and you’re right once you get that down pat it’s everybody knows what you’re doing, it’s very evident.
You’re not over complicating things, the rest of it will fall into place, and that all starts with your not keeping it a secret by sharing it with your mentors as soon as possible, as often as possible and getting all the feedback you can.
Janice this has been wonderful is there anything else, parting comments you’d like to share with new faculty, mid-career faculty, late-career faculty, any other bits of wisdom before we call it a day?
Dr. Clements: This is really a great place, because we focus on mentorship and so as a junior faculty, don’t forget that you are a mentor too. And that you should be building your mentor muscle by mentoring students and technicians, and I think if you take that approach you’ll enjoy what you’re doing more because that contact and seeing other people succeed is so great. That’s been my greatest pleasure as a faculty member.
It sounds like a lot of work but I think what you have to do is get the pleasure out of it too. Step back and enjoy what you’re doing, pat yourself on the back when you succeed, enjoy the journey and don’t be worried about getting to the next step. it will happen if you do it right and worrying about it just takes energy.
Dr. Skarupski: I love Janice how you always talk about not only being passionate and doing what fills your heart with joy and also how you always emphasize to faculty members that you have more power than you think, that you are empowered, so that’s been a theme that I’ve appreciated from you over the years is that passion and the power that you are now as faculty members, you are a leader if not by a fancy title, but by your role, by what you do.
So we are we’re all leaders and if we work with passion and remember that we have a lot more power than we think we do I think we’re all going to get through this and be wildly successful.
This is Dr. Janice Clements our Mary Wallace Stanton professor of faculty affairs, our vice dean for faculty, professor of molecular and comparative pathobiology. Dr. Clements, thank you so much for your time today and we’ll talk to you again soon.