As I continue to think more about science leadership and the two ways that such leadership often presents itself, I’m reflecting on my own science leadership journey at UW-Madison. If you are someone interested in creating your own path to leadership, this story may be helpful. In this first post, I’m going to share how I created a new leadership position at UW to support the work I was doing.
I began my time at UW in 2016, coming from my post-doctoral Cancer Prevention Fellowship at the National Cancer Institute. The role I was hired to fill was the Assistant Director of Population Sciences in the Carbone Cancer Center (UWCCC). If you are unfamiliar with cancer centers, they generally organize themselves around “research programs” where they group cancer-related researchers with the goal of collaboration and mutual support. One of the three main research areas at UWCCC is population sciences. There is an Associate Director and an Assistant Director, which is the role I stepped into.
The job description was lengthy and had enough team science elements that I thought I could both grow the position and make an impact through facilitating collaborative research. (Team science jobs don’t grow on trees, so it was important for me to be flexible!) As with most job descriptions, at least in my experience, the job description was… aspirational and perhaps a little bit of great fiction writing. Some of the programs I was hired to “lead” were not yet actually in existence and/or they had other leadership that was not in on the decision to turn over that leadership to this position. Unfortunately, none of this was shared with me during my lengthy interview process.
So, I came to this position with a very unrealistic view of what I’d be doing, and my view and the view of others I’d be interacting with were completely mismatched in terms of my responsibilities and goals. I don’t think this is super unusual, but it’s especially difficult to negotiate when you’re new to an institution and don’t have an established network of trusted colleagues. Making this whole process more interesting is that the person in the role before me had been funded at 25% FTE, alongside her duties on other projects, while I was brought in at 100% FTE.
In essence, I had 75% of a job to invent. For me, this was fantastic and a place I excel, in dreaming up new ways to be useful! I could see so many areas where my background in team science, in coordinating centers, in library and information science, in public health, could come together to be helpful to the investigators in the population sciences realm and even in the cancer center more broadly. Prior to my post-doc, I had worked at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center for 7 years, so I had experienced working at a world-class top-tier independent cancer center, and was interested in bringing some of what I learned there to this new environment of a university-based academic medical center. Unfortunately, I was surrounded by people who were not always truly supportive of my efforts and who had very different ideas of what “useful” might be.
So I just started. I decided to just ignore other people’s expectations of my position. (And, frankly, I didn’t have a lot to do so had space to go outside those expectations.) I needed to get to know the people, to get to know the culture, anyway, so I started meeting with everyone in the population sciences area who was willing to meet with me. I asked them questions about their work, I asked them what was working for them and what wasn’t in terms of support from the cancer center, what they dreamed of doing in the future. Basically, I did a quick-and-dirty needs assessment. I talked to them about the work I did in team science, especially in coordinating centers, in helping with collaborative grant proposals. Most of these conversations were amazing and fun and people were excited about the possibility of additional help from the cancer center. Some were less interested, they felt their work was fine as-is. <shrug> These were not my people.
As I learned more, I started to formulate a plan for how we could bring more team science to UWCCC. It took a realllllly long time, like multiple years, but I eventually had generated enough interest and enthusiasm from the faculty that it became difficult for a slightly reluctant leadership to refuse to allow me to spend more time on the team science work. In the meantime, along with a very influential UWCCC member, I had secured a high-profile coordinating center as part of the Cancer Moonshot program, which I’ll discuss in part 2 of this post. I had also helped multiple faculty write team science elements into their grants. In short, I had started doing the work even without the title. At some point, the impact became hard to deny. My case was also helped by the UWCCC’s external advisory board’s annual hard questions to the leadership about how they were facilitating more team science. Soon, a slide about my work became part of the director’s presentation!
Around the time I was discussing the creation of a new position focused on team science and research development, the UW’s CTSA, the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (UW-ICTR), was also seeking a team science person and I had become visible enough that the leadership came to me to discuss the possibility of a shared leadership position between UWCCC and UW-ICTR. The UW-ICTR side was a slightly easier sell because then RFA at that point required a team science focus be woven into the CTSA. After a bit of discussion (months, of course!), a position was created… and I was even allowed to name it! I selected “Director of Team Science + Research Development, UWCCC and UW-ICTR.”
Having that institutional support and a title that conveyed such support, really helped jumpstart and propel the work I was doing. We like to think of universities, especially academic medical centers, as strict meritocracies, but of course the reality is not quite as tidy as all that. Having the backing of two major centers on campus helped open doors and made my work more visible and accessible to others across the campus, at least on the biomedical side!
In the end, I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that I raised the profile of team science at UW dramatically. I brought rigor and focus to team science at UW, not just as a “service” that was provided, though that was important and necessary, but as a field of study that needed to be taken as seriously as any other methodology. I wove evaluation and study into all my work, allowing me to publish and raise the profile further.
By being persistent and showing value in the work I was doing and showing how my work advanced their interests, I finally convinced the doubters that this work was something worth investing in. So, if you are someone who is doing work that you want to make more visible, where you want to become a leader, what is stopping you?
And I mean that question literally! It is important to start by identifying the roadblocks that you may be facing in elevating your work to the next level. And then identify who might become your champions, the people who will be helped and supported by your work. If your work is impactful enough for you to be passionate about it, it’s likely that it is going to be helping someone else. Who are those people and how can you engage them in making your case? Think about your institution’s mission and strategic plan. Can you make a case that your work advances those ideas in some way? How much will it cost? How much of the work can you do as a side-hustle at work, without additional funding or authority? Are there pilot funds or professional development funds you could leverage to get started? Who would be interested in learning more about your work and can you get yourself invited to their meetings to present? When I was building the team science presence, I was giving probably 2-3 presentations each month to PhD students, staff groups, etc. Word gets around once you start sharing your gifts!
Your work is important and has value. How can you bring that value to the world?