Empowering Early-Career Scientists via Individual Development Plans
Creating myIDP. I began developing expertise in Individual Development Plans in 2006 in partnership with colleague Bill Lindstaedt, developing a 30+ page workbook and co-teaching IDP workshops at UCSF and nationally. In 2009, Bill and I joined Philip Clifford (at the time, at Medical College of Wisconsin) and Jennifer Hobin (at the time, at FASEB) to convert materials from our collective workshops into an interactive online career planning tool: myIDP. Hosted by AAAS and ScienceCareers, myIDP is used by scientists across the country and world, with more than 200,000 users. It served as a model for ChemIDP (developed by the American Chemical Society for chemists), ImaginePhD (developed by the Graduate Career Consortium for humanities and social sciences PhDs), and PHaSS-IDP (developed by the Kennedy Krieger Institute and collaborators for scholars in public health and social sciences). myIDP’s classification of PhD career options, to our knowledge the first such classification for biomedical PhDs, has been used by universities, NIH, and other organizations as a starting point for career outcomes tracking.
myIDP >
myIDP Collection of Articles at ScienceCareers >
Key collaborators on this work:
myIDP co-authors: Philip Clifford, Jennifer Hobin, Bill Lindstaedt
AAAS IT partners: Zdenek Becka, Melissa Rosenthal, Michael Savelli
Grant support:
Burroughs Wellcome Fund
Integrating IDPs into educational contexts. My work on myIDP has afforded many opportunities to visit campuses across the country to teach workshops or share strategies for using IDPs in various educational contexts. At UMassChan, I converted our IDP workshops into a mini-course required for third-year students, led the effort to develop an IDP process for the graduate school that integrates IDPs with research planning, and developed a Faculty Guide to IDPs. I have adapted workshop content for a variety of trainee stages and contexts. This includes contributing content as an instructor for iBiology’s online course, “Planning Your Scientific Journey”, which debuted in June 2017 with 385 enrollees across 30 countries, and a new online course on developing an IDP (in partnership with the Yale Ciencia Academy). I am a co-author of an IDP being developed for career development professionals through the Graduate Career Consortium, and contributed to developing an IDP for professional science masters students. My focus has increasingly shifted toward presenting to or advising faculty and training program leaders on strategies for facilitating a meaningful IDP process within training programs and mentoring relationships. In alignment with this, I co-developed an IDP process for early-career faculty via our UMass Chan Investigator Career Advancement Program.
Collaborators on this work:
Numerous.
Grant support:
National Institutes of Health (grant no. DP7 OD018421; BEST award, 2013-2018)
Developing assessment tools for IDPs. My most recent work in this area is as co-PI of an Innovations in Graduate Education grant from the National Science Foundation (2018-2021) to develop a toolkit for assessing outcomes and impacts of IDPs in various educational contexts. This project is in partnership with the American Chemical Society.
Key collaborators on this work:
Corrie Kuniyoshi (PI), Joerg Schlatterer (co-PI), Laura O'Dwyer (psychometrician), Jodi Wesemann (senior advisor)
Grant support:
National Science Foundation (grant no. 1806607; Innovations in Graduate Education (DGE-IGE))