Interview with Dr. Olaf Sporns, 2023 winner of the Mentor Award
Author: Lavinia Uscătescu
Editors: Elisa Guma, Elizabeth Dupre, Kevin Sitek
Dr. Olaf Sporns is Distinguished Professor and Provost Professor in the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. He was the recipient of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) Mentor Award at the 2023 OHBM annual meeting, held in Montreal. Several of his students and postdocs have received graduate and post-graduate fellowships, support from training grants, and/or won national awards, and several have moved on to independent positions at leading universities.
Dr. Sporns studied Biochemistry in Tübingen, Germany, before obtaining his PhD in Neuroscience at Rockefeller University, New York. Dr. Sporns brings significant contributions to our understanding of brain connectivity and network neuroscience. Much of his work is focused on connectomics, computational network models and dynamic functional connectivity, including in disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia.
Human brain function strongly depends on network interactions, which play out on multiple time scales and in both anatomy and functional brain dynamics.He is the founder and Editor-In-Chief of the Journal Network Neuroscience and is author of two books which elaborate on approaches to studying the human connectome,Networks of the Brain, andDiscovering the Human Connectome. He is noted for being highly efficient and disciplined in his writing, regularly submitting his documents well ahead of deadline. In this interview, he shares some of this insight regarding his approach to mentoring, as well as some advice for early-career principal investigators to develop their mentoring skills.
Q1: What is your approach to mentorship, and how did this develop over time?
Olaf Sporns (OS): Most mentors probably model their own mentorship activities on their own experiences when they were early career scientists. For me, this was not the case. While I received excellent scientific training, my career did not benefit from the sort of support and caring relationship that should be at the heart of successful mentorship. In a sense, my approach developed as a reaction to my own less-than-positive experiences. When I first started my own lab, I focused on developing a mentorship strategy that was highly personalized, tailored to the specific needs of each trainee. I quickly learned to be flexible and adjust to what each person in the lab tried to achieve, and to open possibilities for them to become more independent and autonomous. Independence goes together with taking responsibility, and it became my most important guiding principle over the years—in part because I had so little of it when I started out.
Q2: What would you say are the most important qualities in a mentor?
OS: Some measure of selflessness and humility. Mentorship is not about you, the mentor, it is about the mentee. They need to advance and move forward as scientists and as individuals. Mentors need to be generous in their approach—with intellectual input as well as time and resources. Mentors also need to be able to look beyond immediate results and work with their trainees towards long-term goals. It is not always just about the next paper or grant or talk – it is also about helping them succeed in their professional lives, in the long run. Another important point is that—for me at least—mentorship often becomes a life-long relationship, and there is an important transition from mentoring to sponsoring when people leave the lab. I try to be available and weigh in (and write, nominate, etc) for my trainees long after they have become fully independent. And remember, their success is their success, not yours.
Q3: What can new PIs do to make sure they develop good mentorship skills?
OS: Try to emulate what worked best in your own experience as a trainee. Talk to others who are starting out as mentors and compare what works and what doesn’t. Learn from the inevitable failures, don’t be discouraged, keep an open mind as every new person who joins the lab will be different from all the previous ones. Ask for feedback from your mentees: is there a way to be more helpful and supportive? Encourage trainees to work together, avoid competition and encourage cooperation, learn to be mutually supportive, and foster a positive social environment. Always focus on positive outcomes: code that works, ideas that seem promising, talks/posters that went well. Get past the unavoidable career disappointments quickly: put them in perspective and focus on the next step to make things better.