A World View: The ACR Global Research Exchange Program Promotes Mentorship & Long-Term Collaboration in Rheumatology

Dr. Traboco also shares that she’ll be taking back some of what she learned to help inspire her training fellows in the Philippines.

Importance of Mentorship

Dr. Psarras

Mentorship is another key goal of the exchange. Dr. Psarras emphasizes the importance of mentorship by senior academics, not just in terms of scientific feedback, but across multiple aspects of career management, especially for researchers early in their postdoctoral academic careers.

“Early and advanced career pathways have become remarkably competitive,” he says, “and academic institutions set high expectations in terms of research output and grant awards. Senior academics should adopt a pragmatic, but supportive approach toward junior academics.”

Dr. Zakaria concurs, “[Learning about their options is] beneficial, especially for those who are early in their career. [By participating in the exchange,] you meet senior experts in the field and get to learn their thoughts about this career path,” she says.

Dr. Traboco notes that partly because of the relatively small numbers of rheumatologists in her country, finding the right opportunities for mentorship can be challenging. “When you’re a young fellow and don’t know what the next step is, it can be hard to ask for help,” she says.

“The scholars were asking very pointed questions about work/life balance and overcoming obstacles and hurdles,” says Dr. Firestein. “Managing a good work/life balance is more important today than it was several decades ago.”

Promoting Collaboration

One of the goals of the research exchange is to build long-term collaborations across international borders. “I think networking is important because you get to know people who have the same interests and might be potential collaborators in the future,” says Dr. Zakaria.

Dr. Firestein reflects that early in his career, scientific research was much more local, often the product of an individual investigator working alone, potentially with a small local team of contributors. It was almost impossible to perform large-scale international collaborations, which were dependent on slow, asynchronous communications via letters. But innovations in communication—first the fax machine, followed by email and eventually remote video conferencing—opened new possibilities.

“Science is now a global community,” he says. “With interdisciplinary research, team science is far more important today. Those potential collaborators aren’t just sitting across the street from you. They might be anywhere in the U.S., or even overseas.”

“We deal with rare, complex systemic autoimmune diseases,” says Dr. Psarras. “I think we realized quite early on the international scene that if we don’t work together, it would be challenging to recruit an adequate number of patients for clinical studies and make evidence-based conclusions that actually change therapeutics.”