Network Platforms & Working Groups

Training, Mentoring, and Early Career Development

The Training, Mentoring, and Early Career Development platform will establish a sustainable training program to support emerging researchers and build capacity for research related to venous thromboembolism. Our training program aims to address unmet training needs, facilitate early career launch for junior scientists, and will be delivered according to best practices by training new and existing mentors. We will focus on developing clinician investigators and clinician scientists.

The Team

Platform Co-Leads

Miriam Kimpton (Ottawa, ON)
Sudeep Shivakumar (Halifax, NS)

Trainee Council

Chair: Ayme Harrigan - 2024
Chair: Amin Zahrai - 2023
Chair: Camille Simard - 2022
Chair: Tania Pannu - 2021
Chair: Miriam Kimpton - 2020
Chair: Faizan Khan - 2019
Chair: Rick Ikesaka - 2018
Chair: Deborah Siegal - 2017

This council is trainee-led and participation is open to all trainees involved in CanVECTOR activities. The council provides an opportunity for collaboration and cooperation amongst trainees and allows them to communicate their needs, concerns and feedback to CanVECTOR’s Scientific Steering Committee.

View the Trainee Council Terms of Reference. If you're interested in joining the trainee council and/or attending the next meeting, please email info@canvector.ca.

Trainee Awards

Given the generous support of our partners, CanVECTOR has been able to directly support capacity development for Canadian trainees conducting VTE basic science and clinical research through network administered annual funding competitions: Research Start-up & Research Training Awards. Additionally, the network has also been able to support emergency medicine trainees focusing on VTE research though our partnership with the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians (CAEP).

The Training, Mentoring, & Early Career Development platform is responsible for administering the Research Start-Up & (Clinical) Fellowship Awards through the platform's Training Awards Committee (see below).

View the network funded trainees / projects.

Training Platform Activities

2. CanVECTOR Academic Mentorship Program

Mentorship is beneficial at each training and career stage and has been shown to increase productivity, career retention and academic promotion in clinician-investigators/scientists. Mentorship is vital for securing research support in a discipline where grant funding is highly competitive, and essential to enable trainees to understand investigator responsibilities in an increasingly complex regulatory environment.

To develop CanVECTOR’s academic mentorship program a plenary workshop was held on June 9th, 2016, led by Dr. Mamta Gautam, through the Canadian Medical Association’s Physician Leadership Institute. This interactive workshop allowed network members to actively participate in building our mentorship program.

With a goal of ensuring that mentorship is provided according to best practices to trainees and early career investigators, we launched our mentorship program in November 2017 at the 2nd Annual CanVECTOR Conference. The mentorship program currently involves 15 mentee-mentor triads (i.e. one mentee paired with two mentors) comprising trainees and early career investigators.