Network Platforms

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: Camille Simard - 2022
Chair: Tania Pannu - 2021
Chair: Miriam Kimpton - 2019-2020
Chair: Faizan Khan - 2018-2019
Chair: Rick Ikesaka - 2017-2018
Chair: Deborah Siegal - 2016-2017

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 Awards Committee

The role of the CanVECTOR Trainee Award Committee is to make decisions about the allocation of CanVECTOR training funds to trainee applicants.

Responsibilities

Develop the process and criteria for awarding training funds
Consider the availability of funding, including partner funding at academic institutions, when making decisions about awards
Endeavour to equitably award funding across CanVECTOR training sites, taking into consideration the applicant's preferences, the training capacity at CanVECTOR sites, and the ability of the site to meet the applicant's training needs
Review applications and recommend candidates for funding

Membership and Voting

Voting members

Committee co-chairs
Committee members, as listed on the Trainee Award Committee membership roster
CanVECTOR directors as ex-officio members

Non-voting member

Manager of the CanVECTOR Training and Mentoring platform

Quorum

More than 50% of the members entitled to vote

Chair

The co-leads of the CanVECTOR Training and Mentoring Platform will act as committee co-chairs and will alternately chair committee meetings.

Frequency of Meetings and Manner of Call

Meetings will be held at least biannually at the call of a committee co-chair.

The meetings will usually be held via teleconference, though may be called in person in conjunction with a CanVECTOR annual meeting or other gathering of the members.

Reporting

To the CanVECTOR directors and Scientific Steering Committee.

Committee Co-chairs

Leslie Skeith (Calgary)
Sudeep Shivakumar (Halifax)

Committee Members

Shannon Bates (Hamilton)
Susan Kahn (Montreal)
Alejandro Lazo-Langner (London)
Agnes Lee (Vancouver)
Rita Selby (Toronto)
Vicky Tagalakis (Montreal)
Marc Carrier (Ottawa)

Ex-officio Member

Marc Rodger (CanVECTOR director)

Manager of the Training and Mentoring Platform

Jessie Micholuk

Training Platform Activities

1. VTE Research Training Curriculum

A research training curriculum will be created with input from the Network membership, including trainees and young investigators. This new curriculum will be implemented at the existing thrombosis research training sites in Canada and will be available to other centres that plan to establish themselves as a new training site.

A CanVECTOR Fellow is taking the lead in the first stage of this initiative. Dr. Leslie Skeith has conducted a needs assessment to identify gaps and priority areas that should be addressed in a VTE research training curriculum.

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.

3. HTRS Publications Committee

The Hemostatis and Thrombosis Research Society's Publications Committee (co-chairs: Drs. Leslie Skeith and Peter Kouides focuses on having HTRS trainees / early career investigators write 2-4 reviews per year for the peer-reviewed journal Thrombosis Research. To provide additional mentorship and feedback in order to improve the chances of publication success, HTRS is partnering with CanVECTOR to have manuscripts undergo additional review from 1-2 HTRS Publications Committee members prior to submission. CanVECTOR members Dr. Marc Carrier and Dr. Deborah Siegal and members of the HTRS publication committee will participate in this "coached peer review" initiative.