LAUSR

For more than 30 years, it has been apparent that the number of trained geriatricians would never keep pace with the demands of a rapidly aging population and that non-geriatricians would be providing the overwhelming majority of medical services for older adults for the foreseeable future. In recognition of this, a strategy was formulated to develop cohorts of aging-focused specialists with the goals of integrating geriatric principles and the tenets of aging science into fields of medicine where disease-based research paradigms had been preeminent (ie, to “gerontologize” each discipline) and thereby improve the clinical care of older adults. Over the last 2 decades, three programs have sought to develop specialists in medical or surgical disciplines with an academic focus in aging and/or geriatrics. The Dennis W. Jahnigen Scholars (DWJS) and T. Franklin Williams Scholars (TFWS) were both funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies, Inc. Recipients of awards from the Grants for Early Medical and Surgical Specialists Transition to Aging Research (GEMSSTAR) program were and are funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA). All three programs also received co-funding from more than 20 subspecialty societies and over 50 institutions. Together the three programs have now trained nearly 300 such scholars, and the count continues to rise. They have achieved unqualified success within their alumni ranks by any measure: grant funding, published papers, career advancement, leadership achievement, and impact on their specialty fields in research, education, and clinical care. One particular challenge in building this workforce has been mentorship. How does one mentor faculty when there is almost no one of a similar “phenotype” to mentor junior faculty? With one foot in each of two camps, a medical/surgical specialty and aging, these scholars were very often the first and only faculty member within a specialty at their institution focusing on aging. Specialist colleagues were often willing to help mentor these talented individuals but did not understand a non–disease-based investigative focus and frequently had to be convinced that geriatric issues mattered, could be measured, or were “real science.” Similarly, geriatricians and other researchers in aging rarely had experience in disease-based pathophysiology and/or familiarity with the special challenges of young academicians in each medical/surgical field and had little or no experience in the cutting-edge areas of research within organ-based science. Thus a new mentorship model was required. Two articles appear in this issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society that outline approaches to mentoring specialists with a research focus in aging. Carpenter and colleagues describe a U13-funded meetingbased approach to mentoring this group through a series of national meetings and “touchpoints”/virtual mentorship networks. Masterson Creber and colleagues describe an institutionally based program at Columbia University School of Medicine funded under a K24 grant. Presenting their shared experiences in back-to-back articles is helpful for identifying common threads. First and foremost, both programs used a mix of classical dyadic mentorship (senior/junior mentorship) along with peer mentoring, bringing together junior investigators to discuss issues and mentor one another. Their shared experience was used as mentorship even though the cohort was relatively homogeneous and junior in academic rank. Peer mentoring is not new or unique to these programs and is a component of many others (eg, Institutional Clinical and Translational Science awards, T32 awards) and frequently used to enhance skills development efficiently in areas such as grant writing, leadership/executive skills, and methodology. However, the central difference of these two programs was that the characteristic of a “peer” was determined not by a skill need, typically the focus of most peer mentoring cohorts, but by the focus on aging research. This distinction was critical to the success of both the programs described. When one is just embarking on a research career, becoming conversant in disciplinary language, accepted methodologies, common conceptual frameworks, and the state of the current science are critical for knowledge generation, pilot-study design, and data interpretation. We have often been asked by well-meaning but naive specialist colleagues new to aging research, “What is the biomarker of aging? I’ll just add it to my study so we can look at aging.” Of course, there is no single biomarker of aging. On the contrary, even with the evolution of geroscience and a better understanding of how aging drives disease and disease reciprocally drives aging, designing high-quality research in aging requires a different paradigm for most specialists. DOI: 10.1111/jgs.15884