Preparing tomorrow’s behavioral health researchers

Early in her academic journey, Yvette Sheline, MD, who is now the McLure Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Research in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, assisted with dissections under the guidance of two Nobel Laureates at Harvard. These two undergraduate mentors, David Hubel, MD and Torsten Weisel, MD, were honored in 1981 for work detailing how the visual system helped explain the brain processing information from the eye.    

Sheline was already fascinated by the evidence for brain plasticity—how our brains change over time—and was headed to graduate school for neuroscience, but her senior honors thesis caused her to reconsider.  

As part of her thesis experiments, Sheline found herself in a basement lab looking for answers not in the human brain, but that of a horseshoe crab.   

“I was fishing the crabs out of dark, slimy tanks, and I thought, ‘There’s got to be something better than this,’” Sheline said, laughing. “I wanted to do something more for people.” Sheline remained interested in neuroscience and connected to a mentor who took her into his lab at Harvard, before she eventually shifted gears to pursue an MD followed by a residency in psychiatry.  

After medical training, she took a hiatus to work in public mental health but returned to academia to study the brain effects of depression and anxiety, initially as a junior faculty member, conducting brain imaging studies.    

Academia often pushes faculty to produce research, procure funding for their research through grants, and set up lab activities, but there is not always training in these aspects of the job. In her early faculty days, Sheline had no formal mentorship plan.   

“When I came back into an academic setting, as a beginning assistant professor, I didn’t really have any mentors,” she recalls. “I had to invent it myself, pull myself up by my bootstraps and seek out support for writing a grant and critiquing my work, which made me realize how important it is to have a mentor, because it took me quite a while to get my research launched.”  

In the years since, Sheline has built a career where she has excelled in both her own research and in offering the type of mentoring guidance that she lacked at this crucial early stage in her academic psychiatry career.  

Her research has focused on seeking to understand treatment effects using techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy and brain stimulation, which typically uses electrical currents or magnetic fields to target specific areas of the brain to treat mental disorders. At the same time, she has helped to build ways for early career faculty to find their way through formal mentorship, including preparing them to pursue significant research awards, in more structured and supportive ways than she had early on.   

From bootstrap to boot camp 

For over two decades, Sheline has been part of a national effort, funded by an R25 grant from National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) known as the Advanced Research Institute (ARI), to help provide mentoring to early career faculty. This yearly workshop helps the participants present and hone their ideas through what Sheline describes as a “boot camp.”  

Participants share draft proposals for research projects they hope to fund with colleagues—both peers but also later-career researchers. These colleagues provide feedback on their topic, structure and even what reviewers at funding agencies may be looking for before submitting them for review. Typically, funding agencies enlist other academics in the field to review and score proposals, and they competitively award grants to only a small percentage of the projects. 

Under the guidance of Maria Oquendo, MD, PhD, the Ruth Meltzer Professor of Psychiatry and chair of Psychiatry, Sheline worked to craft a similar program that would provide mentorship opportunities catered specifically to psychiatry researchers. At the same time, she also shepherded a separate effort helping prepare early-career faculty in Psychiatry at Penn to pursue significant research grants to support their work, known as the grant preparation success (GPS) program.  

“Typically, at this early stage in a career, you're really being awarded the grant based on, do we want to invest in you? Having a quality mentor and mentorship plan is an important part of shaping those plans,” Sheline said.  

Rachel Kember, MSc, PhD, an assistant professor of Psychiatry at Penn, is one of 11 faculty who participated in the grant preparation success (GPS) program and had also benefited from the faculty mentorship committee.  

In addition, Kember sought feedback from the GPS group on a proposal that examined potential sex differences in alcohol use disorder using genetic models, which helped her continue to hone her work.  

“It’s helpful to get feedback from someone in your field but maybe not be working in your exact specialty, because that's exactly the person that's going to be reviewing the grants,” Kember said.  

Shaping the next frontier of psychiatric research—and those who study it 

Sheline has spearheaded mentorship work while continuing her own research pursuits, including new findings published last year in JAMA on accelerated intermittent theta burst stimulation (aiTBS), a potential new treatment for bipolar disorder.  

In this noninvasive form of brain stimulation, a changing magnetic field is used to induce an electric current at a specific brain area through a process called electromagnetic induction. It is thought that this stimulation can help reduce depressive symptoms. 

The randomized clinical trial sought to accelerate theta burst stimulation treatments, which currently take between four and six weeks to administer; this new technique reduces treatment to five days. 

The aim, Sheline said, was a potential therapy for depressed patients with bipolar disorder who may not respond well to drugs or cannot tolerate their side effects, “while also providing faster results.” 

It is also work that Sheline was able to balance with what Kember noted is a “generosity of time” that more senior faculty in the mentorship program extended to encourage the development of their peers.  

“It’s difficult to balance as assistant professor if you're trying to set up your lab, and you're trying to do other things,” Kember said. “Being able to bounce ideas off of someone who has been there is so important.”  

“I value this collaboration with young scientists," Sheline said. “I see it as an integral part of being a member of a top research institution.”