The Importance Of Personal Strategic Plans And How To Develop As A Leader With Charles Irvin
At the core of every business and organization are the people. That is why it is crucial, especially when you are in a leadership position, to always have a plan to understand the individuals that make up the whole. In this episode, I invited a very special guest, Dr. Charles Irvin, who was my mentor at the University of Vermont. While he did teach me everything I know about process science, today's conversation with Charlie will be about topics beyond science: the importance of a personal strategic plan and how to make one, what leadership really is, and how to develop its skills. He also dives deep into the hack on how to make it through boring presentations, lead effective meetings, and more! Tune in to learn life hacks and, most importantly, to enjoy our conversation!
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The Importance Of Personal Strategic Plans And How To Develop As A Leader With Charles Irvin
We have Dr. Charles Irvin or Charlie, who was my mentor when I was at the University of Vermont. A lot of what I know about the process of science I learned from Charlie. In this episode, however, we delve into many other topics beyond science. We discuss the importance of having a personal strategic plan and how to make one. We also discuss what it means to be a leader and how to know if you should be developing your leadership skills.
Listen to learn how to build a personal strategic plan.
One nice hack that we discuss is how to make it through boring presentations and how having your strategic plan is important to leading effective meetings. Charlie has an impressive CV that goes back to many different prestigious institutions. He was the Associate Dean at the University of Vermont. He has trained over twenty Post-Doctoral fellows. He started the Vermont Lung Center. Needless to say, he has a vast wealth of experience. You will find this episode both inspiring and very educational.
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This is special in a way. Charlie, you were how a lot of my career began. Thank you very much for coming to be on the show.
It's my pleasure, Scott. This is going to be fun.
How is everything? How are you doing?
I'm doing okay. I have been locked up here at home for about two years. I'm starting to come out of it but I'm in a beautiful place. It's not too bad. I miss the travel, meeting people, and talking to folks. I miss people in three dimensions.
That's a great way to put it. Looking at the video that we are seeing here, as always, you have lots of interesting stuff around you. Can you describe something for us?
The one thing that's odd here and I've only had one person ask me about it. This is a Wright peak flow meter. These were made in the United Kingdom. They are indestructible. This is the early version of the peak flow meter. The story I tell is that I was meeting with my primary care doctor when I first came to Vermont. He said, "That's it." I said, "I have asthma. Are you not going to measure my lung function?" He said, "I don't know about this." I said, "I have a device here. Why don't you go get it?" He gets one of these. I said, "Do you know what that is? Do you know how to use it?" He said, "Not so much."
What's interesting to me looking at that is that it looks like a giant stopwatch with a tube on the end. It's about twenty times bigger than the peak flow meters.
It's all metal. It's heavy.
For anybody who doesn't know, peak flow meters are these little things you put in your pockets so that you can measure your lung function.
They are little plastic things. This is metal. It's highly accurate. The folks in England know how to put things together. They last forever.
That would be interesting to see how accurate that is compared to the little plastic ones because I bet you it's more accurate, consistent, and precise.
It is certainly 50 years later. I will guarantee that.
One thing I know from working with you in my early career is that you are full of stories from the bygone era of yesteryear from the giants in pulmonary physiology. You have some stories about the beginning of your career. Can you go through that? How did you get started? Did you always know what you were doing? Was it likely you are going to be successful as you are?
My father was a physician. I wanted to go to medical school but I grew up in a little rural town in Wisconsin. I wasn't a very good student. I didn't do well in the tests and whatnot. I've gone to a small private school because my parents didn't feel like I could make it at a big university. The plan was I will go to graduate school, get a Master's or something, and try to get into medical school through the back door but I got turned on by the science.
I decided, "I'm going to pursue this." When I was finished with my PhD studies, I got a piece of good advice, which is to apply to the best people. You read all the literature. I made a list and wrote letters because we wrote letters back in those days. A couple of them said, "Sure." I didn't hear from one. A couple of them said they weren't that interested.
When you say you got turned on by science, what do you mean by that? What turned you on?
It's the unknown. Initially, it was going to the seminars and listening to smart people talking about what they were doing. You start to imagine yourself doing that, discovering something, improving patients' lives or whatever it is that drives you. You realize that every day is a different day. You learn something every day. You come in the morning and leave at night. It's more of a trade rather than an advocation.
Personal Strategic Plans: Every day's a different day. You learn something every day.
It's the unknown or avoiding boredom.
That's the other little problem that I have. I have an attention deficit. It's not bad but I do. I get bored with things after a while and want to move on. I'm also one of these people that like to drive in the country. I want to know what's on the other side of the hill. That's trying to understand how things work. I like understanding how things work, which is why I was drawn to physiology.
Tell us a story about some of your early mentors and some of the people that shaped your career.
I have four people that I think of as my mentors. I did my PhD with Jerry Dempsey at the University of Wisconsin. Jerry is a tough scientist. If I have a reputation as a good scientist, it has come from the rigor that he taught me. I did my Post-Doc work with Peter Macklem at McGill in Canada, Montreal. From Peter, I learned two things. One was the absolute joy that he took in science. The other is to ask big questions. The amount of work it takes to do a simple little study as opposed to changing how we think about things is not that much more. It's that big thought stepping back 10,000 feet. He was an amazing guy, personally as well as scientifically.
That's a very interesting point. Have you seen those big questions come to fruition? Was he right about that?
Think about the things. First, he's the guy that thought about Small Airway disease, which is what I did for my thesis. When I was there, he was into respiratory muscle failure, which was thought not to happen but he showed that it did. Those are the big things that he's known for but a lot of these other works are very amazing and insightful. I remember listening to one of his last lectures. He was talking about what goes on in exercise and how he melded everything that he had learned into this master concept of how the respiratory system adapted to muscular exercise, which was remarkable.
He was a master of this integration of facts into a better understanding of how things work. I've only met one other person with that intellect, and that's Peter Henson in Denver, one of my other scientific mentors. My third mentor was Reub Cherniack. He hired me in Denver. What I got out of Reub was how to be a good manager and leader. That's what I got from watching him and listening to him.
What does it mean to be a good leader?
That's a nuanced question. My answer is going to be nuanced. For some people, it's making the world right for me. You change something or believe in something that I like. What I liked is where you change things. You move the needle. You don't just sit there in the same old thing but you make a change or changes that improve the lives of folks, whether it's medical or their working life. You achieve something.
That goes back to what you were saying about choosing the big project versus the small project.
The work is about the same, particularly nowadays with all the regulatory stuff. If you are going to go through all the IRB, you might as well do it for something important.
If you're going to have to go through all the regulatory hurdles to run a study, you might as well do it for something really important.
I see this a lot when people are thinking about designing and developing a project. They may say, "Let's go for the small study." COVID was a good example because oftentimes, in COVID, people say, "We don't have the time to collect samples." In some ways, people regret that now. That's a very important thing to underline with leadership.
We saw this at NIH for years. The stuff that got funded was incremental understandings and incremental studies. A couple of years back, they changed where they grade the application on innovation. It's as important a significance now. You have to be innovative in what you are doing or you are not going to do well there.
We are getting into the definition work. What do you mean by innovative? People have different points of view on what innovation is.
The NIH looks at it in two ways. One is something truly innovative, "I've got a new technique or theory," or in it by itself is not innovative but it's going to move the field forward. We need to know what normal values are for some new techniques. That may not be all that innovative but it may uncover something innovative. At least, in my mind, you go along and assume certain things. If somebody or something will cause you to rethink everything you thought was true, that's true innovation. You develop a tool, a technique, a device or a product that is a real game-changer. That's innovation in my mind.
Here's a tangential question. What's the currency of science?
I would argue that the currency of science is peer-reviewed publications. In my role as Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs, where you are concerned about people getting promoted and whatnot, it all gets back to working in the laboratory, writing that up, and sharing it with the world. If you write papers and get them published, the money for that comes after that. Pretty soon, you get invited to give talks, which a lot of people view as a success but the foundation of it is peer-reviewed publications in science.
You could step back and say, "That's nice." You and I both know people that have published lots of papers. You say, "What have they done for science or medicine?" That's a different question. What have they done that has either been disruptive or innovative? You are getting into a short list of folks. Peter Macklem is a good example or Saul Perman from Johns Hopkins. Both of them are well-known for their work in lung function testing and concepts. They didn't have a lot of papers but the papers they had made a difference. You can tell that by citations.
You and I both know people that have published lots of papers. You say, “Well, what have they really done for science or medicine?”
What do you think of the characteristics of that? It's not quantity. It's quality.
It is but it's also the presentation. In other words, I've seen lots of great studies but they are so badly written and presented that they are lost. After you read the first paragraph or two, you go, "I don't want to read any more about this." The data is not laid out very clearly. It's communication skills. I talk to the students and our trainees. Getting into science, you have to learn how to communicate in written words first, papers and grants but you also have to get up and be able to present yourself in public.
You've alluded to it. Do you think that there's a lack of up-and-coming leaders in the life sciences?
You have to be careful about that. As a scientist, I say, "What's the data for that?" We have this impression that there is but let's think about it first. There's a bigger demand for leaders in the field. Maybe the demand is bigger than the supply. What about the supply side of it? If you assume that certain characteristics are important in leadership, it is probably very likely. We see this in entrepreneurs, for instance. If you look at 100 people, how many of those people are leaders and have the characteristics of leaders who are going to be successful at it? It's the same with entrepreneurs. The supply side is small.
There's the question of how you have been tapped to be a leader of some sort. Do you develop yourself further? You could take somebody who was on the cusp and turn them into an effective leader with some training and mentoring but there's a personality. I believe a lot in personality types like Myers-Briggs. The one I use in my course on entrepreneurship is this. What is your color? It's a little simpler. It's more fun for the folks to do. You start looking at the personality types that are usually associated with strong leadership. It's a small group. The apparent lack of leadership is people being cast in leadership roles without the skillsets to be effective leaders and a shortage of folks in the first place.
Personal Strategic Plans: The apparent lack of leadership is people being cast in leadership roles without the skill sets to be effective leaders and a shortage of folks in the first place.
If I am somebody who has been tapped in that but maybe I have the wrong color. I don't know what color it is. What could someone do to develop themselves as a leader?
I would argue red or green. There's a lot out there. There used to be nothing. Back when I was a grad student or early faculty, there was nothing. I'm getting news feeds and blogs because of my interest in entrepreneurship every day. There's one I particularly like. He's called Leadership Freak. It's one that I get every day. It's short. It's perfect for me. He discusses something important. You need to understand as a leader how to catalyze people to be the best, lead a team or whatever it happens to be.
You can do it by coloring the boxes but there are still certain characteristics. I don't know if you saw it but there was a paper in the PNAS. They did a GWAS on leadership. One of the things that pop out is physical height, which makes sense but it's personality. Our personalities and value systems are, to some extent genetically determined. You have to be a personality that wants to do that.
That's very interesting. If we go back to that point about choosing to do the big study versus the small study, is that part of leadership as well?
It is. Have you ever read Good To Great by Collins?
I have. That's fantastic.
I got out my copy of it because I wanted to review it. In his paradigm, the first thing he talks about is leadership. The two things about leadership from Collins' analysis is empathy. The second is that you have a real vision or a goal. You realize you can't get there by yourself. You need a team of people. The rest of the book is talking about the other aspects. The metaphor I like is the bus, getting the right people on the bus and getting the wrong people off the bus. You lead it as a team. You are in the background a little bit but you are the person that has the focus and the drive for the goal.
It's somewhat about stepping back and having the team do the work but always asking yourself, "Is it the right people on the right seats on the bus?"
You could see that Macklem and Cherniack were a little flashier personality-wise but they also would sit in meetings, listen, and watch. They are sitting there assessing, particularly Cherniack.
It's interesting that you brought up that book. How important do you think reading books like that is to become a leader?
What I believe very firmly is that we are works in progress. If you are not spending a certain amount of your time on self-improvement, it's like a business. We know that if you don't spend money on R&D, the business doesn't do well. You don't have to spend a lot of time if you have innate talents but you need to spend some. The world is getting more complex. We work in teams now much more than we did in the past. Understanding what it takes to move a team forward means that you have to learn about those things.
When I was put in charge of a lung function lab, I started reading. You are on the plane. You are bored. You get a business magazine because that's all that's left for you to pick from the beginning. I would sit and read little articles about leadership and managerial skills. I won't dive into it and get way down into the weeds but it's enough to say, "What can I get out of this that's going to make me a better leader so that I can get to where I want to go?"
You mentioned working in teams. Is there leadership that happens at all levels, perhaps even the early career and training levels?
It does. It's learning to be a good mentor. For instance, you are a grad student. The PI or the lab has you train an undergraduate or another graduate student. The new Post-Doc comes in, and you've got to train them to do something or other. You are already starting to work in teams and exhibit leadership skills or not. You can tell some of the medical students, residents, and fellows are not interested in being leaders, and they don't have the innate skillsets for it.
Let's shift gears a little bit because we are talking about self-improvement. What is something that you do when nobody else is watching that enhances your performance as a leader? It might be a difficult question.
One of the things I've always done when I sit in a meeting or I listen to a seminar and I will start with the seminar because that's where I started doing it. I would sit and listen to a presentation. It's not a very good presentation. Rather than dreaming about something else, I start to think, "If this is my data, how would I present it? How would I manipulate it? How would I draw figures?"
It's the same thing in a meeting. Later on, as I got into leadership activities, I sat in other meetings, watch other people be leaders, and go, "That is not the way to do that. Maybe he or she could have done it that way." I'm evaluating all the time. That's what you do in science. You evaluate everything. You take those skillsets, which we hone as a scientist or as a clinician, reapply them to the leadership activities, and say, "What's good? What's bad? What could be done better? What skillset do I need to learn to be a better leader? Where did this person go wrong?"
I like that because the way you put it is a positive spin. It's not like, "I could have done it better." It's, "How would I have done it better?"
“How would I have done it better? Could it even be done better?” There are some situations that are so hopeless. The person is doing an okay job in a horrible situation. The COVID crisis is a good one. There's only so much you can do because the events of the day carry everything and wash it all out but it's how you approach problems and try to get the best out of other folks and yourself. Once you become a leader, you realize, "This isn't quite as easy as I thought it was going to be." You said, "I'm going to get this magic wand. Everything is going to be wonderful." It doesn't quite work that way.
Personal Strategic Plans: Once you become a leader, you realize that everything isn't quite as easy as you thought it was going to be.
What are some of the habits or rituals that you have that contributed to your success? In a way, that was a habit you described but are there others that you have?
I saw one of these articles about how to run an effective meeting. What I realized is that I learned how to do that. You come into the meeting. Remember that as a leader, you are running a group. You've got this group, and you say, "What's the goal of this meeting? What do I want to accomplish?" It gets back to what your overall goal is and having a very laser focus on that, "How does this meeting move that forward? What do I have to get this group of people to understand? What do I have to get them to do to move the needle?" Make that crystal clear, "At the end of the meeting, we decided this. These are the action items. Alice, you are in charge. Next time, you are going to tell us about this. Fred, you are going to do that. This is great. We are making progress here. Let's go for it. Have a great day."
There are a couple of things that extend out of that. You mentioned goals. How important is setting goals?
That's an interesting one. I learned how to do that innately. I will tell you two stories about that. One was that I was taking an advanced graduate course. The guy who was running the course was a new faculty. We had this session, "Next time, we are going to talk about what you plan to do with your career," which I thought was a little odd. I didn't see how that had anything to do with fetal physiology but I already knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to do a Post-Doc. I wanted to be a faculty.
When we came together, the one guy who was in the lab with me told them what I had told him privately the day before. The rest of the kids in the class had no clue. That's when I realized that most people don't have a plan. When I interviewed with Reub Cherniack for the first job I ever had, he said, "Charlie, what's your strategic plan?" I thought to myself, "I don't even know what I'm going to do tomorrow when I get back to Montreal."
I said, "I don't have one." He says, "That's unacceptable. You have to have a strategic plan." It turned out he was into strategic plans at the time. I had to write him this letter about my strategic plan. I'm a Director of a training grant. I met with one of our Post-Docs. I do a two-session thing. At the end of it, the young person now has a strategic plan for the next 2, 3 or 5 years of what they want to accomplish.
Can you describe what that plan looks like? Is it goals, tasks, and objectives?
It's based on the principle that the best strategic plan is the one that's on the back of a cocktail napkin, which means to say that there are a couple of key things. It's pretty focused. What I tell the students to do and what I do too is I've got three pages. Imagine three pieces of paper. The first paper says, "What are the short-term goals?" This could be six months to a year. Maybe it's a week. It doesn't matter. At the other end, you have a piece of paper that says, "What are your long-term goals in 5 to 10 years, and then somewhere in the middle, 3 to 5 years?"
The best strategic plan is the one that fits on the back of a cocktail napkin.
You make bullet entries. You don't need complete sentences. This is best done at home with some alcoholic beverages to get you into the spitballing mood. You say, "I have to get this paper done. I have to write this grant. I have to get my portfolio ready to get promoted. I have to get my Post-Doc. I have to get my long-term job." You get a job and get promoted.
In my case, I don't have a real long-term plan other than probable retirement but I know what that looks like now. What am I going to be doing over the next six months? What am I going to be doing over the next 2 or 3 years? It doesn't have to be involved. If it's mental, it's best to put it on a piece of paper. It becomes real, then. It's an easy exercise to do.
When you have people coming through training, what percentage of them have strategic plans before you talk to them?
"When you have people coming through training, what percentage of them have strategic plans?" "Zero."
Zero. They have a vague idea, "I want to be a PI of a lab. I want to finish training and go into practice." I was the same way. You wander from one opportunity to another. Most of them don't.
Maybe this is a bit more difficult to answer but what about people who are established, investigators? What percentage of them do you think have strategic plans?
I wouldn't want to guess. I'm not sure I want to know the answer to that. Back in the day, when there weren't as many people in science, most people were pretty focused. In this world nowadays, we need scientists. Don't get me wrong but maybe we train too many of them. I'm not sure that having a PhD would make them all that more successful in what they are doing other than it's an indicator of being smart and being able to finish tasks. The data from the United States is a little dated. Only about 20% of the graduate students we train end up on faculty, for instance. I think of all the folks that I was involved in training as pulmonary fellows. Few of them end up as investigators or real leaders in a sense in charge of a hospital or a clinic.
That's very interesting. We talked a bit about careers there. I want to go back a bit. It's also to help people understand what the trajectory of becoming a leader in science is like. What was the lowest point of your career? How did you get through it?
The lowest point of my career was prior to me leaving Denver and coming here to Vermont. People ask me, "Why did you leave?" I said, "It was a push and a pull." First, I got a good job offer here. Second, things were such that I wanted to leave Denver. That day, I drove up to the hospital, parked my car, sat there, and argued with myself about whether I should go to work that day because I wasn't up for it. It's when you lose the passion for what you are doing because of all the other things that are going on. You say, "This isn't working for me."
I have to have fun at what I do. I have to have good interactions with the folks that I work with. Those weren't going well. We had an established leader who was starting to make my life difficult and a new leader for the department who wanted me to go in a different direction than I wanted to go in. I felt uncomfortable. I didn't like what I was doing. It was time to change. I've invested so many years in this career at this institution. I'm going, "Now what do I do?"
Did your strategic plan help you through that?
It did because one of the things that happen, and you see it all the time, is that people achieve whatever they wanted to achieve and then become very complacent. I had forgotten the lesson from Cherniack. You constantly do a new strategic plan. I had not done that. It was time to think out of the box. The situation in Denver worked in my favor. They thought I was insane to come here to Vermont. Years later, they said, "Was that ever a good move?" I knew that at the time. I needed to do something different. I wanted to take my career and become a true leader. The opportunity here was to do that. I changed my strategic plan.
I was going to ask that. When you came to Vermont, did you have a new strategic plan?
I had a very clear strategic plan. I was hired to set up an asthma center but I quickly changed it to a lung center. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to attract a critical mass of good and smart people. We could make a difference, not just in science but in applied science. The science that's going to improve human health and make some real impact on respiratory disease.
In a way, that comes back to innovation because that's what innovation is. It's bringing it to application, not just publishing the paper. This goes back across a lot of different aspects. What advice would you give a younger version of yourself?
I'm going to give the advice that I got as a younger person myself. The first is to have a plan. You need a strategic plan. Cherniack was right. Here's the other thing I learned from Cherniack, and I saw it with Macklem too. It's about people. I'm in medical school in the Department of Medicine. You say, "What is the point of a medical school?" It's three things. One is teaching. It's about service, particularly service to patients. Third, it's about discovery and science.
That's not done by fancy instruments and laboratories. It's done by people. Understand that people are everything. It's all about the bus again. I wish I had read this book long before I did because when I read it, it was like, "This puts everything in context." It's a fun read too. It's this idea of the people that you have and the team that you've got. It's about people. It's always going to be about people.
As a leader, you have to have a plan and understand people. Understanding people and what makes them tick is important. As Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs, I have to deal with faculty, which is an interesting group of people, to say the least. When I was an undergraduate, I was interested in Psychology. I took two courses. One was Child Development, which has served me well in dealing with faculty.
The other is Abnormal Psych. Understanding how people tick and what's driving them can be helpful as a leader but it's about continuous improvement on how to deal with conflict and difficult people. The things that we want to shy away from are the things that, as a leader, we can't. You have to learn how to do them. It's not that hard to pick up if you are sharp.
It's how to be a good bus driver.
It's a little more on that. You have to imagine a school bus with fractious kiddos in the back. How do you get this group of kids to do what you want them to do? I'm being very facetious. I don't mean any disrespect to my colleagues but they can be difficult.
It comes to the question, though. If you are going into a career in science or healthcare innovation, is there room for people who are not leaders?
This is where diversity and inclusion come in. That's where the color paradigm is and how I use it in my class. I said, "Not everybody is cut out to be a leader or to do this or that but what you need is a team of people." If you had a team of all reds or blues, that would be a disaster. What you need is a team of different colors because these are different things done. That's where diversity and inclusion are so powerful. The data is very clear about that when they have done the analysis. It's to understand that different people have different styles. That's okay because you are looking at the whole thing.
The other piece of advice is something I learned some years ago. It's a paradigm I like. Imagine a T cross. The bar is where you get trained in your discipline. As you get trained, you go deeper into the weeds and understand how the lung works and the body works but there's also the cross piece of the T. That's transferable work skills. That's the thing we don't do. We don't do that with leaders and graduate students. We certainly don't do that with medical students. How to be able to write and how to be a leader is a transferable work skill. Those are the things you've also got to put into your training plan.
Part of the inspiration for this show is to bring that stuff out but it also reminds me of when I was in Vermont with you. We had these lab meetings. It was diverse in the terms of the different types of disciplines that were always there. I always found that dynamic interesting. It's what I do now as I convene. In some ways, what I have been trying to do is recreate that environment because of the diversity of perspective that comes out of it.
I saw that at McGill with Peter Macklem. The folks in the lab were from all over the world. It changed my view of the world. I'm from a small rural town, "There's this big world. They do interesting things in Brazil, Belgium, and Australia. I would love to travel and visit my colleagues around the world because they do things differently. That's neat. That's cool. Why do you do it that way? You learn things." It's that diversity and different perspectives because the product, at the end of the day, is going to be much more robust. Big businesses get this. They have come around to this.
As we are getting towards the end here, I want to ask this question. What excites you most about what you're doing now?
As I was sharing with you before we started the show, I've put in a number of grants. Two of them look like they have done well enough to get funded. One of them is a project that is part of a big cohort study of young people. Hopefully, it will be like Framingham and continue long after I'm gone. I'm excited about that. We are going to learn a lot about that.
The other one is a training program in entrepreneurship that we have been doing. In some ways, that's even more exciting because we work with young people from all over the country. We do this bootcamp for entrepreneurship. It's only a week long. The last one we did was amazing. We break them up into teams. The capstone at the end is that they give a pitch like you would be pitching to investors.
We had a team. There were different people that never met each other before. The person they selected to give the pitch was a young lady from Puerto Rico. She was amazing. She gave a pitch that is one of the best I've ever heard. One of the other teams got up. The guy who was from Rhode Island said, "Can I have Alicia give my pitch? She was that good." It was watching the teams go from barely not even knowing each other. By the end of the week, they have developed a product and a pitch. A lot of it is made up but it's an amazing process to watch.
Entrepreneurship, as you know, is better than many takes a different skillset than most scientists and physicians have. We talk about transferable work skills in particular. What you need to know to be a successful entrepreneur is a very different skillset. Your personality type has to be different too. They are a fun group of people to work with. That's exciting.
Entrepreneurship takes a really different skill set than most scientists and physicians have.
If people want to take part in that program, is it open to people to apply for?
That's what we are going to do in the next phase. It's complicated. I won't go into it. It's targeted at states and institutions that notoriously have not been as well-funded by the NIH. The big schools have something going on. This is more for the smaller ones. A lot of the educational materials we are going to be producing are podcasts like this or video modules. I have already started working on some of them. They will be widely available. NIH is funding a lot of projects like this. There's a lot of stuff that's going to be coming out over the next couple of years like training modules of one ilk or another to learn how to be an effective entrepreneur.
If people want to find out more should, where should they go?
We have a website. It's not very good. We are going to improve that. That's I-Trep. We run the summer course but it's only for these 22 states plus Puerto Rico. I could take the whole thing on the road. It would not be that hard to do.
If they want that or contact you, where could they go?
You can look at the website or contact me through my email account. The syllabus for the course is pretty straightforward too.
It succeeded expectations because a lot of what we have always talked about is science. This is a bit different. You brought out a lot of nice stuff. Is there anything else you want to mention?
This interaction is not what we normally do in terms of dissemination of information, although the world is changing. This isn't my first show. I've done a couple of them for a friend of mine at Johns Hopkins on faculty affairs and things. This open-ended discussion about things is important because it all looks sterile and cookie-cutter when you see it but behind the scenes, it's very messy.
It's the dialogue that's fascinating.
It's like when somebody gives a seminar. A seminar is interesting but it's the question-and-answer period that I get into. That's where I learn who's got it and who doesn't.
We could go into this for a lot longer but one thing that I see sometimes is that we come to meetings. You spend 75% of the time seeing slides, which you've already seen before, and five minutes with serial hand raising. In other words, you've got a good thing going, and somebody raises something completely off the base. It has been great. My plan is to continue to do this show. As we do that, we will probably want to circle back to you at some point and have episode two because there's still more we can dig into, I'm sure.
I congratulate you on doing this. It will be interesting to see if it catches on and whether people enjoy it or not. I certainly enjoyed chatting with you and catching up.
Thanks, Charlie. Have a good one.
You too.
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About Charlie Irvin
Professor, Department of Medicine University of Vermont and State Agricultural College Charles G. Irvin, PhD, FERS is a Professor of Medicine, Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, Past Associate Chairman for Research Department of Medicine and Past Director of the Vermont Lung Center (VCL) at the University of Vermont.
From 2012-2022 he was the Associate Dean of Faculty for the College of Medicine. Dr. Irvin received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in Pulmonary Physiology in 1978. He served as an a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow from 1978-1980 at McGill University in Montreal. Dr. Irvin is a member of the European Respiratory Society and the American Thoracic Society (ATS) and has served on the Board of Directors of the ATS. He is a frequent invited professor and enjoys an international reputation, and in 2014 he was named an inaugural fellow of the European Respiratory Society. In 2018 he was named a Fellow of the American thoracic Society (ATSF) and in 2021 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine (FRSM). Dr. Irvin has served on numerous grant review panels including NIH, American Heart Association and American Lung Association. Dr. Irvin has been continuously funded by NIH since 1976 and is currently the Principal Investigator (PI) of a T32 training grant a R25 training grant (NIGMS) and a RO1 (NHLBI).
He has trained 20 postdoctoral fellows and mentored numerous junior faculty, the vast majority now successfully engaged in research careers. Dr. Irvin's scientific career has focused on understanding the mechanisms of airways dysfunction in the patient with asthma. Using a multidisciplinary approach including: cell and molecular biology, animal models and systems, transgenics, physiology, imaging and clinical studies, he and his colleagues seek to understand the pathophysiological basis of asthma in order to both better diagnose and treat patients with chronic airways disease.
He has published over 250 peer-reviewed publications and published an additional 125 chapters, reviews and editorials on these topics.
