The DeBakey Executive Research Leadership Program Bridges the Depth of Experienced Leaders with the Breadth of Emerging Leaders

Abstract

Although new investigators leading research operations may be well trained to conduct research, they often have limited practical experience leading research teams. To address this unmet need, the Aggie Research Program (ARP) was developed in 2016 to advance the research careers of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars by connecting them with teams of undergraduates seeking research experiences. The requirements for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to become “Team Leaders” are simple: they must get permission from their faculty mentors to participate, have an active research project, select and train a team of 3‐8 undergraduates, meet with their team once a week, and submit short weekly progress reports. To earn certification of completion, they must also attend monthly Team Leader meetings where they discuss best practices in leadership and complete a “Best Practices Report” to document their innovations to address challenges. This scalable structure allowed the ARP program to grow exponentially until a critical mass was achieved for Team Leaders to congregate in different affinity groups, which could then be formalized in distinct research leadership programs with different disciplinary or vocational focuses. In 2020, the ARP partnered with the Michael E. DeBakey Institute at Texas A&M University to create the DeBakey Executive Research Leadership program for graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and junior faculty. This program leverages the combined 50 years of leadership experience of the Director and the Executive Director of the DeBakey Institute to distill a set of “research leadership principles” consistent with successful leadership careers at Texas A&M. These principles are introduced at the beginning of each Team Leader meeting to stimulate discussion of current challenges faced by Team Leaders. By bridging the deep experience of established leaders with the broad experience of a diverse cohort of emerging leaders, the DeBakey Executive Research Leadership Program structures a resilient, mutually supportive community that has grown during a pandemic. In the fall of 2021, it not only provided research leadership training for 47 Team Leaders, but also created research opportunities for 229 undergraduates. This multilevel, experience‐based training program provides a strategy to fill a critical gap in research training that cannot be filled by standard leadership or mentoring workshops which are typically too general, too short in duration, and too removed from the context in which they were originally developed.