Anna Greka

You know, more investment.

You know, I think that the government, the NIH has a role to play there, of course, you know, and this is important from both an economic perspective, a competition perspective with other nations around the world who are actually heavily investing in the physician scientist workforce.

And I think it's also important to do so through our kind of smaller scale efforts at the AACI.

So one of the things that I have been involved in as a council member and now as president is the creation of an awards program for those early career investigators.

So we call them the Emerging Generation Awards.

And we also have the Young Physician Scientist Awards.

And these are really to recognize people who are making that transition from being kind of a trainee and a postdoc and have finished their clinical training into becoming an independent assistant professor.

And so those are small awards, but they're kind of a symbolic tap on the shoulder, if you will, that the ASCI has.

sees you, you're talented, stay the course.

We want you to become a future member.

Don't give up, you know, keep on fighting.

I think that can take us only so far.

I mean, unless there's like a real investment, of course, you know, still it will be hard to maintain people in the pipeline.

But this is just one way in which we have tried to, you know, these programs that the ACI offers have been very successful over the last few years.

We create a cohort of investigators who are clearly recognized by members of the ACI as being promising young colleagues.

And we give them longitudinal training as part of a cohort where they learn about how to write a grant, how to write a paper, leadership skills, how to run a lab.

And there's sort of like a buddy system as well.

So they know that they're in it together rather than feeling isolated and sort of struggling to get their careers going.

And so we've seen a lot of success.

One way that we measure that is conversion into ACI membership.