This interview with ASA President Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar of RAND Corporation, Ruth Etzioni of Fred Hutch, and Carolyn Rutter of Fred Hutch was conducted by Practical Significance co-hosts Donna LaLonde and Ron Wasserstein during a recent episode in which they discussed Ghosh-Dastidar’s vision for strengthening and expanding mentoring in the ASA community and the working group she launched with Etzioni and Rutter.
Donna LaLonde: Please, introduce yourselves and tell us about your day job.
Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar: I work at RAND, a nonprofit organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges through research and analysis. My work is primarily interdisciplinary, team science-focused, emphasizing health and social-economic well-being. I also serve as the head of the RAND Statistics Group, a group of exceptional statisticians and data scientists.
Carolyn Rutter: I am at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. I work on cancer screening and colorectal cancer screening, with an emphasis on policy. Bonnie and Ruth are two people who have co-mentored me along the way. I worked with Bonnie at RAND. Ruth is just an amazing person for bringing people together, and she’s part of the reason I came to Fred Hutch. I learned so much about mentoring from both of these women. It’s such a fantastic experience to collaborate with them on this initiative.
Ruth Etzioni: I’ve been at Fred Hutch for too many years to count. I’m in the biostatistics program in public health sciences. I love being at Fred Hutch because it has allowed me to feel that I’m a scientist, I’m a statistician, but I’m first a scientist. My research program right now is focused on new diagnostic technologies that are exploding in cancer—both for early detection and disease monitoring—and how to make good decisions and policies around these new tests, which are absolutely critical if we want to do precision oncology. I’m very excited and committed to Bonnie’s initiative.
Donna LaLonde: Would you share a personal experience or a story about the impact mentoring has had on your career?
Ruth Etzioni: That’s a great question. I’ve had an impact both as a mentee and a mentor. In my early years at Fred Hutch, I’d come out of a traditional statistics program, and I landed in a very new environment. And I had two mentors. One was Margaret Pepe, who’s well known for her statistical work around diagnostic testing. And I learned a tremendous amount about problem-solving and problem selection from her. Another was Nicole Urban, who was a health economist. But she was not working as a health economist. She was working as a health policy researcher. And it was because of her that I actually moved toward health policy and eventually became very involved in the ASA Health Policy Statistics Section. So, these experiences were really formative for me during those first few years.
Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar: It’s hard to pick just one, but there’s one career mentor who I want to recognize because I feel my entire career might be attributed to her. A scholarship brought me from India to Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania. Dr. Petee Jung at Albright College, the only female professor in their mathematics department, bolstered my confidence sufficiently to pursue a dual degree in mathematics and computer science.
I had come to the US to study computer science, which my dad saw as the future of society. With gentle persuasion, this professor led me to see the beauty of mathematics while the undergraduate classes shaped my interest in pursuing a career in the mathematical sciences. So, that’s probably one mentor who had the largest cumulative impact on my career.
Carolyn Rutter: I’ll mention two experiences. At the beginning of my career, I worked with Constantine Gatsonis, who works in diagnostic testing. He is responsible for nurturing my interest in cancer screening and changed the trajectory of my career.
I also mentored Pedro Nascimento de Lima, who was a student when he began working on my project. I want to emphasize how much a mentor can learn from a mentee. I learned from Pedro’s research on robust decision-making. Mentoring is a two-way street.
Ron Wasserstein: Bonnie, how do you envision the impact mentoring can have on the broader ASA community?
Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar: It’s all about our professional society, which has brought so much value to my career. In every professional society, we focus on membership benefits when defining the member value proposition. Based on informal conversations with ASA members, it was apparent that mentoring could provide significant benefits—both by increasing opportunities to gain knowledge and expertise from people who have been in the same field and to build relationships with people who can provide support, advice, and valuable connection.
Mentoring programs can foster a sense of community. So, my ‘big picture’ hope is for an ASA-wide mentoring program that expands existing section and group-specific mentoring and leads to more ASA members who see themselves as stewards of our profession. ASA data has shown that members who see themselves as stewards of the profession are more likely to be sustaining members. So, this initiative is focused on member benefits while also engaging people in fostering a stronger ASA community.
Ron Wasserstein: Carolyn and Ruth, you agreed to lead the working group on Bonnie’s initiative because of your commitment to mentoring. What are the goals and outcomes you hope to achieve?
Carolyn Rutter: Bonnie was talking about community, and that is an exciting aspect of this mentoring initiative—thinking about mentoring more broadly, so we can find ways to support people at all levels of their careers.
We’re in this post-COVID era, where sometimes people don’t feel that connectedness within their positions. Not everybody goes into the office all the time. We’re trying to find a way to provide support so junior people have someone to ask questions of and senior people can ask each other questions like, “How should I be mentoring, This builds from the idea of communities of practice. I’m going to shoutout to Nicola Justice, who helped us develop this approach. We are looking to build a community so everybody can get their mentoring support and the mentors don’t have so much pressure.
Ruth Etzioni: We are working differently post-COVID, and we’re connecting differently. And we’re also in a time where there are more new tools for connecting. And we have recognized that the one-to-one mentor model does not always work. We don’t always have enough mentors. It is, as Carolyn said, a “big ask” for mentors.
So, we want to do something innovative and leverage how we’re working and these new tools to create more of a ‘many-to-many’ type of model, where the key is that it’s very accessible. People don’t have to write an application to get into a mentoring program—it’s accessible and it’s connected.
We have a lot of expertise that could be made easily accessible to others. By creating an open channel for sharing this expertise, we can enable learning not just for those who ask questions, but also for passive observers and even other mentors. This approach fosters multiple channels of learning and connection.
Ron Wasserstein: What are the biggest challenges for establishing a successful program in mentoring?
Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar: Carolyn and Ruth are up to any challenge. So that gives me great optimism for our plans. Specifically, the initiative is like a roadmap, thinking ahead to what we need to accomplish and a few challenges we’re carefully considering and trying to solve. One challenge is how to sustain the initiative. We have a vision, we have a plan to implement the vision in a relatively brief amount of time, but how to sustain that is one question I think about.
The second challenge is how to scale, because often the demand for mentorship exceeds the supply of mentors. This is why the many-to-many model is attractive. It can include mentors who might be reluctant to the one-on-one model or worried about their time commitment. It’s like a diffused responsibility or shared responsibility that I, for one, [would] find much easier to agree to if I were to be a mentor.
In addition, I’ve also heard from different programs that we need to think carefully about how to assess the outcomes of mentoring. So, we launch many initiatives; this is just one of many. ASA had some very successful ones. But how do you think beyond qualitative, maybe some quantitative sort of metrics to try to decide how to adapt a mentoring program or grow as we move forward? Scalability, sustainability, and assessment of outcomes are the three things I think about.
Ruth Etzioni: My challenge is how do we bring people together? How do we grab their interests and convince them? We have a very short amount of time to get people’s attention. So how are we going to do this effectively?
The issue is that we want people who are not getting help to access this, but the people who tend to access ASA materials and communications will overlap greatly with the people who are already supported. So again, we’ll be open to any suggestions of how to reach out so less-connected people feel welcomed and included in this initiative.
We’ll be able to share our energy and excitement around it very easily, but we want that to be infectious.
Carolyn Rutter: Exactly. How do we bring people in? How do we identify the needs so we can meet them? And then there’s the sustainability side of it. How do we continue to assess what we’ve started and maybe change it, improve it, in an ongoing way? These are things both Bonnie and Ruth said very well.
Ron Wasserstein: Bonnie, how can our listeners share their ideas and questions with you and the group?
Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar: I believe for an initiative to be successful, it needs to represent what our members want. So, Ruth and Carolyn have put a great deal of energy into this initiative. They have an amazing working group that represents people across sectors, as well as career stages. This summer, they distributed a brief member questionnaire as a way for the broader membership to chime in and have their voices heard.
Currently, members can share thoughts on my community feedback page. I believe every person who agrees to be a leader is more energized when there’s feedback or input because you feel like somebody is pitching in. It is a collective effort.
Sharing thoughts on the community feedback page or ASA community is welcome. Also, you could email one of us directly if you felt you wanted to speak more privately. There are multiple ways you can share input. We want to get the conversation started!
Getting in Touch
Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar
bonnieg@rand.org
Carolyn Rutter
crutter@rand.org
Ruth Etzioni
retzioni@fredhutch.org
Leave a Reply