MICCAI 2018 Daily - Tuesday

Stephen Aylward is a Senior Director at Kitware and Treasurer of the MICCAI Society. He is also a mentor as part of the MICCAI 2018 Mentoring Program. Stephen, can you tell us some more about this year’s Mentoring Program? It’s a wonderful opportunity to provide guidance to the students that extends beyond conveying technical information, which is the main focus of the conference. This is how to take that technical information learned here and really build that into a full career. By having the senior people at the conference together with the students, it is a perfect venue for this student program. Do you think that mentorship is needed more now than it was when you were a student? Yes. Right now, in some ways the line between academia and industry is blurring. It’s possible to do research in both locations. It’s possible to have very well-paying jobs. It’s possible to live anywhere in the world. Our profession is really a great profession, with so many opportunities presented to us, and so the decisions are harder as a result. The demands when you take those jobs, whether in industry or academia, are often harder nowadays. It’s more demanding nowadays to balance family life together with progress in those careers. The senior people who have been through it are happy to provide that knowledge. How do you think we can ensure that the expectations of mentors and mentees align? I think it’s important for both people to listen. What people want from the program is going to vary by the mentee, so I think part of the mentor’s role – just as the role of any educator – is to figure out how to best convey the knowledge that they have in a way that is meaningful to the mentee and addresses their problems and concerns. The mentees that I’m working with, one is a student, but the other one is a professor. Mentees come from all walks of life and have different goals, so the mentorship should be tailored to the individuals. Do you have any success stories about mentorship that you would like to tell our readers? Mentorship has played a huge role in my career and so I’m very grateful for the opportunity to give that back. At my first job that I took after my PhD, I worked with my first mentor, Etta Pisano, who is a wonderful mammographer. Here was someone who was strong in clinical skills, and we were able to partner with my computer science skills. It was a mentor-mentee relationship. She taught me how to write plans, how to do research, and at With Stephen Aylward and Le Zhang 16 Tuesday Mentorship Stephen wearing the I’maMentor badge