Did you have significant mentors in your career?
Not really. There were powerful figures along the way that I wanted to emulate, who were helpful and useful to my career, but not guiding it.

You apprentice yourself to people whose work you admire and that you want to model yourself upon. But if you work closely with someone, later on you can run into resentment, when you and your career move on. Or if you stay on and work with someone, you may be seen as treading on their toes, so you need to differentiate yourself from an earlier supervisor. One of the advantages of having a mentor is that that does not happen. You won’t be seen as one of the children taking over the nursery! I suppose that you need someone who will really help you in a completely non-selfish manner, and maybe that is difficult with highly goal-oriented academics - but not impossible!

What made you say yes to being a mentor for the Academy?
Flattery – I was flattered to be asked. Slightly more seriously, one has a debt to repay and an obligation to those you train and leave behind. One of my old professors didn’t proclaim how many papers he’d published, but how many of his students now had professorships around the world – and he had 40 or 50 of these “academic grandchildren”. If people wish to ask your career advice it does suggest that you haven’t only made mistakes!

How did your relationship as a mentor get started?
I have two mentees now. My first was actively looking for a mentor, at a point in her career when she was starting to separate from a fairly dominant supervisor and establish herself. She was confident and fairly clear about the career path she wanted, but wanted some independent advice. I recently took on a second mentee who approached me after a talk I gave.

Broadly what has been the main focus of your discussions?
I view it as an extension of the advice we are used to giving our clinical registrars. They are always asking about which jobs they should go to next or whether it would be a good time for them to do some research. My first mentee is in a related field and I can advise about which professional meetings to go to, where to publish – we might even interact academically at some point. My second mentee is at an earlier stage in her career, in a more distant field, and less certain of where she’s going, so we talk about softer issues, such as career-family balance and where to spend most of her time. Mostly it’s about offering encouragement, with a bit of adjustment to the tiller to the left or right now and then. I have encouraged one of my mentees not to phone the lab daily when on holiday!

I’ve never had to help with any major problems, but I think a mentor could be useful in discussing ways in which a mentee could manage a local situation better – maybe suggesting when someone could be more assertive or other internal pathways within the mentee’s institution that could be used. Some supervisors can use PhD students as the means to publish papers then essentially spit them out at the end of their studentship without helping the student get the full benefit. A mentor can help in this sort of situation and more generally can help compensate for our human imperfections - it is hard to be the perfect supervisor all the time.

How do you organise meetings and how often?
We meet two to four times a year – about every 3 or 4 months. If I haven’t seen them for a while I drop them an email and it usually takes a month or so to get a date. We meet in a pub or a wine bar – somewhere comfortable rather than having a formal dinner – and we meet for about an hour. It doesn’t really take up that much time.

What do you most value about the relationship?
What a mentor gets from the relationship isn’t very tangible – joy in seeing someone progress, association with a successful young person, and the gratification of seeing their career take shape.

Prof Grossman's research has centred on the pituitary gland, the relationship between the immune system and the central nervous system, the endocrinology and functional significance of the novel hormone, ghrelin, and most recently on the molecular pathogenesis of pituitary tumours. His clinical interests are in the diagnosis of pituitary tumours and in particular the diagnosis and differential diagnosis of Cushing’s syndrome. He is President of the European Neuroendocrine Association, and has co-authored over 500 original papers, chapters and reviews.