b"BRIDGING THE FUNDING GAPTHROUGH MENTORINGALEXANDER K. SMITH, MD, MPH, MSAssociate Professor of Medicine,University of California, San Francisco2009 Career Development Awardee: The Scientific Basis for Palliative Care in the ED2015 Pilot and Exploratory Awardee: Communication of Prognosis in Older AdultsDr. Alex Smith is a loyal, active, and deeply engaged member of the palliative care community, who has participated in every aspect of the NPCRC journey. After successfully completing his CDA research, Dr. Smith received a Pilot Exploratory grant to study prognosis communication with disabled elders. This resulted in the creation of ePrognosis: a website that directs clinicians toward the best prognostic calculator for each seriously ill patients specific circumstances. The site, which has been expanded to address patient communication and cancer screening, gets about 10,000 views each month. Currently Dr. Smith is collaborating with NPCRC director Dr. R. Sean Morrison to explore the impact of disruptive eventship fracture, hospitalization for pneumonia, and death of a spouseon the lives of older adults with dementia. A frequent Foley Retreat speaker and a sought-after mentor to Kornfeld Scholar awardees, Dr. Smith is dedicated to helping junior researchers make the challenging competitive leap to NIH career development awards from their postdoctoral or fellowship trainings. There aren't a lot of established palliative care investigators, so it's a vital part of our professional responsibility to support the next generation of junior folks in medicine, nursing, and social work who are interested in palliative care research. Being a researcher is intimidating and uncertain: living from grant to grant, wondering if you're going to make it. I don't want anyone to meet with a dead end when they finish their training. I want to nurture them, give them a boost. I spend most of my time working as primary mentor for eight or nine mentees at once because it helps us grow the field and build a stronger foundation of science for the clinical practice of palliative care. Mentoring has become the most enjoyable aspect of my work. It allows me to maintain interest in a wide variety of compelling subjects: everything from anesthesia and cognition to loneliness and social isolation in the last years of lifefrom building a better hospice for people with dementia to creating health policy around home-based palliative care models, to improving communication in the ICU. I learn so much from my mentees and I love seeing their success. 20"