“I make time for mentoring because I really enjoy it. When you work with a student or faculty member who is enthusiastic and motivated, it is not something that I see as ‘taking’ time. It gives me energy.” — Truls Ostbye, MD, MPH, PhD, professor of family medicine and community health and the department’s vice chair for research and scholarship.
Named as a Master Mentor by the Duke University School of Medicine Office of Physician-Scientist Development, Ostbye serves as the research mentor for a range of junior researchers and clinicians as well as graduate students across Duke's three campuses (in Durham, at Duke-NUS in Singapore, and at Duke Kunshan in China). “Early in my career, it was very important for me to be the first author or senior author on a paper, but at this point I get more satisfaction from seeing a struggling student, especially if it is someone who has English as a foreign language, get their first paper published,” he said.
Ostbye values at least weekly communication with his mentees, whether that means an in-person or virtual meeting, an email, or even asynchronous voice chats on WhatsApp.
Ostbye, a chronic disease epidemiologist and public health researcher with a special interest in obesity, diseases of the elderly, and global health, took a non-traditional path into the academic ranks. After earning an MD at University of Bergen in Norway, he served as a government officer there, then earned a master’s degree in public health from Harvard. He became a lecturer at University of Otago, then a fellow at Dalhousie University, and then an associate professor at Western University in Ontario. He joined the faculty at Duke before he wrote his dissertation and earned a doctoral degree.
Along the way, he didn’t have a formal mentor, but he benefited from informal “micro mentorships” from many leaders and colleagues. “Maybe that’s why I appreciate the importance of mentoring,” he said.