Mentorship and Hematopoiesis with Dr. Charles Wiener

Dr. Charles Wiener is the President of Johns Hopkins Medicine International and Professor of Medicine and Physiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is the director emeritus of the Osler Internal Medicine Training Program and has previously served as chair of the committee that created the school of medicine's "Genes to Society" curriculum. Dr Wiener completed his Medical school from the University of Miami and his training and chief residency in internal medicine at the University of Washington. During his time at Johns Hopkins, he has been recognized for his academic leadership, extensive institutional and clinical knowledge and ability to build productive business relationships across diverse groups. He has received various awards including the Professors Teaching Award and George Stuart Award for Clinical teaching from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Mentorship is a lot like hematopoiesis. Today, Dr. Charles Wiener explains how all of us are pluripotent stem cells. And it’s important that we be exposed to the right growth factors (right mentors) at the right time in our differentiation (personal development). Depending on where we are both temporally in our differentiation and phenotypically in what we want to develop into, we need different growth factors, and thus different mentors. Therefore, it is critical that we create an environment around us where we can be exposed to the right people at the right time to fuel our development.  Pearls of Wisdom: 1. If you’re excited about an opportunity…sometimes you just have to jump through the window. And although doors may close behind us, new doors will be created along the way. 2. Take the “work” out of “work life balance”. It’s life balance. We should realize that there are no compartments in life…they are all subsets of one holistic life. 3. External validation will never lead to a life where we love what we’re doing. To love what we’re doing, we need to build a foundation based on honesty and self-reflection.