Promotion to professor at HMS is hard!—and not at all essential to a successful, impactful, and fulfilling faculty career. But to help serve our community of Associate Professors aiming for that one last HMS promotion, here are a few insights and tips:

• HMS’s key buzzwords for Professor are national/international leadership. The HMS Criteria for Appointment and Promotion for Professor under Clinical Expertise and Innovation (CEI) call for “a sustained national, and in many cases international, reputation as a leader and innovator… demonstrated through high impact scholarship… [and] a significant influence on practice in the clinical [via] teaching, scholarship and innovation.” The corresponding criteria under Investigation are “a sustained national, and in many cases international, reputation as one of the top researchers in the field… an exceptional independent research program and/or key leadership roles in collaborative studies…a longstanding record of exceptional scholarship which most often includes senior authorship on high impact publications of original research…a sustained record of [principal investigator] extramural funding… [and] evidence of effective teaching and supervision as demonstrated by the number and stature of his/her trainees.” I strongly encourage you to read through the Professor profiles in the HMS handbook, which members of the committees that review you will themselves be consulting.
• “Scholarship” refers to first- and last-authored publications and is absolutely key for the promotion under either Investigation (research investigations) or CEI (can also include high-profile reviews). A good first step to see if you’re competitive for Professor is to prepare your list of “10 Most Significant Scholarly Works.” HMS’s favored metric for evaluating publication impact is the NIH Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) score as calculated by iCite, which sets RCR=1 to the 50th percentile of citations for the field and year. Typically, most or all of the RCRs on this list (for papers published at least 2 years ago, allowing an RCR to be calculated) are greater than 1, many substantially so. (The more substantially, the better.)
• National/international leadership and impact are also gauged by the letters of evaluation. HMS will ask for a list of suggested external and internal letter writers, whom THEY will contact (and YOU absolutely should not). Even a few unenthusiastic or negative comments from evaluators can be very damaging to the promotion, so it’s worth giving your list a lot of thought.
• There are a few disincentives to attempting the promotion when your Professor case is borderline. There is a two-year waiting period after promotion rejection before the promotion can be put forward again. And the review committee for the second attempt will see the dossier from the first, which may not look so good.

I’m making this process sound awful! Granted, it’s long and tough, but most Professor candidates approved by their departmental review do in fact succeed. The HMS Office for Faculty Affairs offers a range of promotion-oriented webinars, including ones on promotion to Professor. Take heart and approach this process by imagining how your field would be different had you not existed: Your impact is what matters.

With best holiday wishes,

Steve