Dean's Message, January 31, 2022

Dear GSBS Community,

Mentoring is the lifeblood of graduate training, allowing scientists to pass along the gifts we have been privileged to receive. When leading a mentoring session for our first-year course on Scientific Ethics, I start by asking the audience to close their eyes, think of one of their own mentors, and remember an example of a difference they made. I always enjoy seeing the smiles across the room.

I am pleased that many of our GSBS faculty have participated in mentor training by the NIH-sponsored Center for the Improvement of Mentoring in Research (CIMER), and even prouder that some of those faculty continued with a training on Culturally Aware Mentoring. Below, I have provided some resources recommended by CIMER; while these are aimed at faculty, they may also benefit students and postdoctoral scholars. These resources address relevant topics such as remote mentorship, culturally aware mentorship, and career development.

Mentorship in the time of COVID

1. Reassess–Realign–Reimagine: A Guide for Mentors Pivoting to Remote Research Mentoring 
2. Six mentoring tips as we enter year two of COVID
3. PODCAST- How the pandemic widened scientists' mentoring networks 
4. Mentoring in crisis does not need to put mentorship in crisis: Realigning expectations

Culturally Aware Mentoring

1. Measuring Research Mentors’ Cultural Diversity Awareness for Race/Ethnicity in STEM: Validity Evidence for a New Scale 
2. Culturally aware mentorship: Lasting impacts of a novel intervention on academic administrators and faculty

Career Development

1. Pause, Breathe, Reflect and Reset 
2. Value, Support, and Advancement: An Organization's Role in Faculty Career Intentions in Academic Medicine 
3. KL2 mentored career development programs at clinical and translational science award hubs: Practices and outcomes 
4. Training PhD Students to Successfully Navigate Research Mentoring Relationships” Letter in the Chronicle of Higher Education 

Dan Jay, Dean