Jun 13, 2019 | Events & Networking, FOR meetings, Ideas for change, Mentoring
FoR Chicago 2019: Mentoring Future Scientists The importance that departments and institutions attach to supporting good mentorship, and providing mechanisms for accountability and addressing poor mentorship, have become an issue of intense scrutiny for early career researchers. Our meeting is imminent on June 14th 2019! We are dedicated to greater prioritization of mentoring practices in departments and at institutions, and hope to make progress at the meeting to push this forward. Follow #MentoringFutureSci on Twitter to keep up with the meeting! Schedule – NOTE ALL TIMES IN CENTRAL TIME: Meeting Schedule June 14th, 2019 9:00 – 9:20 Opening remarks to frame need, background, and desired goals Gary McDowell, FoR and Dr. Kathryn Milligan-Myhre, Assistant Professor for the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alaska Anchorage 9:30 – 10:45 Framing Big Picture Needs, and Areas for Improvement Early Career Researchers: Dr. Susanna Harris, The PhDepression LLC (https://www.thephdepression.com/) Departments: Dr. Kathryn Milligan-Myhre, Assistant Professor for the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alaska Anchorage 11:00 – 11:30 Reconvene for discussion of outcomes from ECR, Departmental, and Satellite workshops 11:30 – 12:00 Keynote Presentation Dr. Melissa McDaniels, Senior Advisor to the Dean for Research Mentoring, Graduate School and Postdoctoral Office, Michigan State University; Investigator, Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research; Co-Director, Master Facilitator Initiative, National Research Mentoring Network Lunch 1:20 – 2:30 Defining Excellence Tiers for Various Mentoring Domains Dr. Danika Khong and Dr. Elizabeth Wu, Scismic 2:30 – 3:30 Reconvene as a large group for discussion...
May 30, 2019 | FOR meetings, Mentoring
FoR Chicago 2019: Mentoring Future Scientists The importance that departments and institutions attach to supporting good mentorship, and providing mechanisms for accountability and addressing poor mentorship, have become an issue of intense scrutiny for early career researchers. Future of Research is organizing a meeting on June 14th 2019, dedicated to greater prioritization of mentoring practices in departments and at institutions. About the meeting We propose that a lack of focus on mentoring is partly responsible for preventing ECRs from reaching their full potential. Therefore, we are pushing for greater transparency for ECRs regarding mentoring efforts, and greater attention to mentoring standards by departments and institutions. The short-term outcome for our meeting is to develop an agreed set of guidelines and to get a commitment from participating departments to adopt them. What is the meeting aiming to do? Develop a set of guidelines across various departmental mentoring climate domains with three excellence tiers: bronze, silver, and gold, to be used as an assessment tool by both departmental leaders wishing to commit to actionable improvement, and by early career researchers and faculty wishing to advocate for and drive this change themselves. Enlist a number of departments signing their support for said guidelines and their department’s commitment to review and implement guidelines, beginning with the most basic mutually agreed short-term actions. The guidelines, divided into domains and excellence tiers, alongside list of departmental signatories, will be publicly hosted on the Future of Research website. Individual departments can display the guidelines, and their commitment to the various excellence tiers across domains, on their own websites and promotional material. To achieve...
May 13, 2019 | FOR meetings, Mentoring
To ensure that early career researchers are supported in their academic development, we are holding a meeting in Chicago June 14 to place mentoring as a priority at academic institutions. Cooperating with satellite meetings around the country, we will develop a set of departmental mentoring climate guidelines to be used by departments, and early career researchers, to evaluate attention to mentoring. For more information and updates, see the conference site at www.futureofresearch.org/mentoring. But we are still keen for others to join the effort! We are looking for input from graduate students, postdocs, junior faculty and departmental representatives. Please join us! REGISTRATION FOR CHICAGO CLOSES END OF MAY 14 2019. Join us in Chicago at https://tinyurl.com/ChicagoMentor19 For more details, or to make a donation, see https://tinyurl.com/ChicagoDonate19 Register for satellites here: Boston University: https://tinyurl.com/BostonMentor19 University of Wisconsin-Madison: https://tinyurl.com/MadisonMentor19 We hope to see you there! Please feel free to contact info@futureofresearch.org for more information. ...
May 3, 2019 | FOR meetings, Mentoring
Future of Research is organizing a meeting to develop a set of departmental mentoring climate guidelines, with the potential to be used as an assessment tool by departmental leaders wishing to commit to actionable departmental improvement, and by ECRs to establish which departments are centering good mentorship in their priorities. To join the meeting in Chicago, or at one of our satellites around the US, see the conference page here! We often talk about the idea of academic mentorship in terms of a professor fostering the career of a researcher earlier in their career, such as a graduate student or postdoc. But of course the reality is that many graduate students and postdocs are themselves mentoring others themselves, including undergraduates. Two recent pieces discuss mentorship by “trainees” from a personal perspective, and in a scientific paper. In Symbiosis: the mutual benefits of mentoring undergraduates in the lab on the ASCB COMPASS blog, Jami Conley Calderon recounts the experience of mentoring undergraduates and provides some key steps from their experience in an approach for graduate students to take when mentoring undergraduates: Explain the lab’s research; Encourage questions; Be present; Give students agency over their project; Be understanding; and Respect their time. You can read the full post, with more details on each step, here. In Volunteered or Voluntold? The Motivations and Perceived Outcomes of Graduate and Postdoctoral Mentors of Undergraduate Researchers, published in CBE-Life Sciences Education, Limeri, Asif and Dolan take a systematic approach to look at the postgraduate perspective of this mentoring experience. Using exploratory interviews, the authors identified and characterized motivations for 32 postgraduates...
Jan 3, 2019 | Diversity in science, FOR meetings, Ideas for change, Mentoring, Personal perspectives
This is part of a series of blog posts explaining our push for centering mentoring in academia. We are organizing a meeting in Chicago in June 2019 to take action – you can learn more about the effort here. Donate to our mentoring effort! This is a post by BoD member Dr. Kaliris Salas-Ramirez. This takes us into January, which is National Mentoring Month. We will continue to discuss mentoring and provide updates as our conference planning progresses here. Mentorship, leadership, institutional policies and systemic change should be something that researchers, as part of institutions, should always be thinking about. Understanding power structures, power dynamics and engaging in bias training that includes learning about racism as a social construct, is critical for bringing about transformative change in the sciences. As professionals committed to innovation and improving the lives of others, understanding these different aspects of systems will allow us to deepen our mentoring relationships within our laboratories and departments. These play a critical role in the development of scientists at every career level and can elevate the voices of even the most marginalized and oppressed groups to promote equity in the research enterprise. Based on my lived experiences, identities and roles, I have many things to say when it comes to privilege, bias, racism and relationships in the academy. I am a Puerto Rican Neuroscientist that trained at Michigan State University (the first to graduate with a doctorate from an underrepresented group (URG), Black and Latinx, in Neuroscience) and is currently faculty at the CUNY School of Medicine (one of three people of color with PhD’s in the...
Dec 31, 2018 | FOR meetings, Fundraising, Ideas for change, Mentoring
This is part of a series of blog posts explaining our push for centering mentoring in academia. We are organizing a meeting in Chicago in June 2019 to take action – you can learn more about the effort here. Donate to our mentoring effort! We are focused on our project to center mentoring as a priority at academic institutions. We are organizing a meeting in Chicago on June 14th 2019 that is looking on what changes, and importantly how to effect them, need to take place in departments and institutions. We are aiming to bring together those working in this space already, and are discussing our proposal for a third-party to evaluate mentoring at the departmental and institutional levels. We have released a brochure summarizing the meeting, and in brief what we are doing and why we are doing it. We are calling for abstracts from those who may have best practices to share, particularly from who are not at the research-intensive institutions on which these efforts usually focus. If you would like to submit an abstract, or know of someone who would be interested, please submit using this link. We also aim to have satellite meetings, live-streaming the Chicago talks to campuses around the country but allowing departments or institutions interested in moving forward in the mentoring space to hear the discussions and discuss how to take action. Please let us know if you think your campus/organization might be interested in providing a space for a satellite meeting, by emailing info@futureofresearch.org We are still asking for help in raising funds for this meeting, and hope that maybe at the end of the...
