Mentoring Satellite Event – 2019

Future of Research Satellite Event

June 14th, 2019

Thank you to all members of the UW-Madison community who participated and contributed to this event! We were ecstatic with the turnout, and all your contributions will go towards the national dialogue of mentoring in academia.

Stakeholders at all levels recognize the need for better mentorship for successive generations of researchers, particularly those from underrepresented groups. The Future of Research (FoR) seeks to apply the available evidence-based research on mentor/mentee competency training with the help of practical expertise of departmental leaders, and the experience of early career researchers to develop a set of guidelines.

The UW-Madison Postdoctoral Association is hosting a local satellite meeting on behalf of FoR, to live stream the workshops from their Chicago meeting, facilitate participation, and submit feedback from UW-Madison departments. The goal of UW’s satellite meeting, in conjunction with the Chicago meeting, is to discuss and develop national guidelines for departmental mentoring. The outcome of this meeting will be a set of guidelines across various mentoring climate domains with three excellence tiers: bronze, silver, and gold.

We are inviting departmental representatives interested in participating in the development of these guidelines to attend the satellite meeting and contribute feedback. The satellite meeting will be held on June 14th from 9am-4pm in the Genetics-Biotechnology Center (Aud 1111). UW-Madison will be one of four satellite meetings across the country. At this meeting, mentoring climate domains will be discussed, as well as the feasibility of implementing excellence tiers. Additionally, Dr. Melissa McDaniels (Senior Advisor to the Dean for Research Mentoring, The Graduate School, Michigan State University), who has collaborated extensively with the UW-Madison research mentor training community, will give a keynote on the state of academic mentoring in the US.

Department chairs and faculty across the country will attend these meetings on June 14th to participate in the development of the guidelines. We encourage UW departments to send at least one departmental representative and one postdoc to attend and participate in our university’s satellite event. Departments will have the opportunity to publicly commit to the guidelines once they have been finalized and published on the Future of Research website later this summer. Departmental leaders wishing to commit to actionable departmental improvement will be able to use the tiers as an assessment tool.