Mentorship has been an essential part of ICTR since its inception. Over the past decade, ICTR has become a national hub for mentorship education and scholarship — starting with the randomized controlled trial testing the Entering Mentoring-based mentor training intervention, and now supporting a national CTSA+ Mentorship Community of Practice (CoP).
November 12, 2026 @ 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
November 16, 2026 @ 8:00 am - 5:00 pm
February 23, 2027 @ 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Resources including tools, toolkits, and skill development opportunities are available on the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER) website.
Several opportunities exist for mentors and mentees across career stages to enhance their mentorship skills and the effectiveness of their mentoring relationships, including local mentor and mentee training opportunities (see events). Evidence-based mentor and mentee training curricula can be found on the CIMER website.
CTSA+ Community of Practice: Advancing the Science & Practice of Mentorship
In April 2023, with support from an NIH conference grant, the University of Wisconsin hosted the mentorship conference, “The Science of Effective Mentorship: Future Directions for Sustainable Implementation and Evaluation of Mentorship Education for the Clinical and Translational Science Workforce.” At the conference, the community discussed the need for an ongoing community of practice to enable colleagues to continue important conversations and share best practices.
In October of 2023, the CTSA+ Community of Practice (CoP) was launched. The mission of the CTSA+ CoP is to provide members with access to information and research about evidence-based mentorship education, mentorship policies and practices, and assessment strategies.
Members include clinical and translational scientists, mentorship experts, practitioners, scholars, and institutional leaders across career stages who are interested in advancing the science and practice of mentorship in the clinical and translational research sciences and beyond.
To learn more or to sign-up to join the community of practice, please visit the community website. For more information, please email Dr. Melissa McDaniels at mmcdaniels@wisc.edu.
A full library of measures used to evaluate mentorship education and mentoring relationships will soon be available on the CIMER website.
ICTR’s mentorship initiatives have been supported by many sources including:
“This was a wonderfully organized training. I was extremely impressed with the quality of resources, organization and communication! Thank you for having me be a part of it.”
I plan to “develop a formal mentoring plan with my current mentor and have frequent checks to ensure that the items on the plan are being met [as well as] seek mentorship in other aspects of my career, not only related to my research.”
The following are a selection of key publications that reflect funding support from the ICTR National Institutes of Health CTSA award.
For a complete list of publications from our team and collaborators, please visit the CIMER Zotero Library.
