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, to serving as the home for the National Research Mentoring Network Coordination Center (NRMN CC), and now supporting a national CTSA+ Mentorship Community of Practice (CoP).
These mentor and mentee resources are framed around the four phases of mentoring relationships: Selection, Alignment, Cultivation, and Closure. Additional 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.
Mentors and mentees looking to expand their mentorship networks can do so through the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN). ICTR also supports a CTSA+ CoP focused on mentorship.
CTSA+ Community of Practice: Advancing the Science & Practice of Mentorship
In April 2023, the University of Wisconsin received a conference grant from NIH to hold a 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 the important conversations that were started there, and to 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. The CoP is committed to integrating the principles of diversity, equity, inclusion and justice into conversations about mentorship.
The membership includes clinical and translational scientists, mentorship experts, practitioners, scholars, and institutional leaders from 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 about our activity and to sign-up to join the community of practice, please go to 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.
