Mentoring Workshops | UC Davis CTSC

What is a mentor, and what does an ideal mentoring relationship look like? In this session, we will empower mentees to be active participants in their mentoring relationships.

Target audience: Graduate Students, Postdocs, and Junior Faculty

Spring 2025 Session: Tuesday, March 4, 2025, noon-1:15 p.m.
Registration coming soon.

Cultural background and intersection of identities play a significant role in mentoring relationships. In this workshop, we will cover cultural awareness, cultural humility, and how to apply concepts of cultural competency to garner a more positive and successful mentoring experience for both mentors and mentees.

Target audience: Graduate Students, Postdocs, and Junior Faculty

Spring 2025 Session: Thursday, March 13, 2025, noon-1:15 p.m.
Registration coming soon.

Conflict is an inevitable part of any mentoring relationship. In this session, we will discover ways of managing--and even preventing--challenging conversations and situations with your mentor.

Target audience: Graduate Students, Postdocs, and Junior Faculty

Spring 2025 Session: Tuesday, April 1, 2025, noon-1:15 p.m.
Registration coming soon.

The courses below are part of the core curriculum for the Mentoring Academy for Research Excellence workshop series. Workshops are currently being offered over Zoom, although this is subject to change.

One critical element of an effective mentoring relationship is a shared understanding of what each person expects from the relationship. Problems in a mentoring relationship often arise from misunderstandings about expectations. Importantly, expectations change over time so frequent reflection and clear communication is needed to maintain a collaborative relationship.

Good communication is a key element of any relationship and a mentoring relationship is no exception. As mentors, it is not enough to say that we know good communication when we see it. Rather, it is critical that mentors reflect upon and identify specific characteristics of effective communication and take time to practice communication skills.

Target Audience: Designed for faculty mentoring junior faculty or fellows but open to all faculty.

Spring 2025 Session: Tuesday, February 25, 2025, noon-1:30 p.m.
Registration coming soon.

Diversity, along a range of dimensions, offers both opportunities and challenges to any relationship. Learning to identify, reflect upon, learn from, and engage with diverse perspectives is critical to forming and maintaining both an effective mentoring relationship as well as a vibrant learning environment. In this session, discussions about how to foster an inclusive environment where everyone can do their best learning and create the highest quality of research, both because of and despite their diverse perspectives.

Successful mentoring relationships include consideration of the complementary roles of work and family/personal life, for the mentee, while also maintaining proper boundaries. This session will introduce mentors to exercises intended to increase comfort and skill in considering mentee’s challenges related to work/life integration that are commonly encountered by the early career research academic.

Target Audience: Designed for faculty mentoring junior faculty or fellows but open to all faculty.

Spring 2025 Session: Tuesday, March 11, 2025, 12:30-2 p.m.
Registration coming soon.

The ultimate goal of most mentoring relationships is to enable the mentee to identify and achieve some academic and professional outcomes after the training period. Non-research professional development activities are sometimes seen as secondary to the core business of doing research, but are often critically important to identifying and successfully meeting the mentee’s long-term career objectives, as well as to the research itself.

It is increasingly recognized that team science approaches may be needed to solve highly complex health science problems. This session will introduce participants to resources developed to prevent and address common problems that occur in conducting team science research, particularly issues encountered by mentees who may be working with more than one mentor.

An important goal in any mentoring relationship is helping the mentee become independent; yet defining what an independent mentee knows and can do is often not articulated by the mentor or the mentee. Defining what independence looks like across career paths and stages, and developing skills to foster independence is important to becoming an effective mentor. Defining independence becomes increasingly complex in the context of collaborative research.

Target Audience: Designed for faculty mentoring junior faculty or fellows but open to all faculty.

Spring 2025 Session: Tuesday, March 25, 2025, noon-1:30 p.m.
Registration coming soon.

This course is being designed as a follow-up session for participants who have completed core curriculum for the Mentoring Academy for Research Excellence workshop series. More information will be provided at a later date.