Mentorship

The Institute strives to create the best environment for our staff, fellows, faculty, and leadership to continuously provide and benefit from outstanding mentorship. We have a strong tradition of mentorship, supporting both professional and personal development at all career stages.

Each trainee, fellow, research scientist, and faculty member is paired with a primary mentor. This mentor provides career guidance, personal support, and facilitates connections within and beyond the Institute. The primary mentor gives a summary of the mentee’s progress and seeks input for advising the mentee in an annual review.

We welcome and encourage all staff to work with human resources or their supervisor to identify a mentor within the department. We also encourage staff to apply for the Point32Health Mentoring Program. This annual program offers mentoring relationships across the company to inspire employees to contribute to their own and others' personal and professional growth and development.

The annual review shifts mentoring at the Institute beyond the traditional one-to-one model. We cultivate a culture that engages the entire faculty, highlighting the importance we place on mentorship and supporting each member’s successful development.

During the annual review, higher rank investigators provide career advancement strategies, address readiness for promotion, and identify needs for success. Each researcher also prepares an annual self-report and participates in a 360-review process to seek anonymous feedback from colleagues.

Our mentoring approach was recognized with the HMS Program Award for Culture of Excellence in Mentoring and identified as a model process during an external review. It has been described in detail in a recent publication.

We facilitate peer mentoring through both formal and ad-hoc structures. These include regular meetings of fellows, junior faculty, and women faculty and fellows; writing accountability groups; and strategy seminars on topics ranging from preparing a K-award application to effective presentation training.

The Institute sponsors the Gordon Moore Excellence in Mentoring Award. This annual award celebrates outstanding Institute members who inspire, support, and catalyze a colleague’s development to become the best they can be in their careers and lives.

Institute leadership invites feedback and suggestions for improvements through various avenues. These include annual faculty review, peer mentoring groups, organizational climate surveys, surveys on existing mentoring and feedback structures, and needs assessments of staff and faculty at different levels.

Tangible results of the multi-faceted program have included:

Our early career faculty have participated in programs to empower mentees, while our senior faculty have taken part in mentoring leadership programs. Faculty have received multiple honors for excellence in mentoring. These include: