Enhancing Faculty Mentorship of PhD Students in Biomedical Research

Successful preparation of PhD-trained biomedical researchers is essential to advance human health and well-being, yet high rates of attrition and deteriorating student well-being in PhD programs undermine preparation of this important workforce. A PhD student’s relationship with their faculty research mentor is the single most influential factor in the quality and success of their graduate training, both positively and negatively, such that negative experiences with mentors undermine students’ personal and professional growth. My research program addresses these issues by understanding factors that promote and hinder effective research mentoring relationships and using this knowledge to develop novel interventions to enhance faculty mentoring abilities and bolster graduate students’ experiences and success. Our research has revealed two avenues with strong potential to improve mentoring effectiveness: (1) cultivating a sense of similarity between faculty mentors and student mentees and (2) coupling a shift in faculty beliefs about mentoring with skill-building to communicate more productively about conflicts. These avenues leverage extensive research in social psychology and communication that has yet to be applied to research mentoring relationships. Over the next five years, I will evaluate two research-based interventions with strong potential for replication and scaling: a similarity-promoting intervention and a beliefs and skills intervention. Studying these interventions will yield insight into their effectiveness for improving mentoring relationships and their outcomes, including students’ research productivity, faculty and student well-being, and students’ time-to-degree and degree completion. This research will also produce mechanistic insights about research mentoring relationships by addressing two key research questions: (1) How can we foster high quality, productive mentoring relationships between faculty advisors and their PhD students through increasing perceived similarity? and (2) How can we sustain positive graduate mentoring relationships and outcomes by promoting faculty motivational beliefs and building their communication skills? I will accomplish this by conducting a series of randomized controlled trials that involve collection and analysis of longitudinal data from local and national samples of biomedical research faculty and their PhD students. IMPACT: This research will yield much needed knowledge about the development and maintenance of research mentoring relationships; address important limitations in the study of mentoring; and provide the foundation for large-scale interventions to advance the biomedical research enterprise by equipping faculty with dispositions and skills to mentor effectively. Project Number: 1R35GM163754-01 | Fiscal Year: 2026 | NIH Institute/Center: National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) | Principal Investigator: ERIN DOLAN | Institution: UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA, ATHENS, GA | Award Amount: $342,000 | Activity Code: R35 | Study Section: Special Emphasis Panel[ZRG1 CDB-E (55)] View on NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/11329991