Rising Star Early-Career Faculty Award Lecture and Cyber-Pedagogy Panel Discussion

The Rising Star Early-Career Faculty Award lecture will feature an address by 2021 recipient Candace S. Brown, PhD, MA, MEd, of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. The Rising Star Early-Career Faculty Award acknowledges new faculty whose teaching and leadership stand out as influential and innovative. This event will also feature a panel discussion led by the AGHE Awards Review Panel titled, “Cyber-Pedagogy to the Rescue: Creating Effective Online Programming for Students and Trainees During the Pandemic.”

Confronting the nameless-faceless: a duoethnography of navigating turnover and early career socialization

PurposeThe purpose of this duoethnography was to share our narratives as a left-behind early career faculty (ECF) and graduate student with minoritized identities and reflect on academic socialization processes. Specifically, when many scholars are raising alarms about the retention and success of faculty with minoritized identities, it is crucial to recognize the dimensions of socialization within the organizational context of academia.Design/methodology/approachThe authors sought an approach that would facilitate the interrogation of the overlap and divergence of the authors’ perspectives. Duoethnography research design was chosen for its focus on self-reflection as well as on the importance of the expression and consideration of those diverging perspectives. The goal was collaboration to generate a discussion that deepens a complex understanding of socialization in and professional commitment to academia.FindingsThe central insight that surfaced from the analysis of our duoethnography data is the enhanced understanding of the “nameless-faceless” dimension of academic socialization. Endeavoring to understand why faculty leave and how those who are left behind make sense of that departure led the authors to examine the unknown entities the authors are responsible to and for so they may better understand their commitment to academia.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors’ findings reveal that the nameless–faceless element is just a generalized behavior adopted in the interest of restricted and individual advantage. Diversity and equity practices are touted as a priority, but frequently, institutions act in ways that establish their own self-interests. The authors argue that we are all the nameless–faceless when they participate in academic norms that work to uphold and perpetuate traditional practices in academia.Practical implicationsThe authors’ findings point to intentional mentoring and integration of responsibility in faculty roles as potential recruitment and retention tools.Originality/valueThe authors extend the importance of collaboration and mentorship in retaining graduate students and EFC to the concept of intertwined professional commitment, or the theory that it is not simply the outcomes that are influenced by the support and cooperation between faculty with minoritized identities but that our professional commitment to academia is strengthened by that collaboration and witnessing each other's purpose and motivation to remain in academia.

Rhetorical Questions and Ruminations

Transitioning from graduate student to early career faculty can often provoke uncertainty and questioning. This study explores the rhetorical and revealing nature of such questioning (i.e., Am I really this lost? Am I in the right place?). Utilizing methods from arts based research (Barone & Eisner, 2012), specifically poetic inquiry (Prendergast et al., 2009; Richardson, 1992), we created found poetry around rhetorical questions from our existing collaborative autoethnographic journal. We frame our findings with a selection of poems to provide insight into our lived experiences of transition. The question poems illustrate that our first year as assistant professors were preoccupied with managing tasks, balancing work, avoiding burnout, building relationships, and discovering how to belong in the new context. While rhetorical questions do not necessarily produce answers, questioning in a collaborative space allowed us to explore the struggle, complexity, and ambiguity of academic identity construction as early career faculty.

Interprofessional grant writing seminar for early career faculty in a small, isolated teaching center

Small, isolated teaching centers have difficulty mentoring interprofessional junior faculty in research methods and grant writing. Peer mentoring programs for grant writing at larger institutions have been successful. In this short report, we describe our program that leveraged mentor experience using four framing seminars followed by project refinement in three-person peer groups and monthly mentored works in progress meetings. In its first year, ten faculty from medicine, psychology, and pharmacy completed the program and successfully obtained six funded grants. Five of the projects transitioned from single profession applications to interprofessional applications as participants connected and profession-specific expertise was identified. Refinements for future cohorts are discussed.

Analyzing NIH KL2 Outcomes: A Pilot Study Using Administrative Data

Background: The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds “K” awards that provide both resources and access to mentoring believed to be invaluable for early career faculty. The KL2 Mentored Career Development Award trains early-career clinicians with the goal of guiding scholars toward an independent clinical and translational research career. This study presents the pilot of a systematic, low-burden method to examine scientific and career outcomes for these awardees, applying a novel set of linked administrative data. Methods: Clinical and Translational Science Award hubs administering KL2 awards at ten universities who participate in the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS) provided names of scholars in their KL2 cohorts. Using extensive data on sponsored projects which IRIS member universities provide, we linked the KL2 scholars to information on subsequent publication, patent, and grant activity. Results: Analyses of linked data supported a rigorous, sustainable, low-cost approach to examining career outcomes. A subset of key metrics identified by CTSA evaluators were operationalized as an examination of the post-award careers of KL2 awardees. We successfully identified contemporaneous faculty with different NIH K Awards to use as comparison groups. The pilot culminated in university-specific and aggregate reporting to all participating hubs. Conclusions: This pilot demonstrates that substantive evaluations of early career programs are possible using administrative data from universities with low additional burden. Integration of research on career development outcomes offer new means to examine the effects of increasingly diverse funding, team, and collaborative network structures, advancing both knowledge about the workings of science and practices to support early career faculty. This approach could be extended to support rigorous multi-institutional evaluation and research on a range of student and faculty training mechanisms.

Training Underrepresented Early-Career Faculty in Cardiovascular Health Research during COVID -19: Structural Inequities and Health Disparity

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted race-based health disparities and structural racism in the United States. Enhancing the training of early-career academic and health scientists from underrepresented minority groups (URM) is critical to reduce disparities affecting underserved population groups. A dedicated training program that has been proven to support URM can facilitate career development for junior faculty during the pandemic. This critical support ensures the retention of talented, racially diverse junior faculty who are poised to mitigate struc­tural racism, rather than perpetuate it. We describe how the Cardiovascular Disease Programs to Increase Diversity Among Indi­viduals Engaged in Health-Related Research (PRIDE-CVD) summer institute successfully transitioned from a face-to-face format to a virtual format during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, early-career faculty continued to receive the PRIDE-CVD train­ing on research methodology, grantsman­ship, career development, and CVD health disparities, especially as related to the pandemic. In addition, the virtual format facilitated networking, promoted mental wellness, and allowed continual mentor­ship. Collectively, the program provided timely and relevant career development in the COVID-19 era and helped partici­pants navigate the psychosocial challenges of being a URM in cardiovascular health research.Ethn Dis. 2021;31(3):411-416; doi:10.18865/ed.31.3.411

Introduction to effective mentorship for early-career research scientists

Diversifying the scientific workforce remains a national priority due to the continued lack of representation from underrepresented individuals in STEM fields. Quality mentoring has been identified as a stimulus to enhance not only research success, but also recruitment and retention of underrepresented groups pursuing STEM careers. Utilizing the Entering Mentoring training curriculum framework, this report provides a brief synopsis and key takeaways from the 2019 NIH-ASCB Accomplishing Career Transition (ACT) workshop, “Introduction to Effective Mentorship for Scientists” for 30 senior postdoctoral and early-career faculty researchers from historically underrepresented racial and ethnicity backgrounds. In addition, effective strategies and best practices to enhance STEM mentoring for early-career researchers are provided, which have practical applications for diverse mentoring relationships across disciplines, career stages, and mentee types.