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Research into mentorship demonstrates that supporting the next generation of brilliant minds takes collaboration, innovation, accountability, and rewards.
For an aspiring scientist, intentional support and guidance through effective mentorship can make a career. For that same scientist, negative mentoring experiences-whether well-meaning but neglectful supervision or intentional bullying or harassment-can break a career. University-based scientific education and research depends heavily on established scientists shaping the next generation of brilliant minds, but currently it does not recognize that kind of labor in the way that it rewards publications and successful grant applications. In fact, it is surprising how little attention is paid to the support and guidance of early-career scientists-who heavily contribute to writing grants, doing research, and publishing results. As a community and a culture, academic science must shift toward prioritizing training and mentoring as much as it does the conduct of research. Accomplishing this shift will require deliberate changes to future science policy at all levels to make the development of early career scientists a national priority.
Decades of research into how to make mentorship successful and productive for the careers of aspiring scientists have not been systematically put to use, with the amount and quality of mentorship left to individual principal investigators (PIs), who typically receive little or no mentoring training. Funding priorities reflect this lack of emphasis: for example, only 3% of total National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding in 2020 went to grant mechanisms that specifically required mentorship and training plans. At the National Science Foundation, although grants supporting postdoctoral scientists require a mentoring plan, accountability structures for them are limited. To support the next generation of scientists and build a stronger, more competitive, and more sustainable research enterprise, academic and funding agency leadership must integrate fundamental and celebrated aspects of scientific research-collaboration, innovation, accountability, oversight, and rewards-into the practice of academic mentorship.
Today, mentorship is largely an ad hoc activity, with institutions delegating responsibility to graduate training programs and the PIs of individual research groups. This entrenched, informal system revolves around each scientist's individual commitment to mentorship and personal experience with past mentors. The uneven way the enterprise handles mentoring is reflected in the way the word itself is used (and misused) in various contexts. Often, the word "mentor" is...