Effective mentorship during STEM graduate education is thought to improve graduate students’ scholarly productivity, academic performance, and career advancement. Mentorship is a key component of graduate training in the life sciences. However, mentoring relationships can also have dysfunctional or problematic elements. Our research group is interested in understanding the range of mentorship that graduate students experience. Our current projects involve developing a robust measure of graduate student mentorship, determining factors that influence the establishment of positive and productive graduate mentoring relationships, and characterizing the dynamics of graduate research mentoring relationships over time.
