Department of Biopharmaceutical Sciences

Department of Biopharmaceutical Sciences

Mentoring guidelines

Goals:

The overall goals of codifying mentoring activities are to provide a structure for our faculty, especially our junior faculty, to help ease them into academic life in general and life at UIC in particular. In this context, faculty, especially junior faculty, are to be mentored for career development and academic success in terms of scholarly activity (research), teaching, service, and, where appropriate, entrepreneurial activity, and achieving work-life balance.

General mentoring plan:

We have had in place a system for the past 11 years whereby the Department Head makes it clear to new faculty, especially junior faculty, what are our expectations. This conversation begins during the recruitment process and is reinforced when the faculty member arrives on campus with details added during the orientation period.

To achieve academic success, the individual needs to excel in research, teaching and service. Our mentoring activities have been unstructured in the past, with mentors assigned (informally) for each of these activities, especially research and teaching. This will be tightened.

Faculty will be formally assigned a mentoring team of two-to-three senior faculty members who will meet with the junior faculty member twice a year for the first three years and annually thereafter to help the junior faculty member integrate into academic life, prioritize his/her research goals, and assist in the development and maintenance of a well-funded research program. This committee will also critique manuscripts and grant applications and be available to answer questions and provide guidance about academics and work-life balance. Milestones such as Administration (starting and maintaining a lab, dealing with personnel, time and budget management, etc); Funding (all matters of science,approaches to problem solving, data acquisition and management, understanding NIH and other funding sources, preparing for grant applications and interpreting and responding to critiques, etc);Productivity (developing a publishing strategy, interpreting and responding to manuscript reviews, authorship criteria, time-management, etc); and Career Advancement(establishing a unique scientific identity – being the “go-to guy”, balancing research, teaching and service, etc) will also be discussed during this mentoring period.

The Department and College require a formal third-year (mid-tenure) review. In BPS, while not required at this level, we also solicit letters from outside experts to assure ourselves that the junior faculty member is “on track” and use these letters to assist us to help correct any deficiencies.