CRF Directors Sally Powers and Wendy Varner had the honor of presenting their poster, “An Interdisciplinary Faculty Mentoring Program for Research Funding Success” at the 2012 Mentoring Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico on October 25, 2012. The goal of this year’s conference was to promote the application of mentoring best practices within a multitude of disciplines and facilitate a platform for presentations that analyze different types of developmental relationships that contribute to an individual’s success.

As an exemplary program offering this type of support, Wendy and Sally were selected to present the strategies and accomplishments of CRF’s Family Research Scholars Program now in its 10th year. “Participating in this forum with over 500 attendees from higher education was a real validation of the innovative work CRF is doing. We saw that our research mentoring model to increase funding is unique and many other academic institutions expressed interest in replicating our success,” stated Wendy Varner.

The Center for Research on Families established the Family Research Scholars Program in 2003 to provide select faculty with the time, technical expertise, peer mentorship, and access to national expert consultation to prepare a large grant proposal for their research support. The FRS supports a broad spectrum of faculty in the social, natural and health sciences.

With Federal sponsors often explicitly demanding evidence of interdisciplinary sophistication, participation as a Family Research Scholar provides concrete evidence of this and ready access to knowledgeable collaborators and consultants from other disciplines. The success rate among our CRF scholars for NSF applications is 62.5% (with a national average hit rate of 22%).

The success rate for NIH applications is 32% (with a national average hit rate 18%).                

For more information about the Family Research Scholars program and to read about current scholars’ projects, please click here on our website