ADVANCE College Faculty Mentor Award Nominations Sought

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The UMass ADVANCE team invites nominations for the 2021 ADVANCE College Faculty Mentoring Awards. One award per college is planned, in order to recognize the critically important work faculty members perform in mentoring and supporting their colleagues’ professional development and success.

Awardees will receive $250 as cash or research funds, be profiled on the ADVANCE website and congratulated during the ADVANCE annual lecture with Shirley Malcolm, senior advisor and director of SEA Change at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, on Wednesday, March 24, at 4 p.m.

Criteria

This award recognizes the vital role faculty play in mentoring their colleagues. Faculty mentoring can take many different forms: mentoring relationships can be informal or formal, can occur through workshops or professionalization seminars, or through one-on-one meetings or mutual mentoring groups. All of these forms of faculty mentoring are eligible for the mentor award.

ADVANCE welcomes nominations that detail how faculty members excel as faculty mentors. Some examples include providing advice for career development of faculty colleagues through individual mentoring, participation or development of the infrastructure needed to establish mutual mentoring teams, or any other individual or group mentoring approaches. The mentoring provided could address a range of topics, including intellectual development, publication development and submittal, grantsmanship, creative works, teaching, mentoring students, supporting faculty for awards, developing public engagement activities, community building relationships and inclusion and equity.

Nominees should be faculty members who have excelled in providing faculty mentoring in their department, college or across the university. Because ADVANCE is focused on building a more inclusive faculty, nominations should explicitly state how the mentoring improves equity and inclusion within the college and/or the university. Our goal is to provide these awards yearly, to ensure that the critical work of faculty mentoring is rewarded by ADVANCE and recognized by the university.

Nomination Process

Any member of the faculty may nominate another faculty member, in a tenure-track or non-tenure-track position for this award (self-nominations are not accepted). There should be no more than one nomination letter and one optional letter of support in any nomination packet.

Award recipients will be selected by college specific committees, including a member appointed by the dean of the college, an ADVANCE team member, and/or a current faculty fellow from the college.

Nomination materials must be received by or on Tuesday, Feb. 16.

Go to https://www.umass.edu/advance/mentor-awards to learn more and nominate someone.