Office of Faculty Development Mutual Mentoring Grants for 2020-21 Announced

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The Office of Faculty Development has awarded Mutual Mentoring Grants to ten teams and four individual faculty for 2020-21. 

2020-21 Mutual Mentoring Team Grant Recipients: 

Bio Learn Mentoring Group 
College of Natural Sciences 
Team Leader: Kari Loomis, lecturer, biology 
A group of biology faculty members expanding their existing learning community by creating focused mentoring groups and offering professional development in STEM education. 

BioEpi Early-Career Faculty Mentoring Program 
School of Public Health and Health Sciences 
Team Leader: Lisa Chasan-Taber, professor and chair, biostatistics and epidemiology 
A mentoring network to support, advance, and retain early-career faculty in biostatistics and epidemiology through a roundtable discussion series and travel funding to support early-career faculty meetings with external mentors. 

Building Support Networks of Jr Women in Math/Statistics 
College of Natural Sciences 
Team Leader: Maryclare Griffin, assistant professor, mathematics and statistics 
A support network addressing the unique career challenges junior tenure track women face in mathematics and statistics, including multiple seminars from visiting early-career tenure track women in mathematics or statistics. 

Cross-Disciplinary Faculty Designing Multimodal Writing Courses  
College of Natural Sciences and College of Humanities and Fine Arts 
Team Leaders:  
Deborah McCutchen, senior lecturer, associate director for Junior Year Writing (JYW) Program
Haivan Hoang, associate professor, English, associate director of the Junior Year Writing Program 
A professional development team aiming to improve members’ respective multimodal junior-year writing courses by exploring and applying new instructional technologies and strengthening the support network for JYW faculty. 

The Glass Half Full/The Full Picture 
College of Social & Behavior Sciences 
Team Leaders:  
Mari Castañeda, incoming dean of Commonwealth Honors College and professor, communication 
Jennifer Lundquist, associate dean of research and faculty development and professor, sociology 
A group of women full professors from ten disciplinary areas and four colleges meeting monthly for support and advice as they plan the second half of their careers. A spring-term event for all women full professors will share lessons learned. 

Law and Society Community 
College of Social & Behavior Sciences 
Team Leader: Jamie Rowen, associate professor, legal studies and political science 
Monthly mentoring meetings devoted to topics such as understanding promotion/tenure, developing a support network, excelling at research, and excelling at teaching as well as planning for the Center for Justice, Law and Societies. 

Leveraging Effective Approaches to Promotion (LEAP) 
College of Humanities and Fine Arts 
Team Leaders:  
Caryn Brause, associate professor, architecture 
Carey Clouse, associate professor, architecture and landscape architecture and regional planning (LARP)
The LEAP group will meet to support, strategize, and steer shifting career trajectories, helping individual members pursue mid-career shifts while simultaneously moving from the rank of associate professor to full professor. 

Mutually Mentoring Academic Moms 
College of Humanities and Fine Arts 
Team Leader: Rachel Green, assistant professor, comparative literature and Israel/Palestine studies 
A support group for academic mothers addressing the competing demands of scholarly productivity and home life through a writing accountability group (WAG), writing retreats paired with on-site childcare, and broad campus outreach. 

Soft Matter Writing Group 
College of Natural Sciences 
Team Leader: Shuang Zhou, assistant professor, physics 
A writing group composed of faculty in “soft matter” field with a focus on improving the quality and quantity of grant proposals of all members through open planning, accountable writing, and peer-review meetings.  

Winds of Change 
College of Humanities and Fine Arts 
Team Leader: Jonathan Hulting-Cohen, assistant professor, music and dance, saxophone 
Building professional and musical relationships among faculty in the woodwind area through musical collaboration, round-table discussions, and research projects of area concerns.

2020-21 Mutual Mentoring Micro Grant Recipients: 

Karen Kurczynski, associate professor, modern and contemporary art 
College of Humanities and Fine Arts, history of art and architecture 
Organizing a faculty seminar with contemporary art historians at Brandeis University to discuss scope and research methods for a book addressing the connections of race and politics in contemporary art. 

Stephen Paparo, associate professor, music education, choral conductor 
College of Humanities and Fine Arts, music and dance 
Working with professional coach Katie Linder to develop a five-year strategic plan for promotion to full professor, seek feedback on a manuscript of a book proposal, and receive coaching on scholarly productivity. 

Jonathan Wynn, associate professor, undergraduate program director, incoming chair 
College of Social and Behavior Sciences, Sociology 
Hosting mentoring and scholarship conversations and retreats for current and future leaders in the sociology program, including strategies for best practices, training on race and inequality, LEAD+, the Mutual Chair Mentoring Program, etc. 

Caroline Yang, assistant professor, English 
College of Humanities and Fine Arts, English 
Establishing a mutual mentorship with Esther Kim Lee of Duke University with the goal of co-editing an anthology on the study of blackface and yellowface minstrelsy, focusing on how artists of color have explored the minstrel form. 

About Mutual Mentoring Program: 

The Office of Faculty Development’s Mutual Mentoring (MM) program provides funding to individuals or groups of faculty for the purpose of developing mentoring networks. The Mutual Mentoring Team and Micro Grants encourage faculty to develop robust professional networks that support their growth as researchers, teachers, and leaders in their fields.  

MM Team Grants provide up to $6,000 for one year to support full-time faculty teams. MM Micro Grants provide up to $1,500 for one year to individual faculty. Applications are accepted in February and announced in April for projects which take place from June 1 though May 31. The Office for Faculty Development works in collaboration with ADVANCE, who also funded a number of team Mutual Mentoring grants. 

For more information, visit https://www.umass.edu/faculty-development/thrive/mutual-mentoring