My primary interests focus on two main areas: 1) graduate student and postdoctoral scholar career exploration, preparation, and transitions; and 2) evidenced-informed mentorship, mentoring relationships, and healthy research training environments. Given the wide array of potential career paths available to biomedical research students and postdocs, I believe it is imperative to provide early career scientists with the resources they need to make informed career decisions. Further, “mentorship” of all kinds (peer-mentoring, traditional mentoring, advising, coaching, sponsoring) is one of the most critical factors for effective career transitions and impactful contributions to the biomedical research enterprise.

As director of the Career Development Office (CDO), I have built a menu of career development resources to empower our graduate students and postdocs to find meaningful careers. The CDO provides career and professional development seminars, workshops, and individual career coaching and we divide our workshops into two tracks: Leadership Development and Career Skills. Leadership Development workshops help students and postdocs build the skills they will need to succeed as leaders in any position (e.g., conflict management, emotional intelligence, personality awareness, etc.) and Career Skills workshops focus on the practical aspects of exploring and preparing for career transitions (e.g., LinkedIn, informational interviewing, CVs and resumes, etc.) In 2020, I utilized a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Guidance for Trainees grant to test and evaluate a program we called individual Career Exploration Research (iCERch, pronounced “I Search”.) iCERch combines multiple CDO workshops into a structured, cohort delivery model that helps later stage PhD students (3rd year and beyond) and postdocs understand their career interests and options, learn to talk about the value they offer an organization, and establish effective professional networks. I also helped develop an NRSA (F30s, F31s, and F32s) mock review program that has now been incorporated into the suite of grant programs offered by the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CCTSI). I continue to look for innovative mechanisms to support our students and postdocs career goals.

Throughout my career, I have held a deep commitment to promoting positive and inclusive training environments and supporting mentoring best practices. I am a Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER) trained facilitator and I am actively working to promote CIMER’s evidence-based research mentoring curricula throughout our institution. One way I am doing this directly is by developing and leading a new mentoring program for the CCTSI titled, Mentoring3: Mentor, Mentee, and Peer that leverages CIMER resources. I also teach a section of a Responsible Conduct of Research course on Mentor/Mentee Relationships and Responsibilities and deliver on-request seminars on these topics. As a member of the AAMC GREAT Postdoctoral Training section Steering Committee, I served as co-chair for a working group that created a document to promote supportive and inclusive training environments titled, Appropriate Treatment of Research Trainees (AToRT). The broad goal for the AToRT document is to foster healthy research environments in which graduate students and postdocs can conduct their training. Thus, my overall areas of scholarship focus on supporting the ecosystem of graduate students, postdocs, and faculty to ensure that CU Anschutz provides an optimal environment for research training and supporting the health of the future biomedical research workforce