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About the Center for Mentoring ...

The Center for Mentoring serves as a central resource to support professional excellence by encouraging growth and development of faculty as mentors, scholars, and teachers. By becoming more effective mentors and mentees, faculty can strengthen professional interactions with colleagues, advance the mission of scholarship, and foster connections with students which prepare them for success at Pitt and for lives of impact beyond campus.

While some schools and departments have formalized (and sometimes rewarded) mentoring programs, mentoring relationships that are more informal are also critical success factors for many faculty. Sometimes the best mentors come from other departments, schools and institutions.

The Center for Mentoring hosts events throughout the year to help mentors, mentees, and administrators establish, improve, and evaluate mentorship programs that benefit all participants. The Mentoring Academy is a program comprised of a series of workshops held throughout the year which cover eight mentoring competencies. These sessions are facilitated by trained faculty mentors throughout the University.

The Center for Mentoring also hosts a number of mentoring resources available to University of Pittsburgh faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students, as well as providing opportunities for connections between mentors and mentees.

Mentoring Faculty

Both junior and senior faculty can benefit from mentoring. When you’re just beginning your career as a faculty member, you’ll undoubtedly have many questions, like:

  • How do I navigate difficult conversations with my department chair?
  • What is the best way to handle a student who I caught cheating in my class?
  • How much time should I spend on service for my tenure and promotion package?
  • What should I do to raise my teaching evaluation scores?

Getting insight from someone who has traveled this road before can be useful.

For more experienced faculty, there are rewards for serving as a mentor to new faculty. Some of the rewards include:

  • Improving your own visibility in your field or department
  • The personal satisfaction of helping another faculty member succeed
  • Shaping the culture of your institution
  • Improving the reputation of your department

Center for Mentoring Personnel

Center for Mentoring Fellow: Joe Ayoob serves as Faculty Fellow for the Center for Mentoring and has been offering mentor training workshops to the Pitt community since 2019.  He has a decade and a half of experience directing programs for the mentoring and training of graduate, undergraduate, and high school students.  Dr. Ayoob has been recognized by the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) as a Mentor of the Month and was also named an NRMN Master Mentor.  Additionally, he is a Principal/Master Facilitator of both the Entering Mentoring Curriculum (mentor training) and Entering Research Curriculum (mentee training) from the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER).  Dr. Ayoob leads workshops in these curricula for faculty and trainees throughout the university and beyond.  His calling to the world of mentoring and mentor/mentee training was sparked by the exemplary mentors who have had such a positive impact on him throughout his career.

Center for Mentoring Fellow: April Dukes is the Institutional Co-leader for Pitt-CIRTL (Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning) and the Faculty and Future Faculty Program Director for the Engineering Educational Research Center (EERC) at the University of Pittsburgh. In her work for Pitt-CIRTL and the EERC, April Dukes currently oversees educational research projects and facilitates professional development (PD) on instructional and mentoring best practices for current and future STEM faculty. As an adjunct instructor for the University of Pittsburgh and an instructor for CIRTL Network and Pitt-CIRTL local programming, April is experienced in both synchronous and asynchronous online and in-person teaching environments.

Center for Mentoring Staff Liaison: Joel Brady is the Program Supervisor for the Graduate Student Teaching Initiative at the University of Pittsburgh. He works individually and programmatically with faculty, graduate students, and administrators throughout the university to improve teaching and mentored experiences at Pitt.

The following resources may also be helpful to you:

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