Each department within the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has a mentoring leader whose role is to help junior faculty identify mentors, conduct personal and professional needs assessments, advise mentees on working with mentors, and help faculty define their career goals. The mentoring champions of each Division of Medicine carry the same responsibilities.
A department can also customize the role of mentoring leader to fit the needs of its junior faculty. Some mentoring leaders, especially in smaller departments, serve on the mentoring committees for their department's junior faculty. In larger departments, the mentoring leader may ensure that junior faculty members find primary mentors within their department in a timely fashion.
Goals
The goals of the mentoring leaders and champions are to support junior faculty by:
- Ensuring junior research/investigator faculty have mentors and/or a mentoring committee
- Making sure that junior clinical and educator faculty have at least one senior mentor and encouraging more than one when possible
- Creating and maintaining their ongoing departmental mentoring plans and evaluating the program annually, at minimum
- Participating in quarterly meetings to learn about mentorship best practices, which they can share with their departments
- Disseminating information about Office of Faculty Development (OFD) events and resources relating to mentoring, career development, and other opportunities for junior faculty
- Recommending junior faculty mentees for opportunities organized by OFD (e.g., lunch with Dean Charney, focus groups)
- Providing OFD with insights into addressing unmet needs of junior faculty mentees and working with the Office to develop resources that fill those gaps.
Department Mentoring Leaders
Each department develops their own mentoring program with guidance from the OFD, to meet the various needs of their faculty within the existing departmental structure.
Contact the mentoring leader of your department for support in seeking mentors. Please email OFD@mssm.edu if you are searching for Leaders in the Departments of Neurology or Health System Design and Global Health.