The Center for STEMM Mentorship at Stanford
The Center for STEMM Mentorship at Stanford is a pilot initiative launched in 2022 with support from the Shanahan Family Foundation that works in service of building healthy research teams and improved mentorship alliances in STEMM labs. An effective mentor-mentee relationship is a two-way street—an alliance with a collaborative spirit rooted in a vulnerability-based trust, in which both mentors and mentees are comfortable in acknowledging what they don’t know, admitting mistakes when they occur, providing honest feedback, readily asking for help, sharing failure stories, and celebrating successes. The Center’s approach uniquely focuses on the unit of the research team, serving whole teams all together and employing lessons from successful teams across diverse sectors (business, academia, and even sports!) to implement and elevate the practice of mentorship in an academic research team context.