A National Mentoring Program Helps Scientists Advance Their Careers

Science advances and does the most public good when many different people with unique ideas tackle a problem.

Yet in 2011, researchers at the University of Kansas and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) published a report showing that underrepresented minority researchers, in particular Black scientists, received fewer grants, even when factors like their previous funding, research training, and employment characteristics were accounted for.¹

“Talent is universal, but opportunities are not,” said Kolawole Okuyemi, a clinician and mentorship researcher at Indiana University. Because of this, otherwise remarkable researchers may struggle to find success in science.

One observation that leaders at the NIH realized that could contribute to the gap in underrepresented minority funding success was a self-reported lack of quality mentoring.² In response, the NIH funded the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) in 2014 as part of an initial five-year initiative to identify best practices to improve the diversity in science.

Okuyemi was among one of five research teams selected by the NIH to carry out the program’s mission. Shortly after the NIH awarded these grants, the NRMN-funded researchers coordinated their efforts to support mentoring, networking, and professional development training at no cost to scientists across the US.

Yet the NRMN leaders realized that effective scientific training does not begin at the start of one’s faculty position. Instead, the program aimed to improve mentoring and career development from the undergraduate level through professional positions, including training for researchers and program administrators.

After two successful NIH funding cycles, the academic leaders of the NRMN chose to continue to provide resources to researchers across the educational and career timeline through independent institutional support. They changed the name of the group to the Network for Research Mentoring Nationwide to indicate the change but kept the acronym for ease of recognition.

Training Researchers with the Skills for Science Success

In its first round of funding, between 2014 and 2019, the NRMN team focused on building a network of mentors and mentees from diverse demographic backgrounds and a range of training stages. Working with social scientist Damaris Javier at the University of North Texas, Jamboor Vishwanatha, a cancer biologist at the same institution, developed an evidence-based curriculum for training mentors. In parallel, Okuyemi and his colleagues coordinated a grant writing course to identify best practices for improving grantsmanship.

With its focus on improving the success of underrepresented minorities in science, the NRMN team developed mentoring training that not only addressed proper communication around expectations and stress management but also how to navigate factors like microaggressions and cultural identities.³ Researchers showed that mentors benefited from this culturally aware mentoring, with it boosting confidence to provide mentorship to diverse trainees.⁴

In addition to more informed mentoring, having access to individuals with similar backgrounds to oneself helps improve a trainee’s success. To facilitate this, the NRMN researchers developed a web portal with a network of mentors and mentees from around the country. This platform expanded access to quality mentoring for thousands of trainees and connected people from diverse backgrounds across science.⁵ As of 2021, the platform had served more than 2,000 mentees and 1,600 mentors and facilitated over 15,000 connections.

Besides giving mentees from underrepresented backgrounds access to a diverse mentor, “It was valuable both from the mentee side and the mentor side. Many of the mentors told us that, ‘I learned a lot about myself during this mentorship relationship,’” Viswanatha said.

While mentorship is a crucial factor in one’s research success, Okuyemi’s focus remained on improving professional development for young scientists, in particular grantsmanship. “That’s probably one of the most critical, essential ingredients for career success in academia,” he said.

In the NRMN’s first phase, Okuyemi and his colleagues identified six grant writing programs—four from universities around the US and two that the NRMN team developed from one existing course—and developed a study to evaluate them in their ability to train researchers in grantsmanship. They recruited early career investigators, including postdoctoral researchers, from 187 institutions around the US and assigned them to one of the courses based upon their previous experience required in each of the grant writing models.

They found that overall, taking a grant writing course improved the funding success for researchers from underrepresented backgrounds.⁶ The team also identified beneficial features of each model that could have contributed to grantee’s success, such as providing more in-depth reviews of individual’s grants.

Continuing the Work of the NRMN

The second phase of the NRMN, between 2019 to 2024, explored more long-term impacts of the mentoring, networking, and professional development resources through 11 funded research studies, some led by former NRMN groups and others by new teams. While the team and their partners are continuing to publish findings from these studies, to date, they have shown that engaging in mentoring and networking, especially with culturally aware approaches and with diverse networks, respectively, improves one’s trajectory through academia.^7-10

Yet, Vishwanatha said that the impacts go beyond what numbers in spreadsheets can always capture. “It’s really the real-life stories from people as to the effect of mentorship on their career development,” he said. For example, he recounted one trainee who connected with an NIH institute director and ultimately secured a position at the NIH.

Normally, successful NIH-funded initiatives are picked up by a specific institute at the end of their second year of funding from the wider agency funds. However, possibly due to many of the changes implemented across the NIH in 2025, none of the 27 institutes integrated the NRMN into their agency.

However, the researchers behind the NRMN projects recognized the importance of the program. So, too, did many of the participants. “We kept getting a lot of inquiries,” Vishwanatha said. “So, we have kept it alive.”

Because of this, the NRMN collaborators chose to continue their work, currently with institutional funds. Since the program was no longer funded through the NIH, the leaders updated the name to distinguish it from the agency-funded version. Even with their new identity, the NRMN team’s mission remains the same. Their portal continues to host networks of scientists across training levels and backgrounds as well as their existing and, in time, new resources for mentorship and career development.

Most of the time, people laud praises for the technologies and insights that come from scientific research. “But behind all of this is people, and it’s people doing the work. It’s people studying to do the discovery and the sciences. So, I think it’s equally important to advance the people, and one way to do that is through mentorship,” Javier said.