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Background and purposeEffective mentorship is critical to the success of early stage investigators, and has been linked to enhanced mentee productivity, self-efficacy, and career satisfaction. The mission of the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) is to provide all trainees across the biomedical, behavioral, clinical, and social sciences with evidence-based mentorship and professional development programming that emphasizes the benefits and challenges of diversity, inclusivity, and culture within mentoring relationships, and more broadly the research workforce. The purpose of this paper is to describe the structure and activities of NRMN.Key highlightsNRMN serves as a national training hub for mentors and mentees striving to improve their relationships by better aligning expectations, promoting professional development, maintaining effective communication, addressing equity and inclusion, assessing understanding, fostering independence, and cultivating ethical behavior. Training is offered in-person at institutions, regional training, or national meetings, as well as via synchronous and asynchronous platforms; the growing training demand is being met by a cadre of NRMN Master Facilitators. NRMN offers career stage-focused coaching models for grant writing, and other professional development programs. NRMN partners with diverse stakeholders from the NIH-sponsored Diversity Program Consortium (DPC), as well as organizations outside the DPC to work synergistically towards common diversity goals. NRMN offers a virtual portal to the Network and all NRMN program offerings for mentees and mentors across career development stages. NRMNet provides access to a wide array of mentoring experiences and resources including MyNRMN, Guided Virtual Mentorship Program, news, training calendar, videos, and workshops. National scale and sustainability are being addressed by NRMN “Coaches-in-Training” offerings for more senior researchers to implement coaching models across the nation. “Shark Tanks” provide intensive review and coaching for early career health disparities investigators, focusing on grant writing for graduate students, postdoctoral trainees, and junior faculty.ImplicationsPartners from diverse perspectives are building the national capacity and sparking the institutional changes necessary to truly diversify and transform the biomedical research workforce. NRMN works to leverage resources towards the goals of sustainability, scalability, and expanded reach.

This chapter focuses on the role of graduate education in preparing future faculty members for engagement not only in the domain of discovery but also in the scholarships of application, integration, and teaching.

The ability to convert face-to-face curricula into rigorous and equally rich online experiences is a topic of much investigation. In this paper, we report on the conversion of a face-to-face research mentor training curriculum into a synchronous, online course. Graduate students and postdoc participants from the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) reported high satisfaction with the online training and increased confidence in their mentoring. Both quantitative and qualitative data indicate that the synchronous environment was successful in creating a strong sense of community among the participants. Specific pedagogical approaches for cultivating learning communities online as well as implications for scaling up such efforts are discussed.

Early career faculty, defined as those within the first seven years of appointment to a faculty position or those who have not yet received tenure, contribute to the present and create the future of universities and colleges. This chapter contributes to deeper understanding of new faculty by addressing these issues: 1) the demographics of early career faculty; 2) the preparation they receive and the gaps in their graduate and postdoctoral backgrounds; 3) the abilities and skills early career faculty need to succeed in higher education; 4) the expectations early career faculty have for their careers and the challenges they experience in their new roles; 5) the strategies individual early career faculty and institutions can employ to enhance their professional growth; and 6) directions for future research Key Words: Early career faculty; New faculty; Demographics; Socialization; Preparation; Expectations; Motivations; Tenure process; Colleagueship; Community; Mentoring; Balance; Flexibility; Non-majority faculty; Strategies Early career faculty contribute to the present and create the future of universities and colleges. When a higher education institution recruits, selects, and hires a new faculty member, it is making a major investment of resources and trust. Ideally, the faculty member will thrive at the institution, finding intellectual excitement and professional and personal satisfaction as well as contributing his or her talents to achieving institutional missions and enhancing organizational excellence. Yet the success of new faculty members usually requires more than simply good hiring decisions. Institutional leaders and estab-