As in other fields, mentoring is believed to be a valuable tool to help ensure the retention and success of physicians and researchers in academic medicine. It promises to offer professional knowledge, career advice, networking assistance, encouragement, and in the best cases, a champion to open doors to hard-to-reach opportunities. Mentoring is thought to be most useful to junior faculty just finding their way in their careers. C-Change’s research sheds light on these aspirations. In a national study, C-Change found that the majority of faculty were dissatisfied with the mentoring available to them and, of note, senior faculty—at the rank of associate or full professor—were just as likely to desire mentoring and just as likely to be dissatisfied with their mentoring as assistant professors.

To confront the problem of inadequate mentoring while avoiding some of the well-documented failures of dyadic mentoring, C-Change designed a yearlong facilitated group peer mentoring program, the C-Change Mentoring & Leadership Institute. In use for over a decade, C-Change received an NIH grant to conduct a randomized controlled trial to study the efficacy of this model. The trial demonstrated medium to very large positive effects in improving faculty vitality and increasing self-efficacy in three domains: career advancement, research success, and mentoring others. The intervention also resulted in improvement in cross-cultural awareness as measured by cognitive empathy, valuing diversity—attitudes and behaviors, and recognition of and skills to address sexism and racism. Work continues on this longitudinal study to identify the mechanisms of action contributing to the success of the C-Change Mentoring & Leadership Institute, and to identify any differential effects of the program for demographic groups.

As an NIH grantee, C-Change became part of the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN), a nationwide consortium of biomedical professions and institutions collaborating to provide enhanced networking and mentorship experiences in support of the training and career development of individuals from groups identified by NIH as underrepresented in biomedical, behavioral, clinical and social science careers. C-Change joined ten other grantees as part of the NIH Diversity Program Consortium Initiative.