What Makes a Great Mentor: Interviews With Recipients of the ATVB Mentor of Women Award

Mentoring Award: Importance, Availability and Association With Mentoring Outcomes

Intrinsic and extrinsic awards may motivate mentors and thus strengthen the organizational mentoring climate (OMC). Several institutions offer extrinsic awards for mentoring to recognize exceptional mentorship by individuals who support junior faculty in their career development. Mentees, peers, or institutions may nominate mentors for these awards. However, the faculty's perception of the importance of these awards and the association between their availability and mentoring outcomes remain unclear. We conducted secondary data analysis of a cross-sectional survey of 298 individuals (5%) from a pool of 6,152 faculty from the University of New Mexico (Main Campus and Health Sciences Center) and Arizona State University. The mentoring award's importance to faculty subgroups and the relationship of its perceived availability with providing/receiving and confidence in mentoring was determined. Participants completed the online OMC importance and availability draft scales, containing one item each on the award. Of all participants, 60.4% rated an award as very or somewhat important. Only 7% reported award availability (reaching 19% for ASU faculty). Women and Hispanic faculty rated the award as more important than their respective counterparts. Although availability was not associated with providing mentorship, faculty reporting unavailability were less likely to be receiving mentorship than others. Mean self-reported confidence in mentoring was higher among those reporting availability than in other groups. University faculty, particularly women and Hispanic, rate a mentoring award as important, yet few report their availability. Although availability is not associated with providing mentorship, it is associated with receiving mentorship and confidence in mentoring. The study's cross-sectional nature, low participation rate, and inability to independently confirm award availability limit its findings. Organizations need to establish and raise awareness of a faculty mentorship award as part of efforts to strengthen the OMC.

Fostering New Scientific Networks in the COVID Era and Beyond

Over the last 2 years, the COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated the scientific community by starting a race to develop new vaccines and therapeutic approaches to fight this life-threatening illness. At the same time, the pandemic also evoked an urge for innovative communication strategies to maintain scientific networking and data sharing among investigators. Communication through audiovisual platforms has quickly become a unique tool to sustain scientific interaction, whereas social media has turned into an unmistakable pivotal environment for sharing scientific data and combating misinformation around SARS-CoV-2 infection, prevention, and therapy. Amid this challenging scenario, the scientific community organically established new roles, such as a social media ambassador, a conference-associated role to virtually promote breakthrough science while reconnecting investigators and forging new scientific networks via social media. Moreover, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it also became clear the critical need for the scientific community to support efforts to empower flexibility, creativity, and the inclusion of new forms of communication to advance science. Thus, the goal of this brief article is to provide a structured follow-up on the importance for researchers to occupy the internet to promote scientific findings and events, to combat science mistrust by stimulating communication among nonscientists to scientists, and to provide essential strategies for young and senior investigators on how to virtually expand their professional networks within and across research and clinical areas of the cardiovascular field.