Contact Information

Mentoring at the Center for Faculty Development

Email: alevy@mgh.harvard.edu

Confidential Contact

If you need advice on obtaining a mentor or dealing with a challenging mentoring situation, please contact Dr. Anne Levy, CFD Senior Program Manager: alevy@mgh.harvard.edu. 
Your confidentiality will be respected.

Mentoring Resources

    Latest News

    Mentoring Advice and Support

    Videos by senior mentors on the value of mentoring.

    Jennifer Temel, MD, on the value of mentoring

    Hasan Bazari, MD, on the value of mentoring, a reflections by a John T. Potts, Jr., MD Faculty Mentoring Award recipient

    Maurizio Fava, MD, reflects on the importance of mentoring.

    1 of 3

    Speed Mentoring Sessions

    Speed mentoring with mentor leaders were offered to all faculty in the Spring. Participants came ready with questions about any aspect of mentoring or being mentored. They learned not only from the senior mentoring leaders but also from fellow attendees:

    • March 4 (1:00 - 2:00 pm) with A. Eden Evins, MD, MPH, Cox Family Professor of Psychiatry in the field of addiction medicine, and Joshua Goldstein, MD, PhD, MGH Endowed Chair in Emergency Medicine Research. 

    • April 6 (1:00 - 2:00 pm) with Steven Greenberg, MD, PhD, Vice-Chair for Faculty Development and Promotions, Mass General Department of Neurology, and Jennifer Wo, MD, associate professor of radiation oncology. 

    • May 12 (1:00 - 2:00 pm) with Patricia D’Amore, PhD, MBA, Vice Chair for Basic and Translational Research, Department of Ophthalmology, and Richard Hodin, MD, Chief for academic affairs, Mass General Department of Surgery.  

    • June 4 (11:00 am - 12:00 pm) with Karen K. Miller, MD, chief of Neuroendocrine Unit, Mass General, and director of mentoring initiatives for the Mass General Department of Medicine, and Madhusmita Misra, MD, MPH, chief of pediatric endocrinology, Mass General. 

    Peer Mentoring Groups

    Peer mentoring has been shown to improve support, collaboration and access to resources. Peer mentoring groups will empower robust debate, learning, and problem solving in a space of trust and both practical and emotional support.

    • GSD Peer-to-Peer Program for new graduate students (ongoing, on a rolling basis)
    • GSD/PPD Peer Mentoring Program — launched February 2021
    • Peer mentoring for senior women faculty — launched February 2021
    • Peer mentoring for mid-career women faculty — launched February 2021

    Questions? Contact Dr. Anne Levy, CFD Senior Program Manager: alevy@mgh.harvard.edu. 

    Mentorship Connection

    MentorMGB: This “LinkedIn” style mentorship platform for the entire Harvard Medical School (HMS) community connects faculty, trainees and students across hospitals to find and give secondary mentorship; collaborate on research interests/find new projects; and create general work and non-work discussion/connections. Thanks to Mentor Mass General, we aim to foster a dynamic cross-institution mentorship culture and facilitate research collaborations.
    • The MentorMGB website is a general representation of site-wide activity to see what others on the platform are talking about, chime in on discussion forums, “like” updates, etc.
    • Members will eventually have all faculty across the MGB system, in all specialties, and provide the ability to search by research interest, mentorship area and send messages that go to their MGB email inbox. The more of your profile you fill out, the more searchable you will be on the network
    • Groups is a page to create interest groups and meet others across the MGB system with like-minded interests
    • Forums is a place to create discussion forums (on promotions, new articles, research projects, collaborator searches, etc.), to help each other and provide fluid mentorship across the MGB system
    For more information, read the tutorial below.

    Download Tutorial PDF

    Resources

    Awards

    John T. Potts, Jr,. MD, Faculty Mentoring Award

    Mass General's Center for Faculty Development created the John T. Potts, Jr., MD, Faculty Mentoring Award in 2011 to recognize and honor senior faculty members with ten or more years of mentoring experience at Mass General, in the spirit of further building a culture of mentoring at our hospital. The inaugural recipient of this award, John T. Potts, Jr., MD, is the Jackson Distinguished Professor of Clinical Medicine at Mass General and Harvard Medical School. He served as chairman of the Department of Medicine at Mass General and physician-in-chief from 1981 to 1996 and as director of research from 1995 to 2004.

    2020 marked the tenth year of honoring a consummate Mass General mentor with the Potts Award. The CFD took this occasion to acknowledge all the recipients of this special award by creating this booklet, Celebrating the John T. Potts, Jr., MD Faculty Mentoring Award 2011–2020 (PDF).

    Learn more


    GSD Principal Investigator Mentoring Award

    The Mass General Graduate Student Division (GSD) within the Center for Faculty Development offers this annual award given to a Mass General PI who has contributed to the success of PhD graduate student(s) at Mass General and demonstrated excellence in mentoring.

    Learn more

    Departmental Mentoring Programs

    Examples of Mass General Departmental Mentoring Program Structures:

    MEDICINE Secondary Mentoring Program Pilot

    This cross-divisional secondary mentoring program aims to enhance career advancement and satisfaction and will also examine whether such a program leads to greater job satisfaction than access to career development resources alone. Mass General Department of Medicine faculty members with a primary non-investigator role are invited to participate as Mentees; secondary mentors are recruited from a list of senior Department of Medicine faculty members. Participants will be provided career development resources and matched to a secondary mentor for either the entire 12 months of the pilot program or the last 6 months. All participants will be expected to attend one-on-one mentor-mentee virtual meetings monthly for the first 3 months and then at least every 2 months for the remainder of the program, as well as to complete a short survey at 0, 6, and 12 months.

    NEUROLOGY

    The underlying principle of this mentoring program is that the optimal mentor is a senior faculty member who knows the mentee best. The mentor serves as the mentee’s primary advisor, particularly in the areas of HMS promotion, annual career conference and other ad hoc advisory meetings, and advocacy within the department. To build the pipeline of early-career investigators, research faculty meet once or twice per year with secondary research mentors from outside their own labs/research groups to get useful perspective and problem-solving advice for both scientific and career challenges. The program includes a “Mentor Monthly” newsletter and annual Mentor of the Year awards for mentoring in Clinical Excellence and Investigation. Annual career conferences between mentees and mentors are based on an on-line survey and record-keeping process that create a readily retrievable record of the discussion. Senior departmental leaders hold one-on-one meetings with all mentors to provide equal consideration for every faculty member, with an eye towards assessing promotability. 

    OPHTHALMOLOGY

    The central focus of this mentoring program is to direct and support junior faculty toward promotion. With rare exceptions, every Full-time Instructor, Assistant Professor and Associate Professor is assigned two mentors from among Professors, Associate Professors, and Service and Site Directors. Basic science faculty are assigned a clinical mentor as well as a research one, to gain greater insight into translational research. Both mentees and mentors can confidentially communicate with the Manager of Faculty Affairs, who shares concerns/suggestions with the Mentoring Oversight Board, made up of four faculty members and overseen by the Chair. This group assigns mentor-mentee pairs and selects the annual recipient of the Excellence in Mentoring Award. Surveys are run annually to gauge the effectiveness of the program and further develop it based on faculty feedback. This program received a 2019 HMS Program Award for a Culture of Excellence in Mentoring (PACEM).

    RADIOLOGY

    This program provides dedicated one-on-one mentoring and the creation of a mentorship network as well as access to opportunities for career development and promotion. Mentees include new faculty, Instructors and Assistant Professors, both clinical radiologists and research faculty. A unique part of the program is cross-division mentorship, which allows mentor and mentee to gain an outside perspective, increases the openness within the department and across divisions, and avoids conflicts of interest between faculty members in the same division. The mentee is encouraged to create a "Mentorship Board of Directors”—a list of advisors and mentors with different expertise who may be from different divisions, departments or institutions, medical or even non-medical. The program includes a yearly mentoring award. It received a 2020 HMS Program Award for a Culture of Excellence in Mentoring (PACEM).

    Departmental Mentor Leaders

    Mentoring Leader Round Table: Mentor leaders meet on a bimonthly basis to share mentoring program structures and initiatives, successes and challenges. These meetings consist of focused discussion topics, mentor trainings and/or invited speakers, including Vineet Chopra, MD, MSc, FHM (Michigan Medicine) and Jennifer A. Haythornthwaite, MA, PhD (Johns Hopkins Medicine).