Career Development and Mentoring for Junior Faculty

The CEEH is committed to nurturing the next generation of ecogenetics researchers by ensuring that the University of Washington recruits, supports, and retains a new generation of high-caliber EHS-focused investigators with a strong interest in gene-environment interactions. To this end, we are in the process of establishing a new core, the Career Development and Mentoring Core (CDMC), with Dr. Harvey Checkoway as Core Director. The goals of the CDMC are to:

  1. Recruit to DEOHS and other Center-affiliated departments (e.g., Epidemiology, Genome Sciences, Pharmaceutics) new junior faculty with research and teaching interests compatible with the CEEH mission to identify the interactions between genetic, epigenetic and environmental factors that contribute to the major chronic diseases.
  2. Provide mentorship to new and current CEEH junior faculty to ensure they achieve their full potential as scientists, teachers, and communicators.
  3. Provide junior faculty with unique career development opportunities and resources to advance their environmental science careers by incorporating a gene-environment approach into their research projects.

The CDMC will use a customized approach to the career development and cross-training of junior faculty. A mentoring team consisting of 3 senior CEEH faculty will be assigned to each new faculty member. Dr. Checkoway, in consultation with the Mentoring Oversight Committee, will make the mentoring team assignments. Each mentoring team will include at least one senior scientist from the junior member’s research specialty. Other committee members will be from the ARE relevant to the junior faculty member’s stated area of interest. Mentoring team membership will be decided with input from the mentored junior faculty member to ensure the composition of the team is in alignment with the mentee’s goals and vision. Mentoring teams will meet once during each of the fall, winter, and spring academic quarters. In order to document the activities and achievements of these mentoring teams, junior faculty members will be asked to prepare a follow-up report after each quarterly team meeting.

For more information about the CDMC and to discuss how it might work for you, please contact our Admistrator, Azure Skye, at 206-543-4383.