Programs
Mentorship in Scholarship dialogue with Carla Schatz, April 9th - Join us!
Join us on April 9, 2025 at 3:00pm for an inspiring chat featuring Dr. Carla Shatz, the Sapp Family Provostial Professor in Biology and Neurobiology and Director Emerita of Bio-X at Stanford.
Dr. Shatz will discuss the pivotal role mentorship has played in shaping her groundbreaking career, from becoming the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in Neurobiology from Harvard to being the first woman to chair the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard and the first woman to receive tenure in the basic sciences at Stanford.
Through this conversation with Dr. Joseph DeSimone, faculty director of the Center for STEMM Mentorship, Dr. Shatz will share how mentorship has guided not only her personal journey but also the importance of fostering the next generation of innovative, trailblazing researchers.
Team-Building for STEMM Groups workshop series
**Please note enrollment has closed for spring 2025 workshops**
- 2025 WORKSHOP DATES: February 4 and April 7
- Time: 9:00am – 1:00pm. Food provided!
- Enrollment for up to 20 research teams
- Location: Mackenzie Room, Huang Building (Engineering Quad)
- Build trust within your lab, assess team health, hone accountability, improve understanding of one another, create strategies for addressing conflict, improve communication, and measure progress toward strengthening team cohesion!
- The program engages complete teams, for example a faculty PI and all students and postdocs. The sessions build on one another, and a commitment to both dates is needed. (Please note that we understand some conflicts are inevitable and can accommodate remote participation when needed.)
- Please complete our simple enrollment form or download our flyer to learn more!
When members of a research group work together to build trust and cohesion, the lab becomes better positioned to support strong mentorship alliances throughout the team—leading to better well-being, research outcomes, and individual and team achievement.
In Spring 2022, we launched an on-campus, interactive team-building workshop program for STEMM research labs at Stanford, Team-Building for Research Labs, enrolling 14 teams and over 200 participants in a series of team sessions. Facilitated by world-class experts from Table Group—who specialize in organizational and team health based on concepts developed by renowned business leader Patrick Lencioni—the sessions help labs assess team health and cohesiveness, build vulnerability-based trust, improve their understanding of one another, create strategies for resolving conflicts, hone accountability, improve communication, and measure progress and growth.
As we enter our fourth year in 2025, our program—now called Team-Building for STEMM Groups—has served more than 40 Stanford teams from the Schools of Engineering, Medicine, Sustainability, and Humanities and Sciences, as well as several research service facilities and staff teams. By the time we were halfway through our program in 2023, more than 90% of participants were recommending the workshops to peers and other teams.
As a pilot initiative, the Center for STEMM Mentorship continually works to refine our program to provide a meaningful forum for the practice of mentorship, as well as supply participants with useful knowledge and strategies to promote healthy team environments within their research groups. For our 2025 cohort, we are using a 2-session format (instead of a 3- or 4-session format) to make it easier for teams to commit the program.
If you’re interested in participating in 2025, please discuss with your team/lab mates and apply via our application form. Please feel free to email STEMMteams@Stanford.edu with any questions. Only complete teams can participate: A faculty member and their group, inclusive of students, postdocs, and staff.
Storytelling for Impact workshop (2022)
The ability to make your research—and yourself—accessible to others through compelling, factual narratives plays an integral role in career development and success.
By partnering with National Geographic, the Center for STEMM Mentorship presented the National Geographic Society Global Storytelling Institute program at Stanford on October 19th and 20th, 2022, serving more than 100 researchers at Stanford. These workshops involved interaction with a National Geographic Explorer and focus on helping researchers at all career stages to create more compelling narratives about their science and themselves. This included exercises on honing your personal narrative and on telling the story of your science effectively.
The ability to tell your own personal story fosters greater human connection in building new professional relationships and in day-to-day interactions within established teams. Effectively conveying your research vision, goals, challenges, achievements, and plans to different audiences—mentors, mentees, peers, collaborators, funders, and institutional leaders—can make all the difference in fostering healthy intellectual discourse, obtaining meaningful feedback on your work, securing resources, and determining new and innovative paths forward.
Forthcoming programs
Please check back periodically to learn about additional programs that will be part of our pilot phase, including a module focused on building and contributing to a strong academic research group. We plan for this module to include subjects such as building an inclusive lab culture, asking good research questions, encouraging mentor-mentee alliances throughout a team, embracing the subjective aspects of science, and working together to collaboratively articulate lab expectations.
