CTSA News

Mentored research training programs, such as the T32 and K12, provide trainees and scholars with the opportunity to work on a research project under a faculty mentor. As of 2025, all training grant applications must now include a Mentor/Trainee Assessment Plan, underscoring the crucial role of mentorship evaluation in these programs.

With the paramount role of mentorship in these programs in mind, a collaborative team representing CTSA hubs in Michigan, Georgia, and Virginia came together to review published work on mentorship in CTSAs.

“While there have been many studies of mentorship in a CTSA context, no one has attempted to summarize this body of literature with a focus on empirical results of impact. This is important because we want to make evidence-informed decisions that guide how good mentorship practices can be advanced by our programs at our respective hubs,” said Phillip Ianni, Ph.D., Program Evaluation Specialist at the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research (MICHR).

“A scoping review of mentorship in a CTSA context: A summary of past work and an agenda for future research,” recently published in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, is authored by Ianni; Elias Samuels, PhD; and Ellen Champagne of MICHR at the University of Michigan, along with Eric Nehl, PhD of the Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance at Emory University, and Deborah DiazGranados, PhD of the Wright Regional Center for Clinical and Translational Science at Virginia Commonwealth University. The review provides a comprehensive overview of past research on CTSA mentorship and identifies opportunities for future research.

“Collaboration across CTSAs is at the heart of the NCATS program. By bringing together several hubs, we were able to identify common themes and shared needs that no single hub would have seen on its own,” said Nehl.

The group first conducted a systematic literature review of mentorship in CTSA programs and identified three categories of research: nationwide institutional surveys of CTSA mentorship programs, mentored research training programs, and mentor training programs. Their findings highlighted the effectiveness of mentor training and mentored research training programs and acknowledged the need for more robust assessment of mentoring inputs and indicators.

“The most striking takeaway is a finding that we describe as the ‘black box’ problem in program evaluation. We found that while past work successfully highlighted the effectiveness of mentor training and mentored training programs, there is a notable lack of assessment of mentoring inputs and indicators—we know they work, but often not precisely how or why,” said DiazGranados.

Based on their review and findings, the team has proposed a model to guide future research on mentorship and mentored research training programs within the CTSA Consortium. This model, which measures mentorship outcomes as a function of individual and environmental factors, provides a comprehensive framework explicitly designed to guide the evaluation of mentoring relationships, particularly within the complex environment of CTSA programs. It has the potential to impact future research and CTSA programs significantly.

“We’ve found there is a lot about CTSA mentorship that has yet to be studied. The model presented in this paper can serve as a blueprint for evaluators to assess mentorship at their CTSA hub. Our goal is to eventually create a theory-based, harmonized measure that can be used to collect data on mentorship processes for all three of our institutions,” said Ianni.

To learn more about this work, read the team’s paper in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Science.