04/08/2021
By Megan Hadley

Mentoring Undergraduate Research for Student and Faculty Success

An Honors College at UMass Lowell Symposium
Presented with support from Commonwealth Honors Programs (CHP)

Friday, April 23
3 – 5 p.m. EDT
Zoom Registration

While mentorship is often thought of as an inherent skill, becoming a good faculty mentor takes practice. Undergraduate mentorship contributes to faculty success by extending professional and personal networks and building collaboration and leadership skills. However, many faculty must navigate through a sea of pressures around their research production, publications, teaching, and working with graduate students, leaving them with less experience, and thus less practice, working one-on-one with undergraduate students. When faculty miss out on undergraduate mentorship opportunities to play a critical role in student success, they miss how undergraduate mentorship can also contribute to faculty success. This symposium will feature five faculty experts from across the country recognized for their excellence in mentoring. Each panelist will each share their experiences and best practices in the art of undergraduate mentorship to help faculty mentors and their students to thrive.

Please register online to attend.

All are welcome!

Featuring faculty panelists:

  • Jamae Morris, Assistant Professor, Africana Studies, Georgia State University
    Jamae Morris received her Ph.D. in applied anthropology from the University of South Florida. Her research utilizes mixed-methods to evaluate the effectiveness of new technologies and new strategies to improve access to safe water and improved sanitation in sub-Saharan Africa. Broadly stated, her work interrogates the factors that inform global WASH-related health inequities and seeks to identify/evaluate WASH interventions designed to improve health outcomes amongst the most vulnerable. Her more recent projects cover a range of topics from evaluating the effectiveness of ceramic water filters for reducing infant diarrhea in Kenya to evaluating the impact of an innovative handwashing station on handwashing practice among refugees in Tanzania and Uganda.
  • Lorena Navarro, Natural Sciences Coordinator, Chico STEM Connections Collaborative, California State University, Chico
    Lorena Navarro is the Natural Sciences Coordinator for the Chico STEM Connections Collaborative and the Director of the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation. She is also the CURE-E Coordinator for the Cultivating a Culture of Entrepreneurial Mindset and Undergraduate Research (CEMUR) Project and a Co-Coordinator for the Student-Faculty Research Collaborative. Before joining Chico State in January 2017, she was a professor at UC Davis in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. She is a strong proponent of STEM education as well as programs to encourage women and underrepresented minorities to pursue a higher education.
  • Nathaniel Stern, Professor, Art & Design / Mechanical Engineering, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
    Nathaniel Stern is a full Professor of Art and Design at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), with a 50% dual appointment in Mechanical Engineering, and is Director of the UWM Startup Challenge - a year-long, co-curricular program that centers on how entrepreneurial skills can be applied across fields. In short, Dr. Stern teaches artists how to engineer, engineers how to art, and everyone how to sustain their passions. He continuously works with a team of undergraduate researchers on interdisciplinary projects ranging from international art exhibitions or documentary films to new battery designs or peer-reviewed papers. 
  • Kathy Tegtmeyer Pak, Professor of Political Science and Asian Studies, St. Olaf College
    Kathy Tegtmeyer Pak teaches political science and Asian studies at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, a small liberal arts college with 3000 students. She directs the college's mentored undergraduate research program, which coordinates (paid) summer research involving 30-40 faculty and 80-115 students each year, from departments across the college. She has mentored seven summer research teams herself, conducting field research on various issues in the United States and Japan. She also engages students in public scholarship projects in her seminar on comparative immigration and citizenship, publishing the best projects on the Rural Immigration Network website.
  • Tyreasa Washington, Associate Professor, Social Work, University of North Caroling at Greensboro
    Tyreasa Washington is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), Faculty Affiliate to the Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, and the Founding Director of the African American Families and Kinship Care Lab. Currently, Washington is the Principal Investigator of two Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) funded studies. Additionally, Washington has received various research and teaching awards for her scholarship. For example, she is the receipt of the Thomas Undergraduate Research Mentor Award and the Mary Frances Stone Teaching Excellence Award.