Advancing Health Equity through Organizational Mentoring Policies at Minority-Serving Institutions.

Objective: Morehouse School of Medicine, a collaborative partner in the National Research Mentoring Network, established the Mentoring Academy Institutional Planning Forum (MA Forum) to help minority-serving institutions (MSI) optimize research mentoring. In this commentary, we describe the policy workshop and review survey data from six MSIs to assess the current state of organizational policies and activities that advance research mentoring. Participants: Twenty-eight institutional leaders, representing six MSIs, participated in an MA Forum between May 20, 2016 and May 11, 2017. Methods: After describing the MA Forum's background, design and recruitment strategy, we present a synthesis of institutional summaries built from responses to a 45-item survey that explored existing mentoring infrastructure, policies, and activities at each institution. Results: There is a heavy reliance on extramural funds to facilitate research mentoring initiatives. Mentoring policies and activities were most often governed by individual programs rather than the institution. Thus, the research mentoring expertise was concentrated at the local level, which may prevent opportunities for future scalability and optimization. Conclusions: Given these findings, we offer recommendations to help MSIs establish a mentoring culture backed by institutional policy.

Early career biomedical grantsmanship self-efficacy: validation of an abbreviated self-assessment tool.

A hallmark of success for early career biomedical researchers is the acquisition of research funding. There are marked disparities among principal investigators who submit grants and the likelihood of receiving national funding. The National Research Mentoring Network was funded by the National Institutes of Health to diversify the biomedical research workforce and included grantsmanship training for early career researchers. Self-efficacy in developing research grant applications is significantly improved over time with training and experience. We created a 19-item self-efficacy assessment inventory. Our aims were to confirm the internal consistency of a three-factor solution for grantsmanship confidence and to test the likelihood that self-efficacy influences grant proposal submission timing. We gathered data from 190 diverse biomedical trainees who completed NRMN grantsmanship training between August 2015 and June 2017. Findings revealed high internal consistency for items in each of three factors. There was a statistically significant association between self-efficacy mean scores and grant submission timing predicting that, for every one-point increase in the mean score, the odds of submitting a grant 6 months post-training increased by 69%. An abbreviated inventory of grantsmanship skills self-efficacy is a promising tool for monitoring changes over time in early career researchers and for promoting tailored grantsmanship interventions.