Twenty-four faculty have been awarded Mentor Relationship Travel Grants through the FORWARD project. The grants offset the costs of meeting with mentors from outside NDSU to build long-term professional mentoring relationships. Some grants are used by NDSU faculty to travel to meet with mentors, and others are used to bring a mentor to NDSU.
Donna Grandbois, assistant professor of nursing, will use her funding to take part in the third annual Health Equity Leadership Institute: Building Collaborative Research Teams, facilitated by her mentor, Jared Jobe, former program manager at the National Institutes of Health. Jobe is a founding member of the National Institutes of Health’s American Indian-Alaska Native Employee Council and the institute’s Community-Based Participatory Research Scientific Interest Group. The institute is an intensive weeklong "research boot camp" focused on helping investigators, particularly investigators from underrepresented populations, engage in health equity research to achieve research funding through the National Institutes of Health.
With her funding, Simone Ludwig, associate professor of computer science, will meet this summer with her mentor, Wolfgang Banzhaf, professor of computer science at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, a leading authority in the field of genetic programming and evolutionary computation. Banzhaf and Ludwig will develop steps to advance her career and her research program in evolutionary computation and swarm intelligence.
Elizabeth Birmingham and Amy Rupiper Taggart, associate professors of English, will use their funding to travel to Philadelphia in May to participate in the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America Career Retreat for Associate Professors in conjunction with the society’s conference. At the retreat, Birmingham and Taggart will work with senior members of the society serving as careermentors to analyze their current curriculum vita and develop an action plan to achieve promotion to full professor. This opportunity also will enhance the peer mentoring Rupiper Taggart and Birmingham engage in through NDSU FORWARD’s mid-career mentoring program.
Other recipients for Mentor Relationship Travel Grants for 2011-12 include Senay Simsek and Kim Vonnahme from the College of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Natural Resources; Kjersten Nelson, Amy O’Connor, Kathryn Samuels, Courtney Waid-Lindberg and Christina Weber from the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Science; Rajani Pillai from the College of Business; Stevie Famulari, Sumathy Krishnan, Annie Tangpong, Joan Vonderbruggen and Yechun Wang from the College of Engineering and Architecture; Kristen Benson, Elizabeth Erichsen, Jooyeon Ha, Christi McGeorge and Sherri Stastny from the College of Human Development and Education; and Hyunsook Do and Juan Li from the College of Science and Mathematics.
