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.