The ADVANCE-IMPACT mentoring program involves a three-tiered approach that includes programming for early and mid-career faculty.
For early career mentoring, we will adopt the University of Michigan’s (MICH) Launch Committees, which are composed of the newly hired faculty member, department chair, and three senior faculty members (one from the home department, one from outside the department, and one who convenes and moderates the meetings). This team approach allows new faculty to create a mentoring network and enables an early-career faculty to onboard at the department and college level quickly and smoothly.

For mid and late-career faculty mentoring, we will adopt MICH’s Leadership and Integration at Faculty Transitions (LIFT) program that addresses the needs of mid- and late-career faculty by offering day-long seminars for recently promoted associate and full professors. The ADVANCE-IMPACT team will launch the Advancement and Initiatives for Mid-Career Support (AIMS) program at GSU that will partner with the Office of Faculty Affairs to provide seminars for associate and full professors.

Topics will address Work-Life Balance, Careers after Tenure, Pursuing Promotion to Professor, Post-Tenure Review, Managing Service Commitments, and Transitions to Leadership. We will also coordinate with the workshops and seminars already offered throughout the year by the Office of Faculty Affairs (e.g., New Faculty Orientation, P&T Workshops, Leadership for the Advancement of Women Faculty). In addition, the Office of Faculty Affairs will train mentors and faculty interested in serving in this capacity on mentoring models, mentoring pre-tenure faculty, and mentoring mid-career faculty.

Finally, to promote community, we will revise and enhance the Office of Faculty Affairs’ mentoring webpage to further expand the mentoring network guidance and highlight the Office of Faculty Affairs' work in mentoring (e.g., Mentor Advocates Program, mentoring-related training). To do so, we will partner with the existing Faculty Affinity Groups at GSU to create Faculty Mentoring Networks specific to each community.

Aaron Roseberry

Associate Professor of Biology and Neuroscience

Dr. Roseberry’s laboratory studies how the brain controls feeding, metabolism and body weight, and how the brain is altered under conditions of disordered feeding or body weight. His lab focuses on ‘reward’ pathways in the brain that are involved in the pleasurable or rewarding aspects of food, including food addiction. This includes studying how food, especially pleasurable and appetizing foods high in fat and/or sugar, act on the brain’s reward pathways, and how these pathways are changed by conditions such as obesity, binge eating, and food restriction (i.e. dieting). Dr. Roseberry emphasizes diversity among his students and trainees.

Brown. N.E. & Montoya, C. (2020). Intersectional mentorship: A model for empowerment and transformation. PS: Political Science & Politics, 53, 784-787

Schultz, S.E. (1995) The benefits of mentoring. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 66, 57-67.

Silveyra, P. (June, 2020). How my intersectionality made me a better mentor. STEM and Culture Chronical.

Steward, A.J., Malley, J.E., & Linderman, J.J. (2021) Launching new faculty careers: Building a strong foundation for a diverse faculty. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 27 (1) 85-106.

Turner, C.S.V. & Gonzalez, J.C. (2015). What does the literature tell us about mentoring across race/ethnicity and gender? In C.S.V. Turner & J.C. Gonzalez (Eds.), Modeling mentoring across race/ethnicity and gender: Practices to cultivate the next generation of diverse faculty. (pp. 1-41). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing LLC.

Zambrana, R.E., Espino, M.M., Castro, C., Cohen, B.D., & Eliason, J. (2015). “Don’t leave us behind”: The importance of mentoring for underrepresented minority faculty. American Educational Research Journal, 52(1), p. 40-72.

Aim Leader

Dr. Megan Connors

Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Email: [email protected]

Dr. Connors studies the fundamental building blocks of nature by exploring the nucleus under extreme conditions and pushing the limits of our understanding of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory describing the nuclear strong force. To support her research, Dr. Connors earned an NSF CAREER grant as well as over $3 Million in grants from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and the Department of Energy as a Co-PI. She is the faculty advisor the Women in Physics Student Organization and has served on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committees for the Department of Physics and Astronomy as well as the RHIC/AGS Users Executive Committee at BNL.

• ACE Equity Minded Workloads
• Equity-Minded Reform of Faculty Evaluation Policies Audit Resource
• Principles of Equity-Minded Reform of Faculty Evaluation Policies Audit

• Research suggesting that departments can identify and enact key practices around workload that will improve gendered and racialized perceptions of workload

• Opinion article suggesting specific changes to improve retention of BIPOC women faculty
• Examples of Equity-Minded Reform of Faculty Evaluation Policies