Duke University Center of Exemplary Mentoring
I served on the founding team of Duke’s University Center of Exemplary Mentoring, a university-wide initiative to strengthen support in STEM. I co-developed and managed key programs and led evaluation efforts that informed institutional strategy, improved retention, and supported Duke’s successful renewal with the Sloan Foundation.
Strengthening Doctoral Support Through Program Design, Mentoring, and Evaluation
The Duke University Center of Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM) is part of a national initiative funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to improve access, retention, and completion outcomes for doctoral students in STEM. As a member of the founding team, I collaborated with senior leadership in The Graduate School and faculty champions across nine departments to design and launch the UCEM at Duke. In this role, I co-developed signature programs—including the Early Start Research Immersion Program and the Sloan Research Summit—and helped shape the six-pillar strategy that would guide all UCEM efforts: recruitment, academic support, mentoring, professional development, wellbeing, and financial support.
I led the development of the UCEM’s assessment and evaluation framework, ensuring the initiative was grounded in clear metrics, rigorous data collection, and a strong feedback loop for continuous improvement. The research focused on how institutional structures affect doctoral student experience, particularly around mentoring quality and advising relationships.
I designed and administered a university-wide mentoring climate survey that gathered detailed data on advising satisfaction, access to mentoring networks, and perceptions of departmental support. Responses were disaggregated, enabling a nuanced understanding of gaps across the nine UCEM-affiliated Ph.D. programs. I also shaped qualitative components of the evaluation—including faculty engagement strategies and focus group design—that added necessary context to the survey results.
These findings informed the redesign of several program components, shaped new faculty development efforts, and helped Duke refine its institutional strategy for doctoral student support. The data and evaluation strategy became a core component of Duke’s successful UCEM renewal proposal to the Sloan Foundation.
📄 Read the 2021 and 2023 renewal announcement
This work led to measurable and sustained improvements in how Duke supports doctoral students in STEM. The mentoring survey revealed significant variation in advising quality and access to informal mentoring networks across departments. These insights prompted the university to invest in new support mechanisms, including the expansion of Duke’s Mentoring Toolkit, department-led mentoring workshops, and peer mentoring models within UCEM programs.
The evaluation framework I built continues to serve as the foundation for institutional accountability around graduate advising. Retention rates among Sloan Scholars increased by 18% during the first phase of the UCEM, and time-to-degree data showed that Sloan Scholars were completing their doctorates at rates comparable to or faster than their peers in multiple departments—including Math, Physics, and Biomedical Engineering. These outcomes reinforced the value of pairing data with program design, and they demonstrated that intentional collaboration between students, faculty, and administration can shift structural barriers to student success.
📂 Featured Materials
