Promoting Early Career Researchers in SBM: Launch of SBM’s Early Career Researcher Mentoring Program

Carina Nigg^✉; Steering Committee Chair, Early Career Researcher Mentoring Program; ETCD Council and Student SIG Liaison

Welcome to the “Education, Training, and Career Development (ETCD) Council corner!” In each issue of Outlook, the ETCD provides SBM members with opportunities and support to enhance their training and career development in behavioral medicine. In this issue, we report about SBM’s first Early Career Researcher Mentoring Program and its launch during the 2021 Annual Meeting.

The last year has been a challenging time for early career researchers, with in-person events being cancelled or moved to an online environment. Online mentoring programs are one option to promote and facilitate career development of upcoming researchers in a crucial career development phase during pandemic times.

In SBM, the Student SIG and the ETCD Council in collaboration with the Health Equity SIG set up an Early Career Researcher Mentoring Program. The program is open to graduate students and post-docs. The program has several goals: Promoting exchange and networking between early career researchers and experts in the field of behavioral medicine, providing expert and peer support to work on a goal, facilitating discussion around topics in behavioral medicine, and building one’s mentoring team. The program consists of two components: One expert mentoring component, where a group of three to four early career researchers meets with an established SBM expert and mentor; and a peer-mentoring component, where the same group of early career researchers meets without the mentor. Meetings are scheduled once a month, with alternating expert- and peer-mentoring meetings.

We are proud that we launched the Early Career Researcher program during SBM’s Annual Meeting together with 15 mentors and 50 early career researchers! The kick-off session provided some background and organizational information, together with some fun activities to get to know each other in the first part. In the second part, the early career researchers and their respective mentor gathered in breakout rooms to set up their mentoring group and for some first discussions.

We would like to thank all mentors and mentees for participating in the kick-off session and launching the program together with us. We would especially like to thank the mentors, all established SBM members, for dedicating their time and sharing their expertise with the next generation of scientists in behavioral medicine. We wish the mentees and mentors all the best for the coming year with great discussions, networking, and productive expert- and peer-mentoring meetings!