CIMER

Upcoming Events

New Institute for Academic Leaders

CIMER is excited to announce a new offering: the CIMER Institute for Academic Leaders. The Institute is an intensive, 18-month, cohort-based learning experience for leaders who are ready to move from ideas to implementation.

Participants leave with a clear blueprint, shared metrics, and enhanced capacity to embed mentorship as a sustainable, equitable force that strengthens performance, accelerates talent development, and contributes to lasting change toward organizational excellence.

---

News

CIMER Earns International Award for Advancing Mentoring Excellence

The Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER), at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s School of Education, has received the 2026 Margo Murray Award for Excellent Results in Mentoring at the Societal Level from the International Mentoring Association.

The award recognizes an established mentoring program or organization that demonstrates measurable positive societal impact through mentoring best practices. Read the full article on the WCER website.

National Research Mentoring Network Coordination Center published a book

We’re excited to share that our colleagues at the National Research Mentoring Network Coordination Center have published a book on the lessons they learned while running the center for six years. The book includes information on developing a grant proposal, establishing communication infrastructure with project sites, coordinating the use of common measures, tracking collective progress, supporting a community of research managers, cleaning common data, and sunsetting a coordination center.

Running a National Research Coordination Center: Lessons Learned from NRMN

Recent Publications

• Branchaw, J.L., Butz, A.R., Ayoob, J.C. (2025, September). The comprehensive researcher development framework (CRDF): Core learning outcomes for research training. PLoS One 20(9): e0332587.
• Branchaw, Janet, and Christine Pfund (2025). Building Strong Mentorship Ecosystems to Support Positive URE Student Outcomes. 8 (4): 6-12.
• Commentary by our colleague from CU-Anschutz in Academic Medicine: Mandat, Bruce H., Blake, Nicquet M.J., Swartz, Talia H. (2025, October). Sustaining the Biomedical Research Workforce: Medical School Leadership in Supporting Research Learners, Academic Medicine, Volume 100, Issue 10, Pages 1113–1119.
• Sancheznieto, F., Pribbenow, C.M., Pfund, C. (2025). Tools for coordinating measurement use in science education and training. Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education. 26:e00060-25.
• Weber-Main, A. M., Spencer, K., Dums, E., Hyun, S. H., & Pfund, C. (2025, April). National dissemination of an online research mentor training intervention: Evidence of an asynchronous model to promote learning outcomes and behavior change. Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, 9(1), e113.

CIMER’s Zotero library includes a range of mentoring-related publications.