Main Body
1 Introduction
By Fátima Sancheznieto and Emily Utzerath
“A growing body of research on mentoring is instructive for designing and implementing programming that may have a positive impact on transition from training to employment or independence…We hope to learn more from the NRMN, an innovative laboratory space for analyzing mentoring approaches in varied institutional contexts.” (Valantine et al., 2016)
The History and Mission of the National Research Mentoring Network
In order to address disparities in the biomedical research workforce (Valantine et al., 2016; Valantine & Collins, 2015), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) established the Diversity Program Consortium (DPC). The DPC was a landmark, decade-long effort that fostered diversity in the biomedical research workforce through the development, implementation, assessment, and dissemination of novel approaches in higher education. These novel approaches were innovative and sustainable, focusing on student engagement, early career researcher training and mentoring, faculty development, and the institutional research training infrastructure. The DPC was comprised of three highly integrated initiatives: Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD; Meyers et al., 2016), the Coordination and Evaluation Center (CEC; Guerrero et al., 2022), and the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN; Sorkness et al., 2017), the primary focus of this book.
During Phase I of the NRMN initiative (2014-2019), the NIH funded 5 core teams to provide services such as training, resources, and infrastructure that supported the mentoring, networking, and career development of trainees from all backgrounds, including those minoritized and excluded in the biomedical, social, behavioral, and clinical sciences[1]. Trainees participated in evidence-based programming that emphasized the proven benefits of diversity, inclusivity, and cultural awareness for mentoring relationships and research teams. These efforts resulted in the development of a highly connected network of motivated and skilled mentors from various disciplines linked to trainees from diverse backgrounds across the United States (Ahmed et al., 2021; Javier et al., 2021, 2022; Syed et al., 2024; Thompson et al., 2025). Additionally, data collection was included in NRMN Phase I to assess effective mentorship practices and the results demonstrated NRMN’s broad impact across research communities in the first five years.
In Phase II of the NRMN initiative (2019-2024), the NIH shifted the focus of NRMN from providing services to researching the efficacy of interventions similar to those implemented in Phase I. This led to the funding of 11 new research studies (funded through NIH’s U01 funding mechanism), along with the establishment of a resource center and a coordination center (Figure 1). We refer to this collective as the NRMN research community. The 11 research studies examined the effectiveness of interventions in increasing the participation of minoritized and excluded researchers at various career stages from academic research centers nationwide; notably, these studies were open to participants from all backgrounds. The resource center continued to sustain the foundational network of mentees and mentors carried over from Phase I on its platform and to amplify the efforts of the NRMN Phase II research community. Finally, the NRMN Coordination Center, established at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, coordinated the design, implementation, evaluation, research, and dissemination of the 11 research studies. Our team was funded to run the NRMN Coordination Center and was adequately prepared due to prior experience with NRMN and mentor training interventions given our role running the Mentor Training Core (MTC) during the NRMN Phase I (Sorkness et al., 2017).
Synergizing Research and Building Community towards Collective Impact
Research coordination centers (hereafter referred to as coordination centers) coordinate data collection, develop communication infrastructure, and ultimately bring together teams to facilitate a collective research effort (Rolland et al., 2011, 2017). We refer to the facilitation of this collective effort as ‘synergizing research’ because it allowed the 11 NRMN research teams to maximize their collective impact, achieving more together than they could individually. The NRMN Coordination Center team both synergized research through discussing data sharing and encouraging the use of common measures, as well as focused a significant portion of effort on building community through trust and effective communication (Figure 1). In other words, our team focused on logistics, content, data, research, and people—from principal investigators to research managers and participants. As will be explored in later chapters, catering to human and community aspects of research coordination was crucial for preventing, mitigating, and resolving issues arising from the various personalities, needs, desires, and goals within the NRMN research community. These aspects were easier to address with the full trust and collaboration of research team members, something that needs to be earned and maintained throughout the work of the coordination center.
We designed our work based on the Collective Impact framework (Kania & Kramer, 2011). We aimed to connect the 11 NRMN research teams and facilitate their free, open, and collaborative communication. The Collective Impact framework posits that in order to achieve an impact greater than the sum of its total parts, a group of teams must have:
- A common agenda (established by the NRMN values, mission, and goals)
- Mutually reinforcing activities (discussed throughout our book)
- Continuous communication (discussed in Chapter 3)
- Backbone support (the administrative support provided by our coordination center and discussed in Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 6, and Chapter 8).
Figure 1. Supporting the NRMN Research Community towards Collective Impact. This figure was originally developed for a poster that represented the work of the NRMN Coordination Center supporting the NRMN research community towards collective impact. The houses represent the individual NRMN research teams, while the radio tower represents the NRMN Resource Center, a crucial component for disseminating NRMN news across networks. The NRMN Coordination Center’s roles, represented by a library and town hall, constituted building community across research teams and synergizing research across studies. Throughout this book, we discuss how both roles complement each other to achieve NRMN’s collective impact.
Throughout our process of synergizing research and building community towards collective impact, we benefited greatly from the feedback, support, and wisdom of our Steering Committee of content experts. We also collaborated with the NRMN research community, who provided valuable feedback that allowed us to continuously improve the way we served research teams in real time. Our efforts to build community, connection, and collaboration were key for research teams mutually supporting each other during two seismic shifts in 2020—the COVID-19 pandemic and the country’s racial reckoning—when the NRMN interventions were just beginning (grant years 1-2). The COVID-19 pandemic led to research teams moving their implementations to online formats, while mentors simultaneously grappled with how to best support their trainees, particularly those from minoritized and excluded backgrounds.
Over the course of the grant, our coordination efforts resulted in a staggering collective impact. Over 17,000 data points across the 11 NRMN research studies. Data that will continue to inform the science of mentorship even after the NRMN interventions end. Our success over the past six years can be attributed to our clear commitment to the NRMN research community, as well as the enthusiastic support of our funders. They not only believed in our vision for bringing this incredible group of researchers together, but they also provided us with an adequate amount of funding required for our team of experts to fulfill that vision (see Chapter 2), which included the opportunity to further expand and support research teams through an administrative supplement and a yearlong no-cost extension (NCE).
Who this Book is For and How to Use It
As with any complex endeavor, our work is impacted by uncertainty, challenged by obstacles, and impacted by the broader sociopolitical and cultural context. This book provides a retrospective view of the work that went into coordinating NRMN Phase II research studies, including the knowledge and wisdom we wished we had when we first embarked on this journey and citations to the coordination center literature. Citations can be commonly found at the beginning of each chapter where the concepts and theoretical frameworks are introduced. However, this book is not strictly academic; it offers important anecdotal recounting of our work, often without too much comparison to other coordination centers in the biomedical, social, behavioral, and clinical sciences, especially given NRMN Phase II’s focus on training and workforce development interventions.
Chapters are organized chronologically (see Figure 2) around the various phases of planning, establishing, leading, and sunsetting a coordination center. Early chapters guide readers through our mindset while developing the funding proposal (Chapter 2), establishing communication infrastructure with each of the project sites (Chapter 3), and coordinating the use of common measures (Chapter 4). Later chapters focus on topics such as tracking collective progress (Chapter 5), supporting a community of research managers (Chapter 6), cleaning common data (Chapter 7), and sunsetting a coordination center (Chapter 8). This book can be read in its entirety or readers can explore it selectively, approaching individual chapters based on their interest or needs. Because our work was so interconnected, chapters contain signposts that guide readers to other chapters where they can find more information on that particular topic.
Figure 2. Visual timeline of book contents. Timeline for the different types of work employed by the NRMN Coordination Center during its six years. For more details on the work listed above, see the chapters listed.
We believe this book is a timely addition to the coordination center literature as it provides insights from our six years of running a coordination center for a national research community of training and workforce development scholars. At its core, this book is more of a practical text than a theoretical one; at the end of each chapter it provides lessons learned with the takeaways we gained while engaging in our work. We brought our team’s expertise in dissemination and implementation, mentorship, social science, education, and biomedical science to the running of our NRMN Coordination Center. We now share that expertise with others hoping to gain insights into running their own coordination centers; whether they are an administrator already running a coordination center and just looking for advice on a specific topic, or someone hoping to submit a grant to a funding agency. We believe there is something in this book for anyone interested in coordination centers.
- We here use terms “excluded” and “minoritized” to reflect ongoing systemic barriers to reach parity in leadership and the workforce. The NIH historically has had its own criteria for who qualifies in this category, including across race/ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic background, categories for which data was collected during NRMN. NIH tends to use the term “underrepresented” and “disadvantaged,” but these categories and definitions continue to evolve at the federal level, reflecting the politicization of this topic. ↵
