Angela Byars

University of Wisconsin–Madison | UW · Department of Medicine

Introduction: Mentorship is critical for faculty success, satisfaction, and engagement. However, many faculty, particularly underrepresented racial/ethnic (UR) faculty, lack access to high-quality mentoring. In an effort to improve mentoring for all faculty, we developed and implemented a formally structured faculty mentor training program (FMTP)...

Research mentors are reticent to address, and sometimes unaware of how, racial or ethnic differences may influence their mentees' research experiences. Increasing research mentors' cultural diversity awareness (CDA) is one step toward improving mentoring effectiveness, particularly with mentees from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups in science,...

Considerable evidence has demonstrated that gender influences interactions during in-person meetings, most commonly, negatively impacting women and persons of color. Pervasive gender stereotypes about roles that were (and are) occupied by men and women lead to implicit assumptions about competency in said roles. For example, women may receive more...

Maintaining your research team's productivity during the COVID-19 era can be a challenge. Developing new strategies to mentor your research trainees in remote work environments will not only support research productivity and progress toward degree, but also help to keep your mentees' academic and research careers on track. We describe a three-step...

Maintaining your research team’s productivity during the COVID-19 era can be a challenge. Developing new strategies to mentor your research trainees in remote work environments will not only support research productivity, but also help to keep your mentees’ academic and research careers on track. We describe a three-step process grounded in reflect...

National efforts to address the diversity dilemma in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) often emphasize increasing numbers of historically underrepresented (HU) students and faculty, but fall short in instituting concrete changes for inclusion and belonging. Therefore, increasing the pool of senior faculty who wish to become guides a...

This case study investigated how mentors and mentees in biology experience and understand race and ethnicity in their research mentoring relationships. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with mentors (n = 23) and mentees (n = 15) who had participated in an undergraduate biology summer research opportunity program at a large Midwestern resear...

The current study examined predictors of undergraduate science students’ intentions to attend graduate school and participate in undergraduate research. We used social cognitive career theory to test our hypothesized model using a sample (N = 411) of life science and physical science majors and examined basic interests in these disciplines as media...

Introduction: The gender gap in professorship and leadership roles persists in academic medicine, whereas reasons for these disparities remain unclear. Materials and methods: Open-ended text responses to a 2013 faculty engagement survey were analyzed by using the grounded theory and consensual qualitative analysis techniques. The authors grouped...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the motivation of research mentors to address race/ethnicity in their research mentoring relationships, using self-determination theory as a conceptual framework. Mentors from science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) fields primarily in the biological sciences (N = 115) were asked to repor...

Using social–cognitive career theory, we identified the experiential sources of learning that contribute to research self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, and science identity for culturally diverse undergraduate students in science, technology, engineering, and math (i.e., STEM) majors. We examined group differences by race/ethnicity and ge...

Introduction Innovative evidence-based interventions are needed to equip research mentors with skills to address cultural diversity within research mentoring relationships. A pilot study assessed initial outcomes of a culturally tailored effort to create and disseminate a novel intervention titled Culturally Aware Mentoring (CAM) for research mento...

Background and purpose Effective mentorship is critical to the success of early stage investigators, and has been linked to enhanced mentee productivity, self-efficacy, and career satisfaction. The mission of the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) is to provide all trainees across the biomedical, behavioral, clinical, and social sciences wi...

Self-efficacy beliefs are strong predictors of academic pursuits, performance, and persistence, and in theory are developed and maintained by 4 classes of experiences Bandura (1986) referred to as sources: performance accomplishments (PA), vicarious learning (VL), social persuasion (SP), and affective arousal (AA). The effects of sources on self-ef...

Background: The Association of American Medical Colleges reports continued low rates of female faculty as professors and in leadership positions. While attrition and discrimination have both been proposed as explanations, recent literature has suggested that women's professional motivations, ingrained behavior, and perceptions of organizational su...

Hispanic female faculty, especially those in Puerto Rico. remain understudied in the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE’S efforts. To address this need, a strategic, inter-institutional collaboration funded by an ADVANCE grant zoos initiated to investigate the challenges and opportunities for Hispanic female STEM faculty in Puerto Rico that may...

Despite evidence of mentoring's importance in training researchers, studies to date have not yet determined which mentoring relationships have the most impact and what specific factors in those mentoring relationships contribute to key outcomes, such as the commitment to and persistence in research career paths for emerging researchers from diverse...

An important step in broadening participation of historically underrepresented (HU) racial/ ethnic groups in the sciences is the creation of measures validated with these groups that will allow for greater confidence in the results of investigations into factors that predict their persistence. This study introduces new measures of theoretically der...

Diversity training is challenging and can evoke strong emotional responses from participants including resistance, shame, confusion, powerlessness, defensiveness, and anger. These responses create complex situations for both presenters and other learners. We observed 3 experienced presenters as they implemented 41 gender bias literacy workshops for...

Scientific communication (SciComm) skills are indispensable for success in biomedical research, but many trainees may not have fully considered the necessity of regular writing and speaking for research career progression. Our purpose was to investigate the relationship between SciComm skill acquisition and research trainees' intentions to remain i...

Few studies have empirically investigated the specific factors in mentoring relationships between undergraduate researchers (mentees) and their mentors in the biological and life sciences that account for mentees’ positive academic and career outcomes. Using archival evaluation data from more than 400 mentees gathered over a multi-year period (2005...

Competency in forms of scientific communication, both written and spoken, is essential for success in academic science. This study examined the psychometric properties of three new measures, based on social cognitive career theory, that are relevant to assessment of skill and perseverance in scientific communication. Pre- and postdoctoral trainees...

We used census data on the civilian non-institutional adult population to analyze trends in labor force participation by race/ethnicity and sex in U.S. occupations from 1970 to 2010 in decennial periods. We examined these data for the main effects and interactions of race/ethnicity and sex across the total labor market and within 35 detailed occupa...

Numerous federal and national commissions have called for policies, funds, and initiatives aimed at expanding the nation's science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce and education investments to create a significantly larger, more diverse talent pool of individuals who pursue technical careers. Career development professiona...

Purpose: Despite sincere commitment to egalitarian, meritocratic principles, subtle gender bias persists, constraining women's opportunities for academic advancement. The authors implemented a pair-matched, single-blind, cluster randomized, controlled study of a gender-bias-habit-changing intervention at a large public university. Method: Partic...

As the numbers of female physicians continue to grow, fewer medical marriages are comprised of the traditional dyad of male physician and stay-at-home wife. The "two-career family" is an increasingly frequent state for both male and female physicians' families, and dual-doctor marriages are on the rise. This qualitative study explored the contempor...

An evidence-based framework offers a guide for efforts to increase student persistence in STEM majors.

The high attrition rate of female physicians pursuing an academic medicine research career has not been examined in the context of career development theory. We explored how internal medicine residents and faculty experience their work within the context of their broader life domain in order to identify strategies for facilitating career advancemen...

The National Science Foundation and others conclude that institutional transformation is required to ensure equal opportunities for the participation and advancement of men and women in academic science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM). Such transformation requires changing the habitual attitudes and behaviors of faculty....

This article builds on assertions in Richardson's (2012, this issue) Major Contribution on counseling for work and relationship. In this reaction, I expand on the relevance and potential of the counseling for work and relationship perspective to enrich the field of counseling psychology. My comments focus on three considerations to further extend t...

Few, if any, educational interventions intended to increase underrepresented minority (URM) graduate students in biological and behavioral sciences are informed by theory and research on career persistence. Training and Education to Advance Minority Scholars in Science (TEAM-Science) is a program funded by the National Institute of General Medical...

The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between academic self efficacy, ethnic identity and spirituality in African American STEM students. We hypothesize that there will be a significant relationship between three dimensions of spirituality and outcome expectations in African American STEM students and that there will be a sig...

Scholarship is emerging on intervention models that purposefully attend to cultural variables throughout the career assessment and career counseling process (Swanson & Fouad, in press). One heuristic model that offers promise to advance culturally-relevant vocational practice with African Americans is the Outline for Cultural Formulation (American...

In this study we investigated the academic interests and goals of 223 African American, Latino/a, Southeast Asian, and Native American undergraduate students in 2 groups: biological science (BIO) and engineering (ENG) majors. Using social cognitive career theory (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994), we examined the relationships of social cognitive varia...

Women and people of color continue to be underrepresented among biomedical researchers to an alarming degree. Research interest and subsequent productivity have been shown to be affected by the research training environment through the mediating effects of research self-efficacy. This article presents the findings of a study to determine whether a...

This study investigated the relationship between perceived family support and coping efficacy in premedical (i.e. prior to entering medical school) students, an understudied subset of undergraduate students who are particularly at risk for academia- related stress. The relationships between students' perceived academic coping abilities and their ac...

This study investigated the influence of two contextual factors, parental involvement and perceived career barriers, on math/science goals. Using social cognitive career theory (SCCT; Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994), a path model was tested to investigate hypothesized relationships between math- and science-related efficacy beliefs (i.e., task and co...

Over a 100 years ago, fixed wing aircraft flight was made possible by Orville and Wilbur Wright’s breakthrough invention of a three-axis control that allowed effective steering and maintenance of airplanes’ equilibrium. The significance of the Wright brothers’ control invention is that it facilitated recovery of lateral balance, or equilibrium, whe...

This exploratory study expanded Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT; Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994) by incorporating the personal variable of racial ideology (Sellers, Rowley, Chavous, Shelton, & Smith, 1997). The association of racial ideology (i.e., nationalist, humanist, assimilationist, and oppressed minority) to self-efficacy variables, outcom...

The authors focus on the significance of the counselor's cultural contexts in effective career interventions vis-à-vis the incorporation of multicultural metacognition. They briefly summarize and critique extant career counseling models for racial/ethnic minority clients and then describe an expanded model for career counseling that incorporates me...

Issues such as, over commitment, insufficient time, and lack of funding, threaten physicians' entry and sustainability in a research career pathway. Social cognitive career theory is presented as a conceptual framework to critically examine the limitations of the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) efforts to promote the career development of phy...

The authors focus on career counseling from a cultural perspective, using the proxy construct of race/ethnicity. They briefly describe traditional career counseling and critique the degree to which the myriad cultural contexts that shape clients' career development are incorporated into vocational theories and practice. They conducted a meta-analys...