Bernadette Sanchez is a research grantee studying whether cultural humility and social justice training for volunteer mentors improves their relationships with and outcomes for low-income youth of color. She has mentored twenty-three graduate students, fifteen of whom identified as students of color, six junior faculty, and twenty undergraduate participants of the McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program—a federally funded effort to increase the diversity of PhD recipients. Sanchez’s goals include developing strategies to effectively mentor and train graduate students of color as her research team grows and increasing her comfort with cross-racial mentoring. Sanchez, a Dominican American, plans to place a particular emphasis on supporting Asian and Asian American students as they navigate anti-Asian racism. With this award, Sanchez will promote a culture of collective responsibility for mentoring graduate students of color by sharing what she learns with her research team and the faculty and graduate students within her department and college. Sanchez’s mentee, So Jung Lee, is a Korean doctoral student at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her goals include developing and implementing community-partnered interventions that promote positive youth-adult relationships, enhancing her capacity with mixed-methods research, improving her writing and becoming more comfortable producing manuscripts in English, and gaining confidence in her ability to navigate academia as a woman of color. Sanchez and Lee will meet monthly with senior Asian and Asian American scholars. In addition to supporting Lee’s professional development, these meetings will also provide Sanchez the opportunity to learn best practices for supporting Asian and Asian American junior researchers.
With this award, Sanchez will promote a culture of collective responsibility for mentoring graduate students of color by sharing what she learns with her research team and the faculty and graduate students within her department and college.
