September 2025 | Oceanography
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for more open sharing within the group and giving mentors a clear
window into the issues faced by another generation. This insight
enables better mentorship within MPOWIR, as well as at mentors’
home institutions and in their primary roles. Co-mentorship also
allows senior mentors to learn about each other’s career trajecto-
ries, opening ideas and opportunities to pursue paths that may not
have been evident otherwise.
TRAINING FUTURE SCIENTISTS AND LEADERS
Engagement in MPOWIR activities not only trains senior leaders
to be effective mentors but also prepares them to be more compet-
itive for leadership roles. Mentors from academia, public, and pri-
vate positions all report that they gain leadership skills through
MPOWIR that they did not otherwise receive through their own
institutional training, professional development programs, and
workplace resources. Within academia, the authors and MPOWIR
mentor community note that leadership training is often not pro-
vided, or if it is available, the audience is limited, and faculty may
have to compete for the opportunity to participate. Further, it can
be challenging to get access to leadership training from faculty
roles, particularly for more junior positions. Government posi-
tions often offer a range of leadership training; however, they tend
to focus on direct mentorship and leadership of a project team or
department. According to personal communications, neither gov-
ernment nor academic mentors within the MPOWIR commu-
nity felt that their work setting offered access to the breadth of
mentoring and leadership training made available to them through
their involvement with MPOWIR.
Though mentorship training programs for graduate stu-
dents, postdocs, and junior faculty are starting to emerge
(e.g., the programs and resources available through the University
of Wisconsin’s CIMER), many current faculty members received
no formal training in mentorship or leadership prior to stepping
into a supervisory role. In a survey of over 7,000 full-time faculty
members from 56 institutions, 42.4% of faculty members indicated
that they had not received any training in preparation for being a
mentor (Stolzenberg et al., 2019), though STEM faculty members
were slightly more likely than their non-STEM peers to have been
trained (36.2% of STEM faculty members reported no training).
In training mentors, the MPOWIR program clearly fills a critical
gap in the leadership training of junior scientists and profession-
als in STEM. Moreover, through role modeling, MPOWIR mento-
ring training provides benefits that move beyond the recognized
MPOWIR mentees and positively impacts the departmental peers
and mentees such as students, postdocs, and staff that work with
the MPOWIR participants at their home institutions.
A fundamental shift in scientific priorities is reflected in the
growing emphasis on mentoring plans in funding solicitations from
regular single-PI National Science Foundation (NSF) awards (Gage
et al., 2024) to large Science and Technology Centers, which are
aimed at fostering the next generation (NSF Office of Integrative
Activities, 2024). These requirements are not merely bureaucratic
checkboxes but signal a deeper, lasting commitment by the scien-
tific community to cultivate a more inclusive, sustainable, and well-
prepared workforce. Programs like MPOWIR play a critical role
in translating these priorities into practice. By equipping scientists
with evidence-based mentoring strategies and cross-institutional
perspectives, MPOWIR participants are better prepared to develop
compelling, actionable mentoring plans that meet funding require-
ments while advancing broader community goals. For example, the
US Office of Naval Research’s Task Force Ocean (TFO) Initiative—
launched in 2017 to advance Navy-relevant ocean science—
explicitly prioritized graduate student and postdoctoral engage-
ment in ocean acoustics research. A senior leader involved in TFO,
drawing on MPOWIR mentoring experience, reported fostering
deeper connections with early-career researchers and implement-
ing more effective support structures across the initiative.
This alignment between funding mandates and community val-
ues underscores a larger trend: mentoring is increasingly recog-
nized as integral to scientific progress, not just an ancillary activity.
While funding requirements may evolve, the scientific commu-
nity’s investment in mentorship reflects an enduring priority to
ensure that the next generation of researchers is equipped to tackle
complex, interdisciplinary challenges. MPOWIR’s role in facilitat-
ing these discussions helps institutionalize mentoring excellence,
creating cultural change that outlasts any specific funding cycle.
CASCADING MENTORSHIP
MPOWIR mentoring training has inspired a cascade of other
mentoring activities including the Society for Women in Marine
Science, a community support organization that used MPOWIR’s
published mentoring structure in developing its mentoring model,
and the pilot mentoring program Polar Impact, an early-career run
network for historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups in
polar science, which brought in a former MPOWIR senior leader
to help initiate its mentoring program. The AGU mentoring pro-
grams also incorporated aspects of MPOWIR’s mentoring frame-
work, facilitated when former MPOWIR chair Susan Lozier was
AGU President. Many MPOWIR mentees have not only assumed
mentoring roles in future MPOWIR groups but are also mentors
at their home institutions. The skills learned and training received
during the Pattullo and Virtual Conferences have highlighted to
many participants the lack of such training at their institutions,
and in many cases led to a realization that it is up to them to imple-
ment programs if they want to see change. From initiating men-
toring groups to one-to-one mentoring programs, mentees have
become pioneer mentors within their work environment, well
beyond their home institutions, expanding and sharing the com-
munity, and providing network links that support that community
of women+ oceanographers.
Equally significant is how MPOWIR participants apply train-
ing insights to daily professional life—whether by vocally reject-
ing discrimination or mentoring junior researchers beyond their
immediate teams.