The Graduate School announced six UW–Madison professors as recipients of the inaugural Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring. This award recognizes faculty who demonstrate exceptional commitment to supporting the growth, success, and well-being of UW–Madison graduate students. It highlights faculty whose engagement goes beyond standard advising expectations and reflects exemplary, evidence-based mentoring practices. Among them is Jenny Saffran, Letters & Science Mary Herman Rubinstein Professor and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Psychology.
Saffran’s approach to mentorship and training in the Infant Learning Lab at the Waisman Center treats her students as junior collaborators. Her PhD advisees take note of the privilege they feel in collaborating with Saffran on her grant projects while also learning the skills they need to support independent research and compete for grant funding. Saffran guides her students in building their own research questions and scaffolding their development as independent scholars who are well-equipped to pursue that research.
Her students say her mentorship is inclusive, intentional, and caring, inspiring them to incorporate her practices into their own mentorship. They note her skill in cultivating a research environment where they feel safe to ask questions and take risks in their research.
Her doctoral students have been extraordinarily successful in publishing papers in top journals and in securing federal funding, such as F31 awards from the National Institutes of Health and Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation. Most of her advisees have secured tenure-track careers in academia, with several students working in industry and government careers.
“Jenny builds effective mentoring relationships and a healthy, inclusive lab ecosystem that enables all students to receive the support that they need for optimal development. Importantly, it is not only individual graduate students who benefit from Jenny’s mentorship. Our department, our university, and our field are also beneficiaries of her graduate mentoring, as she is helping to build capacity and instill values that will continue to bear fruit in a wide range of ways, far into the future.” –Martha W. Alibali, Susan Goldwin-Meadow Professor of Psychology and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor
“I have papers and/or active projects with at least half a dozen former lab mates, and every conference is a family reunion that has grown too large for a reasonably sized table. We’re fortunate to have this network, and it comes because Jenny is acutely aware of how to build a team that is supportive and positive and how to model that attitude.” –Christine Potter, Assistant Professor, University of Texas at El Paso
Congratulations, Professor Saffran! Read about the other recipients here.