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CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article

Front. Educ.
Sec. STEM Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1474063
This article is part of the Research Topic Building Tomorrow’s Biomedical Workforce: Evaluation of How Evidence-Based Training Programs Align Skill Development and Career Awareness with a Broad Array of Professions View all 13 articles

Synergy as a Strategy to Strengthen Biomedical Mentoring Ecosystems

Provisionally accepted
Becky Wai-Ling Packard Becky Wai-Ling Packard 1Beronda L Montgomery Beronda L Montgomery 2*Joi-Lynn Mondisa Joi-Lynn Mondisa 3
  • 1 Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, United States
  • 2 Grinnell College, Grinnell, United States
  • 3 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Across science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, mentoring initiatives promote persistence among racially-diverse trainees within the biomedical workforce. Unfortunately, mentoring initiatives even within an individual college or university may be disconnected from one another, which can contribute to a lack of consistency and strategic investment. In this conceptual analysis, we argue for a synergistic strategy to biomedical mentoring, which involves rethinking disconnected approaches to mentoring and moving toward a systems design for strengthening the infrastructure. We offer our STEM mentoring ecosystems framework, which helps institutions survey the landscape, take stock of assets, "connect the dots" of exemplary programs and initiatives, and identify gaps and vulnerabilities in mentoring ecosystems. Action planning should involve seeking strategic synergy by bringing intentionality to the interdisciplinary collaborations common within biomedical contexts. We unpack the concept of synergy, illustrate synergy within a biomedical context, and outline multiple pathways to synergy. Readers are invited to consider ways to optimize their biomedical mentoring ecosystems using synergistic strategy as they aim to diversify and strengthen the biomedical workforce.

    Keywords: collaboration, mentoring, STEM -Science Technology Engineering Mathematics, STEM ecosystems, Synergy, diversity, racial equity

    Received: 31 Jul 2024; Accepted: 23 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Packard, Montgomery and Mondisa. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Beronda L Montgomery, Grinnell College, Grinnell, 48824, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.