Fostering Talent Pipelines:
Supporting new generations of researchers and innovators

Mentoring and networking opportunities can support the success of students and early career researchers, sustaining new generations of innovators with the skills to illuminate and address important societal challenges.

Recent research indicates that mentoring programs can dramatically increase the success of students and early career researchers and innovators. For example, Ginther et al (2020) and Ginther and Na (2021) found that randomly assigning pre-tenure economics faculty to a mentoring program organized by senior faculty increased coauthoring, publication, and citation rates, and increased the probability that mentees would secure tenure-track jobs at highly ranked institutions. These findings suggest that mentoring programs for students and early career researchers can strengthen career pathways for new generations of researchers and innovators.

The Social Science Research Council has a long and successful history of developing and administering mentoring programs and research consortia that build talent pipelines for new generations of researchers and innovators. We design and implement programs that build relationships across cohorts of students, early career researchers, senior researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders, providing professional development, mentoring, networking, and leadership training opportunities. We design and execute research consortia that build new knowledge about cost-effective strategies to support talent pipelines.  In our talent pipeline work we are supported by an efficient and responsive administrative infrastructure that excels at project management, event planning and execution, marketing and communications, fellowship and research grant administration, and outcome reporting.