Program Overview

The overall goal is to facilitate the success of graduate and health professional students, medical residents, postdoctoral trainees, and early-career faculty who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents, as well as early career researchers as independent GMH researchers by providing specialized training and mentorship which addresses the unique challenges and complexities of social driver intervention research in GMH. The purpose of this program is to facilitate their success as independent researchers and members of the research community in global mental health. Forty mentees will receive dyadic/triadic mentorship, group mentorship, and participate in the summer institute and collaborative activity group, ultimately resulting in a sustained personal mentoring network. Forty mentors are trained on mentoring skills.  And, a sustainable gmhCONNECT network will be formed with 100+ members.

To achieve this goal, the program will address the following aims:

Aim 1:  Provide training, primarily through a Summer Institute, which advances the trainees’ research knowledge and skills on the ways in which social drivers impact mental illness, prevention, and care and how social drivers and their impact can be addressed through interventions.

Aim 2: Provide one-year of focused intensive mentorship (dyadic and triadic) from a US and LMIC pool of multidisciplinary and diverse GMH experts to support the mentees’ research interests and career trajectories.

Aim 3: Provide a range of synergistic guided learning opportunities including group mentorship, structured peer mentorship, and engagements with people living with mental illness and practitioners at implementing organizations, which will enable trainees to form their unique mentoring networks.

Aim 4: Evaluate the impact of gmhCONNECT on the mentee’s networks, knowledge and productivity, with an emphasis on equity and collaboration when evaluating productivity metrics.