Consortium News
CSUN BUILD PODER faculty share passion for mentoring
By Sonia Hiew
Mentors share their knowledge by encouraging students to pursue their passions and, as part of the National Institutes of Health-funded biomedical research training programs, they also help to amplify the voices of underrepresented students.
In honor of National Mentoring Month in January, meet Kacie Blackman, PhD, Stefanie Drew, PhD, and Melissa Takahashi, PhD — three mentors at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) who have dedicated their time to mentoring the next generation of scientists participating in BUILD PODER, a National Institutes of Health-funded biomedical research training program.
Kacie Blackman, PhD
Kacie Blackman, PhD
Kacie Blackman is passionate about helping amplify the voice of the underprivileged or underrepresented.
Blackman, who has a doctorate in Nutrition, Food and Exercise, demonstrates this not only through her research on the discrimination that African American non-clinical professionals experience in medical settings and their perceived stress levels, but also through her mentorship role in BUILD PODER.
“[My students] already have all the power that they need, but I'm providing a platform for them to amplify their voices,” Blackman said. “Sometimes you just need a mentor to provide an opportunity that you may not have had otherwise.”
Blackman provides her students this opportunity through her research lab HOMME (Health. Opportunities. M-health. Mamas. Equity). Blackman said that the name of her lab is an intentional wordplay on the word “home,” as she wanted it to represent a physical space as well as a social communal space where her students can feel like it’s their home away from home.
“When I think of home, I think of security. I think of trust. I think of love, support, and that you're valued. And so, those are a lot of the things that I want the students I mentor to know,” she said.
“I have experienced and continue to experience the power of mentoring and the difference that it makes in my own life and so I wanted to be able to pay it forward to future generations of scholars.”
Blackman started as a mentor at CSUN in 2019. Her mentoring tactics are inspired by the wisdom she received from the many mentors she has had throughout her life. For example, she found it helpful when her own mentors set clear boundaries and guidelines, so she makes sure she does that with her mentees too.
“I think it's helpful to not be so quick to say yes to everything,” Blackman said. “If your tank is constantly being used up and you're not being able to refill your tank by just refreshing and resting then you're going to be exhausted, you're going to burn out…. I tell my students that as well because they're high achievers like me.”
She also acknowledges when she doesn’t have the capacity to mentor someone in a certain subject matter and says it’s important for her to be authentic with her mentees.
“I'm clear with people what my strengths are, what my weaknesses are so that there are no gray areas,” Blackman said. “Sometimes that can be difficult for some entities because they want me to be superhuman but I realize I'm a person just like them.”
Instead, Blackman recommends her mentees have multiple mentors for different areas of their life. She shares with her students her own experiences of having many mentors at different phases of her life and how doing so was beneficial for her.
Blackman posing for a photo with the students in her lab.
“I think that people should have mentors at different phases of their lives and the frequency of communication can change which is okay, like in a relationship,” Blackman said.
“Getting different viewpoints can be very helpful from people that you trust and you can feel supported, you can brainstorm with them. There's just a lot of benefit to having a mentor.”
This year she strives to push more of her students to put themselves out there in terms of submitting abstracts to present at conferences, as well as writing papers to be published. She wants her students to graduate with a solid network for their careers and know how to use their voices.
“I provide opportunities but I really want them to take hold of the opportunity and be like ‘Yes, I want to do it!’” Blackman said. “I get excited with mentoring but also being mentored myself. It's a beautiful opportunity to continue to grow . . . together.”
Stefanie Drew, PhD
Stefanie Drew, PhD
Stefanie Drew, who received her doctoral degree in cognitive psychology and visual perception, is passionate about helping people by using her knowledge of technology and ocular health.
Not only does Drew help people through her groundbreaking research on virtual reality as a tool for rehabilitation, but she also uses her knowledge in optometry to mentor students in the BUILD PODER. Through mentoring, she nurses a different kind of vision—one for students’ careers in STEMM.
In part, Drew wanted to be a mentor because of the significant impact mentoring had on her own professional career.
“I wouldn't be where I am without my mentor and I wanted to be able to be that same thing for other students,” she said.
Her passion to give back to the next generation of STEMM professionals drove her to become a mentor in 2005, and in 2017, she began mentoring her first BUILD scholar. Her commitment to mentoring is also driven by her love for working with students.
“It's also one of the reasons I came to CSU and not a UC because I really wanted to work with students one-on-one,” Drew said. “I love how passionate they [students] are about learning. I love how they're like sponges; they just soak up the information. And how passionate they are about research as well.”
Outside of BUILD and being a professor at CSUN, Drew is a Krav Maga instructor and a mother of two. Like anyone else, she struggles to find balance between all that is on her plate, and she experiences burnout from time to time.
Drew said that while balancing all this can be hard, it is worthwhile because she loves mentoring students.
“I tell my students all the time, if I won the lottery tomorrow, I'd still be in class on Monday because I love my job,” Drew said, adding it’s easy to feel burnt out, especially with some of her responsibilities like grading. “But not mentoring students – I love it.”
Another reason Drew loves mentoring is because of how much she learns from her student mentees.
Through her years of working with students one-on-one, she says she has learned different ways of communicating, learned to look at problems from another perspective, and learned how students are resourceful and resilient. She notes how this resiliency inspired her, especially during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“During the pandemic, it was really hard. But seeing their faces every day and working with them was really a highlight for me. Seeing them persevere also encourages me to want to be better,” she said.
The tight-knit community Drew has created in her lab and between her and her mentees is in big part due to the culture of empathy and communication she fosters by her own example.
She notes how she always keeps in mind the non-traditional background most CSUN students come from whenever she is mentoring.
“Recognizing how many barriers many students have to overcome and being compassionate and as supportive as I can be to help those students,” is one of the mentoring philosophies that Drew said helped her provide successful mentorships.
This led Drew to strive to have more one-on-one time with all her students this year.
Drew and her lab students posing for a group photo.
“I'm trying, at least every couple weeks, to get one-on-one time with every single one of them to make sure their needs are being met and their goals are being reached. And then I can help facilitate them be as successful as possible in their academic careers and trajectories,” she said.
Drew runs a large lab with 27 students. To keep the camaraderie alive in her lab she plans to do more community-building activities. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Drew often organized game nights, movie nights, field trips and lab dinners.
“I'd like to do more things just for community building with my students. I want to get back to the pre-pandemic approach, but still be cautious,” she said.
Melissa Takahashi, PhD
Melissa Takahashi, PhD
Melissa Takahashi, who earned her doctorate in chemical and biomolecular engineering, is passionate about many things, one of which is mentoring undergraduates.
So in 2018, she sought to become a faculty in the department of biology at CSUN. The university’s BUILD PODER program provided her with an extra platform to help undergraduate students in their careers in STEMM.
“It kind of goes back to my experience as a mentee and the mentoring relationship that I had with my PhD advisor, and how I truly valued how much I grew as a scientist under his mentorship, and I really wanted to pay that forward,” Takahashi said.
“I didn't get that kind of hands-on mentorship until I was a graduate student and so I really wanted to try and see if I could help students earlier on in their career. That’s why I really wanted to mentor undergraduates.”
At BUILD PODER’s 2022 Senior Showcase, Takahashi was given a Mentor of the Year award for her dedication as a mentor. She said she feels blessed with the group of students she mentors right now because of the harmony and camaraderie that exists between her students.
“I feel like they genuinely like each other. It's not that they're just in the same lab. I think they care about each other and are looking out for each other,” she said. “I’ve been really lucky. It doesn't always work out but I'm really happy that there is this environment.”
Takahashi, whose lab studies the biological principles behind RNA gene regulation in bacteria, said she wishes to incorporate more fun activities in her lab, since the COVID-19 pandemic limited those opportunities.
“Just like non-science things and more social things for them to kind of foster that environment a little bit more,” she said.
It’s not surprising that Takahashi’s lab exudes harmony, as she embodies the qualities of mentorship that benefits her students.
She prioritizes listening to her students’ needs, is adaptable to their individual goals, and is not afraid to go the extra mile to learn more about other STEMM fields that her students are interested in pursuing in order to improve her mentoring.
“In general I’m very hands-on and I'm always present, but exactly how much and in which ways kind of depends on what I'm seeing from the students or what they tell me they want,” Takahashi said. “It is an always growing process and learning what each student needs and I adjust to what they need in terms of my mentoring style.”
However, she said she has two general goals that she aims for whenever she mentors students: make them as independent as possible and ensure they understand why Takahashi is doing what she does, not just what.
Takahashi accomplishes this not by lecturing at her students, but by giving her students a few options and helping them find a path that best suits their goals. Then she collaborates with them and supports them to get to their desired destination.
Takahashi discussing with BUILD scholar Andrea Gutierrez the results of her experiment.
“I pop into the lab just to check on everybody — ‘how's it going?’, but I try to also give them their space — ‘okay, do you know what you're doing? Okay, good then. You can go ahead and do it,’” she said. “I have to assess. Everybody's in a different place and then everybody progresses at a different pace, but in general, that's what I'm pushing my students to get to.”
Takahashi said the best part of mentoring is seeing the impact that she's had on them, no matter how big or small.
“Sometimes it takes a little bit longer to see, but just feeling like I've been able to even just be like an ear for them to listen to what's going on or just help guide them through their next steps…that always makes me happy,” she said.
The Diversity Program Consortium Coordination and Evaluation Center at UCLA is supported by Office of the Director of the National Institutes of Health / National Institutes of General Medical Sciences under award number U54GM119024.
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