Graduate Student Recruitment, Retention Aided

     KNOXVILLE — The Office of Graduate Training and Mentorship has been created to help departments campus wide recruit and retain graduate students, as well as provide them with the very best academic experience and professional development possible.
    Part of the Graduate School, the office opened in February 2010 under the leadership of Ernest Brothers, assistant dean.
    The office was developed in conjunction with the Program for Excellence and Equity in Research (PEER), a graduate training program that supports fellowships at UT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in an effort to increase the number of accomplished, competitive and determined underrepresented minority students who pursue doctorates in the sciences and attain careers in biomedical research.
   Brothers has degrees in chemistry, public policy and administration, and urban higher education, and he previously worked at the University of Georgia as the executive director of an office that worked to recruit, retain and graduate minority undergraduate students in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) areas.
    Among the efforts to be led by the Office of Graduate Training and Mentorship are:
    Assistance with coordination f recruitment and retention efforts;
   Identify and create diversity resources and initiative that strengthen faculty mentoring and support retention of underrepresented populations in a variety of fields of study across campus;
    Collaborate with other members of the Graduate School executive staff and related offices to collect and maintain data;
    Collaborate with the Office of Research and faculty from various units across campus to coordinate training grant development and conduct research;
    Assist with building faculty-student collaborative research teams and interdisciplinary projects.
    For more information about the Office of Graduate Training and Mentorship, visit http://gradschool.utk.edu/ernest.shtml.