Cameron Named Senior Director of NUCATS Mentoring and Leadership Development
A longtime figure in the mentoring landscape at Northwestern University, Kenzie Cameron, PhD, MPH, has been named senior director of Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute Mentoring and Leadership Development. The NUCATS Institute's Center for Education and Career Development (CECD) serves to anchor mentoring activities at the medical school and includes the renowned "Developing & Enhancing Mentoring Relationships" program.
“I’m both incredibly excited, as well as grateful for this opportunity,” says Cameron, professor of Medicine in General Internal Medicine, Medical Education, Medical Social Sciences in Intervention Science, and Preventive Medicine. “One of my greatest passions is mentoring the next generations of scholars, and being involved with training both mentors and mentees to improve their mentoring relationships extends that passion even further.”
Cameron has been at Northwestern for more than two decades serving as a mentor to many medical students, graduate students, residents, fellows, and early career faculty.
In 2016, she became co-director of the NUCATS Mentoring Consultation Service where she worked with five different departments across Feinberg to identify the mentoring needs of their faculty and develop relevant programs and opportunities to meet those needs. In 2018 she co-established a Mentoring and Professional Development program within the Division of General Internal Medicine, and in 2019 she joined the Department of Medicine Peer Coaching Program, first as the Outcomes and Quality Management Lead, and later as a Peer Coach.
One of my greatest passions is mentoring the next generations of scholars, and being involved with training both mentors and mentees to improve their mentoring relationships extends that passion even further.”
“These opportunities, as well as sponsorship from my own mentors, allowed me to collaborate with faculty across both campuses in the development of the Northwestern University Provost’s Small Group Faculty Mentoring Program — launched in 2020 — which provides mentoring for early career faculty at Northwestern,” says Cameron.
That same year, Cameron was named director of the NUCATS’ Mentoring Programs where she helped develop the Institute’s mentoring workshop series. She also recently joined Richard McGee, PhD, Associate Dean for Faculty Recruitment & Professional Development, as one of the facilitators of the Feinberg Grant Writing Coaching Groups, sponsored by the Faculty Affairs Office.
As senior director of Mentoring and Leadership Development, Cameron will continue to collaborate with multiple groups across campus, including the Office of the Provost, the Center for Leadership, and The Graduate School, to harmonize mentor training options that serve faculty mentors across Northwestern. Between the NUCATS Mentor Training Certificate Program and the Advancing Mentoring Excellence at Northwestern Faculty Mentoring Training Program, Northwestern faculty have multiple options to cultivate their mentoring skills.
“Mentoring is not one thing that you do that stays static over time,” says Cameron. “I have become a better mentor by learning from my mentors and mentees, by attending workshops and trainings to identify and understand how I can continue to improve, by integrating coaching skills into my mentoring relationships, and by cultivating a wider definition of mentorship, recognizing that there are many different mentoring roles that one can serve.”
Cameron recently helped launch a new workshop series consisting of three, monthly two-hour sessions (January through March 2025) designed specifically to prepare early career faculty to be effective mentees. The series focuses on assisting faculty with identifying and defining their career goals and purpose, strategically navigating career advancement, and cultivating mentoring networks.
Faculty can also still enroll in the Institute’s ongoing “Mentor Development Series: Cultivating Effective Mentoring Skills.” The NUCATS Mentor Training Certificate Program and its associated certificate satisfies the new NIH requirements for faculty mentors on T32 and other training grants.
Research reported in this publication was supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, Grant Number UM1TR005121. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Written by Roger Anderson
