How the Research Programs of Mentors Connect to One Another

This chapter describes the early career researcher’s mentor and how their theories, methodologies, and findings serve as resources for doctoral and postdoctoral training. These resources help fuel the early career researcher’s scholarship insofar as they provide a secure foundation for the trainee’s work. In turn, this foundation facilitates building research programs for early career researchers. Contextualizing mentored scholarship in this way reveals the mission of early career researchers—to create a research program that is informed by their mentor’s work—and at the same time connects the early career researcher’s work to the larger network or “universe” of scholars to whom the mentor’s work connects. The foundational principles of mentorship set in this chapter result in a “sneak preview” of sorts for the chapters to follow.