Tufts-Laidlaw Faculty Mentor Resource Guide - Office of the Provost and Senior Vice President

Quick Links

Planning the Summer Research Experience: Initial mentor-scholar meeting topics and a six-week planning framework.
Research Ethics, Deliverables, and Public Communication: IRB considerations, scholar deliverables, and Laidlaw Scholars Network guidance.
Tufts-Laidlaw Mentor Resources: Core program materials, Tufts resources, and external mentor development resources.
Publishing Tufts-Laidlaw Scholar Research: Taylor & Francis / F1000Research publication opportunity and accessible research writing resources.

Supporting Student-Led Research and Scholar Development

Thank you for serving as a faculty mentor for a Tufts-Laidlaw Scholar. These pages provide a brief overview of the summer research experience, scholar deliverables, publication opportunities, and resources available to support student-led undergraduate research.

Program Overview

The Tufts-Laidlaw Scholars Program is a two-year undergraduate leadership and research program. Scholars complete a six-week full-time research project during their first summer, participate in leadership development training, complete the Oxford Character Project ethical leadership program, engage with the Laidlaw Scholars Network, and complete a six-week Leadership-in-Action experience during their second summer.

The summer research period is designed to give scholars a meaningful, mentored, student-led research experience. Strong Laidlaw projects are intellectually meaningful and scoped so that a student can make substantive progress within six weeks.

Faculty Mentor Role

Laidlaw faculty mentors provide disciplinary expertise, research guidance, and intellectual community for scholars during the summer research period. Mentors typically help scholars:

Define a feasible six-week research project or project component.
Clarify the research question, methods, timeline, and expected outputs.
Understand relevant research practices, ethical standards, and professional norms of the field.
Identify any research ethics, IRB, data, lab safety, or risk-management considerations.
Access necessary resources, which may include workspace, lab access, datasets, archives, equipment, software, or project materials.
Develop research outputs, including a poster, research paper, presentation, and Laidlaw Scholars Network posts.