Mentoring in Research   Case Study
      At Institution X, biological sciences faculty are expected to develop—and secure outside funding for—research projects in their area of specialization. A junior faculty member has been fortunate in obtaining a new investigator grant from a federal agency that has allowed her to support a graduate student as well as a part-time technician. She is pleased that the graduate student working on this project is both excited about the research and highly skilled in the laboratory. On the basis of work that the graduate student has been doing over the past six months on this grant, as well as studies that she conducted prior to her faculty appointment, the faculty member is preparing to submit a major grant proposal to the same funding agency. As part of the requirements for this proposal, the faculty member needs to provide preliminary data to support her stated hypotheses. Consequently she has asked her graduate student to provide her with his raw data, along with the general conclusions that he has made as a result of his work.

With the grant proposal deadline looming, the faculty member takes the graduate student’s research materials home for the weekend to read over. During her examination of this material she is shocked to see that some of his experimental designs have serious flaws. For one experiment he failed to include a critical control and in another he discounted some data points that he had labeled as "outliers." The conclusions that the graduate student derived from his experimental work are now in question, but they are crucial for the grant proposal. The faculty member agonizes over how to proceed.

On Monday morning the faculty member approaches the graduate student and tells him of her concerns. Before he has a chance to respond she tells him that he needs to repeat several of the key experiments, using the appropriate protocols, and that they must be completed this week, in time to be included in the grant proposal. The graduate student tells her that he had planned to take part of the week off to attend a family reunion, but the faculty member is adamant that he remain to carry out the required studies. The graduate student storms out of the lab and the faculty member returns to her office to determine what her options are.