Leadership cohort explores ways to support faculty success
The first class of the Provost Distinguished Faculty Leaders Program presented its research at a spring symposium.
The inaugural cohort of the Provost Distinguished Faculty Leaders Program closed out their two-year terms April 17 at the PDFL Spring Symposium. The program, formed in 2023, was created to identify issues of pressing faculty needs and to generate solutions to those identified problems.
The PDFL Selection Committee chose five faculty members, from both fixed-term and tenured ranks, to be a part of the program. The fellows received mentoring from the Office of the Provost, leadership development support through monthly trainings and discussions, and executive coaching. They also participated in two intensive development programs: the ACC Academic Leadership Network and the FastTrack Leadership Boot Camp.
During the symposium at the Carolina Club, the five faculty members presented their capstone leadership projects, each contributing to faculty support and success at Carolina.
Provost Chris Clemens speaks during the Provost Distinguished Faculty Leaders Program on April 17.
(Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)
Travis Albritton, “Faculty Resource Groups: A Collaborative Model for Faculty Well-Being and Development”
For his project, Albritton is developing faculty resource groups for Carolina. These small, interdisciplinary, faculty-led communities are designed to enhance well-being that will foster collaboration and support professional growth. Rooted in the faculty learning community model, the groups will be flexible and responsive to faculty needs. This initiative addresses challenges such as burnout and isolation by creating structured opportunities for connection and shared learning.
Spencer Barnes, “An Analysis of the Data Associated with APT Committee Voting Items from 2022-25″
The appointment, promotion and tenure process is a vital component of the faculty experience at Carolina. It rewards faculty for their accomplishments and their contributions to the academy. Barnes’ project offers a glimpse into how the process unfolds and maintains its cadence via an exploration of University data from 2022 to the present. An understanding of the process will help to identify current trends, foster faculty success through the experience, and enhance Carolina’s campus community.
Dr. Kim Boggess, “Faculty Success: UNC Faculty Thrive Hub”
Boggess proposed and is working on the creation of a faculty thrive hub that will support faculty happiness by tracking satisfaction and timeliness of promotion. These two elements are key to faculty success, according to research and evaluations of both national data and published literature. The Faculty Thrive Hub will be administered by the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment and the provost’s Office of Faculty Affairs and will be used to monitor faculty success. When faculty thrive, students succeed, research flourishes, and our community grows stronger.
Tanya Garcia and Johna Register-Mihalik, “Campus-Wide Mentoring Toolkit”
Garcia and Register-Mihalik know mentoring is a powerful tool, but it’s not something a typical faculty member is trained in. For their project, they sought a path to making mentoring easier by bringing together key resources and turning them into a coherent and practical campus-wide toolkit. Working collaboratively with the faculty affairs office, the Center for Faculty Excellence and a dedicated advisory board, they created a toolkit that addresses needs at the University, unit, mentor and mentee levels, providing efficient tools to develop the talent at Carolina and foster stronger contributions to innovation and science.
The 2025-27 cohort of the Provost Distinguished Faculty Leaders Program takes a selfie after the Spring Symposium. (Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)
The next PDFL cohort for 2025-27 was announced during the PDFL Symposium:
- Lucinda Austin, associate professor, UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media
- J.D. DeFreese, teaching associate professor, exercise and sport science department, UNC College of Arts and Sciences
- Anna Krome-Lukens, teaching associate professor, public policy department, UNC College of Arts and Sciences
- Dr. Anne Lyerly, professor, social medicine department, UNC School of Medicine
- Dr. Lisa Rahangdale, professor, obstetrics and gynecology department, UNC School of Medicine
- Viji Sathy, professor, psychology and neuroscience department, UNC College of Arts and Sciences
- Benjamin Waterhouse, professor, history department, UNC College of Arts and Sciences
