UW–Madison’s CIMER Earns International Award for Advancing Mentoring Excellence
August 10, 2026 | By Katie Grant, Office of Research & Scholarship Communications
CIMER is a trusted leader in mentor-mentee relationships, higher education, and workforce development.
The Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER), a center within the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s School of Education, has received the 2026 Margo Murray Award for Excellent Results in Mentoring at the Societal Level from the International Mentoring Association.
The award recognizes an established mentoring program or organization that demonstrates measurable positive societal impact through mentoring best practices. CIMER was honored earlier this year at the annual International Mentoring Association Conference in St. Petersburg, FL.
According to the International Mentoring Association, CIMER was recognized for its significant contributions to advancing mentoring research and practice through evidence-based mentor and mentee training, facilitator development, and national leadership in mentoring excellence. The Center was selected for its demonstrated ability to expand high-quality mentoring across research and academic communities and for showing how mentoring can serve as a lever for meaningful, systemic change.
“CIMER exemplifies the kind of research-to-practice impact that defines WCER and the School of Education,” said Mariana Castro, interim director of WCER. “This international recognition reflects years of innovation, collaboration, and rigorous scholarship by the CIMER team. Their work has improved mentoring experiences for thousands of researchers and trainees while strengthening the systems that support learning, discovery, and inclusion. We are incredibly proud to have CIMER as part of the WCER community.”
Since 2015, CIMER has trained more than 7,600 individuals through mentor and mentee workshops nationwide and has developed a network of over 2,300 trained facilitators. Through research-informed curricula and implementation strategies, the center has helped institutions strengthen mentoring practices across disciplines and career stages. CIMER’s work has also informed federal policy development related to research training and scientific workforce development.
“We are honored to receive this award from the International Mentoring Association,” said Christine Pfund, founding director of CIMER. “From the beginning, our goal has been to ensure that mentoring is intentional, evidence-based, and accessible to researchers at every stage of their careers. This recognition affirms the collective efforts of our staff, collaborators, facilitators, and partner institutions who have helped transform mentoring from an individual practice into a scalable strategy for advancing research excellence and opportunity.”
Founded at UW–Madison, CIMER works to improve mentoring relationships and experiences across higher education and the research enterprise. Its programs are grounded in decades of research on effective mentoring and provide training, resources, and implementation support to institutions throughout the United States and beyond.
The Margo Murray Award honors mentoring initiatives that demonstrate sustained excellence and impact beyond individual participants, reaching communities, systems, and society at large. Named for mentoring pioneer Margo Murray, the award recognizes organizations that measure and demonstrate the scalability, sustainability, and broad social impact of their mentoring efforts.
For CIMER, the recognition underscores the growing importance of high-quality mentoring in developing the next generation of researchers, educators, and leaders, while highlighting UW–Madison’s role as a national and international leader in mentorship research and practice.
About the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences (CIMER)
CIMER is a trusted leader in mentor-mentee relationships, higher education, and workforce development. Its researchers and practitioners are recognized experts in mentoring relationships, organizational change and talent development who have served as advisors to federal agencies and groups providing policy advice. For more, visit cimer.wcer.wisc.edu.
About the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER)
WCER at UW–Madison’s #1-ranked School of Education is one of the world’s oldest and most productive education research centers. It has assisted scholars and practitioners in developing, submitting, conducting and sharing grant-funded education research for over 60 years. Visit wcer.wisc.edu for more information.
