I am passionate about mentoring and am working collaboratively with undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students on my research projects, providing equitable opportunities for training and publishing. I have been honoured to receive the Killam Award for Excellence in Mentoring in 2024 and the Faculty of Arts Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2020. 

My mentoring style is relationship-based, rooted in trust and highly individualized. In interacting with students, I am genuinely interested in learning about my students’ passions, the driving forces behind their pursuit of a degree—whether at the undergraduate, graduate, or postdoctoral level—and the questions fueling their curiosity. By developing a concrete understanding of their unique identities, I can provide personalized support to help them realize their potential and achieve their goals.

As a mentor, I strive to be an open book for my mentees, sharing my knowledge about how academia operates. Having been educated and worked in Europe, the United States and Canada, I share firsthand knowledge of the differences in structures and expectations across different countries with my mentees. 

Helping my mentees land their dream jobs fills me with immense pride. I consider it a significant achievement that my graduate students regularly receive prestigious scholarships (including Trudeau Fellowships, SSHRC Bombadiers, Vanier Scholarships, and Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Fellowships) and that all my PhD graduates have secured tenure-track positions at research universities. 

Over the past ten years at the UofA, I have built a strong research group of undergraduate and graduate students and worked to provide excellent mentorship and training. This team is built on principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and the great majority of my students are of minority status regarding their ethnic and racial background, social class, gender, as well as sexual orientation. Their varied perspectives and life experiences enrich how our research group designs studies and engages in research projects. I tailor my approach to accommodate diverse communication styles and personalities. My approach is fundamentally reciprocal: although I serve as their mentor, I solicit and value student input, which fosters a dynamic exchange of ideas. As a result, I find myself continuously learning from my mentees, as my students have, for example, shaped how I think about research questions and design and helped me puzzle through sometimes tricky ethical questions.

Fostering a community and mutual learning environment among my students is central to my mentoring style. Doing so has encompassed a range of activities, including hosting weekly research group meetings, organizing informal academic book clubs, and teaching several graduate courses informally. I also organize a weekly informal coffee event for all graduate students in the Department of Sociology (and several undergraduates). When students in my research group reach a professional milestone, such as a proposal defence or a conference presentation, I organize mock defences and presentations. In monthly group meetings, we also share and comment on paper drafts, and advise on the peer review process for co-authored and solo publications. I arrange informal gatherings and social events, bringing all mentees together.