Christine Pfund, PhD

Christine Pfund, Ph.D. is a scientist with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and the Department of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW). Dr. Pfund earned her Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology, followed by post-doctoral research in Plant Pathology, both at University of Wisconsin-Madison. For almost a decade, Dr. Pfund served as the Associate Director of the Delta Program in Research, Teaching, and Learning and the co-Director of the Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching helping to train future faculty to become better more effective teachers. Chris is now conducting research with several programs across the UW campus including the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research and the Center for Women’s Health Research. Her work focuses on developing, implementing, documenting, and studying interventions to optimize research mentoring relationships across science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM). Dr. Pfund co-authored the original Entering Mentoring curriculum and co-authored several papers documenting the effectiveness of this approach. Currently, Dr. Pfund is co-leading two studies focused on the impact of training on both mentors and mentees and understanding specific factors in mentoring relationships that account for positive student outcomes. Dr. Pfund is one of the principal investigators of the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) and directs both the NRMN Mentor Training and Administrative Cores. She is also director of the newly established Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experience in Research at UW-Madison (CIMER).