A message from the 2025 Faculty Organizing Committee:

Background & Motivation
Faculty at public-facing institutions have a responsibility to their students and to the communities they serve to address society’s most pressing issues with urgency, clarity, and competence. This is particularly important when addressing historical exclusion from the academy and supporting students of all backgrounds. Furthermore, as we have seen over the past few years through a global pandemic and decreased support for research, it is more important than ever that there is public trust in our scientists, doctors, and researchers. 

Our goal is to enrich our faculty applicant pools in STEM by identifying and supporting scientists who simultaneously offer the most promising and innovative research programs while demonstrating a strong commitment to scientific outreach, communication, and mentorship.

Symposium
The Next Generation Faculty Symposium is designed to target exemplary early career researchers to hiring efforts prior to the announcement of faculty searches, thereby increasing the richness of our applicant pool. Research seminars highlight the work of a cohort of late-stage graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Speakers are selected based on demonstrated scientific excellence, evaluated based on prior research achievement and significant prior contributions to mentorship and community engagement. In addition to the presentations, the Symposium features one-on-one and small group discussions between Next Gen Scientists and a scientific advisory board made of faculty from related departments at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UCSF. In this way, the Symposium is structured to provide meaningful mentoring for junior scientists that will directly impact their career trajectory while simultaneously providing search committees with early access to a highly coveted candidate pool. Moreover, we hope the Symposium will nucleate a community of talented scientists, providing them with a peer network that can provide mentoring and support as they confront the challenges associated with launching an independent research lab.  Our primary goal with this program is to dramatically increase the number of talented candidates in faculty search pools, who not only demonstrate promise to become great scientists, but who will also become the next generation of great professors.