Professor Receives Mentorship Award for Prioritizing Student Wellbeing.

Professor Receives Mentorship Award for Prioritizing Student Wellbeing
Sarah Lipson was named Mentor of the Year for 2022-2023 by Graduate Women in Science and Engineering at BU.
Sarah Lipson, assistant professor of health law, policy and management, was named Mentor of the Year for 2022-2023 by Boston University’s Graduate Women in Science and Engineering.
Presented annually since 2014, the award recognizes BU faculty in science, technology, engineering, and math for their exemplary contributions to student mentorship. Lipson is the first SPH professor to receive the award.
Lipson earned a masters from Harvard University and a dual PhD in health policy and higher education from the University of Michigan. “My experience in graduate school was so enormously shaped by having a supportive adviser,” says Lipson. “I want to always pay that forward.”

Now, as a SPH FirstGen mentor, Lipson regularly meets with first-generation graduate students over coffee and breakfast. It has opened her eyes to what she calls, “low-hanging fruit–opportunities for faculty to support students in ways that are high impact, but really quite easy.” For example, when a student is unable to afford books or even a winter jacket, she dips into her discretionary funds to ensure they have what they need.
Lipson describes her role as part researcher, part advisor, and part cheerleader. “It can be really easy for students to internalize rejection and failure,” she says. “If you looked on Twitter, you would think, ‘Everybody’s papers are just accepted on the first try,’ but experiences of rejection are so common in academia and not talked about nearly enough.”
To combat this, she started an initiative in her department to collect student and faculty “Reflections on Rejections.” SPH Dean Sandro Galea even contributed to the project, which Lipson hopes will draw back the curtain on the challenges faced by even high-achieving academics and normalize the experience of rejection.
Lipson also co-leads a course for doctoral students on grant writing that she developed. “There’s a lot of two steps forward, one step back in the dissertation phase,” Lipson says. The grant-writing course guides students through the iterative development of grant proposals to support their dissertation research. In the first two years of the grant-writing program, multiple PhD students have received competitive, federally funded grants after participating in the program.
Lipson’s own research focuses on mental health in higher education with an emphasis on the disparities experienced by marginalized groups. A principal investigator of the Healthy Minds Network, her work has been featured in media outlets both nationally and internationally. She reckons her research is a facet of her motivation for prioritizing mentorship, but she boils it down to: “Mentorship is the most rewarding, fun, and important part of being a faculty member for me so it’s a huge honor to be recognized for something I care so much about.”
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