Examining the Alignment and Misalignment of Mentoring Expectations Between Faculty and Students of a Multi-institutional Biomedical Engineering Research Center

Abstract Purpose Biomedical engineering (BME) programs are designed to offer students interdisciplinary experiences and opportunities for collaboration that increasingly span disciplines and institutions. Mentoring is central to how students navigate these environments, but in multi-institutional settings it is distributed across faculty trained in different disciplinary traditions and operating under different departmental norms. The US National Science Foundation’s Engineering Research Center (ERC) model is one such environment, bringing faculty and trainees from multiple institutions into shared interdisciplinary projects. Little is known about whether faculty mentors and student trainees in these settings hold shared expectations of what mentoring should provide, or about where those expectations diverge. To address this gap, this study examines the mentoring expectations and experiences of faculty mentors and student trainees engaged in BME research within an ERC, guided by the following research questions: (1) What are the mentoring perceptions and expectations of faculty mentors and student trainees collaborating on a BME project? and (2) In what ways do faculty mentors’ and student trainees’ perceptions of mentoring practices and expectations align or diverge? Methods Using an interpretative phenomenological approach, this study explores both shared and misaligned experiences of mentorship. Results The findings reveal that participants commonly described their experiences within three thematic domains: access to ERC resources, mentorship beyond supervision, and a collaborative lab culture. At the same time, notable misalignments emerged in areas related to mentor accessibility and mentee independence. Conclusions These findings offer practical insights into how mentoring expectations form and diverge in research-intensive, interdisciplinary environments, and into how BME programs might establish, sustain, and evaluate mentoring practices in settings where no single set of institutional norms governs them.