Happy Tuesday, everyone! In this episode of Grad Pod, we are proud to highlight Dr. Dina T. Garcia, this year’s early career recipient of VCU’s Graduate Faculty Mentoring Award—honoring faculty members who go above and beyond to uplift and walk alongside their students.
HAYA: You know how it is. You’re juggling research, deadlines, maybe even teaching, and somehow still plan for what comes next. And in the middle of all of that, as a grad student, having someone in your corner, someone who sees your potential when you’re struggling, can make all the difference. You guys know that firsthand, and if you haven’t taken a guess by now, we are yet again talking about mentorship. You know how we do it at Graduate School. It’s mentor maxing. Happy Tuesday, and welcome back to another episode of GradPod.
Today on the pod, we are talking about mentorship, not just as guidance or advice, but again, as a relationship that can shape the course of your graduate experience and beyond. We’ve talked about this before on the pod—we’ve talked about the importance of networking and building relationships with people in your discipline and even in interdisciplinary experiences. But mentorship goes a step beyond all of that. It doesn’t always come in big, dramatic moments. It’s not always at a conference meeting that the top leader in your field of expertise. Sometimes it’s quiet. It can be big, but sometimes it’s quiet. And that’s kind of what we’re here to highlight, really. We want to talk about the encouraging emails after a small rejection, or maybe the big transformative moments, like a mentor who helps you find your voice as a researcher or reminds you why the work matters in the first place. We’re really here to celebrate all of that, all that mentorship is.
Every spring, the graduate school presents the Graduate Faculty Mentoring Award to two faculty members—one early career and one seasoned—who exemplify what it truly means to invest in their grad students. This is more than just advising or checking in on milestones or the big conferences and networking. It’s about relationship building. It’s about advocacy and walking alongside students as they grow.
This year, we’re incredibly proud to honor our early career recipient for 2026, Dr. Dina T. Garcia, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at VCU’s School of Public Health, previously School of Population Health. Dr. Garcia teaches Systems, Power, and Health and Community-Based Participatory Research, which are grad courses that don’t just train students academically, but push them to think about equity, power, and partnership with the communities that they will serve. She also served as the Deputy Editor of Teaching and Learning in Medicine.
As one faculty colleague put it, and I quote, “Dr. Garcia’s dedication to developing confident, thoughtful, and engaged scholars embodies the very best of VCU’s commitment to graduate training and mentorship. She has quickly become a central figure in fostering a supportive, intellectually vibrant community for our graduate students.”
A former mentee said, I quote again, “Through her mentorship, students are not only trained as public health professionals, but also prepared to mentor the next generation and engage communities as partners in advancing health equity. Her guidance has been transformative for my personal and professional growth and has shaped the way I envision my own role as a public health practitioner and mentor.”
Dr. Garcia, welcome to The Grad Pod.
DR. GARCIA: Thank you for having me today, and also for the invitation to speak about mentorship, which is a topic that’s very near and dear to my heart.
HAYA: Thank you for making the time to be here. I’m really excited to hear from you firsthand because we just heard what other people had to say about you, and it sounds very great. But again, Dr. Garcia, you’re being recognized as this year’s early career recipient of the Graduate Faculty Mentoring Award. What does mentorship mean to you personally, and how has it shaped your path as a faculty member, again, so early in your career? Kudos.
DR. GARCIA: Mentorship has been foundational to my formation as a scholar, educator, and faculty member. When I reflect on my own path of how I even got here, I recognize that I didn’t get here alone. There are mentors who have invested in me, challenged me intellectually, opened doors, and supported me during moments when navigating academia itself felt uncertain. That helps me recognize the possibilities for myself that I couldn’t see at certain points.
My understanding of mentorship is shaped by my own positionality and lived experience within higher education. I was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, and I grew up in the Midwest. As an immigrant scholar, my experiences have shaped how I understand systems, opportunities, belonging, and the ways institutions can either create pathways for people to thrive or create barriers that make those pathways more difficult. Those experiences influence both my scholarship and my approach to mentorship.
My research examines social and structural forces that shape health, and I bring that lens to education. Scholars don’t enter academic spaces as blank sheets. They bring histories, identities, communities, and lived experiences, and those shape how they experience the institutions and programs they are navigating. That’s why I see mentorship as a relational, transformative practice. It’s not simply about helping students complete milestones or develop technical skills; it’s about building relationships rooted in trust, reciprocity, accountability, and care, while supporting scholars as they develop their own voices and identities within their fields.
I think about the work of Professor Patricia Williams, a legal scholar and critical race theorist, as well as Dr. Anita Tijerina Revilla, a Chicana feminist scholar in education, who have influenced how I view this. Their scholarship reminds us that institutions are not neutral spaces, and that experiences of exclusion, marginalization, and devaluation can influence people’s sense of belonging and possibility. Their work on academic spirit murder, for example, has particularly shaped my thinking on mentorship because it reminds me that mentorship is not only about helping scholars succeed, but also about creating spaces that protect and restore their sense of purpose.
For me, mentorship is both relational and structural. We have to support individual scholars while also creating academic communities where scholars feel valued, affirmed, and empowered to thrive.
HAYA: Thank you for sharing that. Dr. Garcia, your teaching and research live at the intersection of health disparities, social justice, and community-based participatory research. How does that specifically shape the way that you mentor, and how does it help students not only learn how to do the research, but also do it with communities, ethics, and partnership in mind?
DR. GARCIA: My teaching and research are deeply connected to how I approach mentorship. In my Systems, Power, and Health course, for example, we examine as a class how historical, political, economic, and social structures shape health inequities. In the Community-Based Participatory Research course (CBPR), we explore what it means to create knowledge in partnership with communities rather than simply collecting information about communities.
Those are the same principles that guide how I mentor scholars. I want students to understand that becoming a public health scholar—or a scholar in any discipline—is not just about learning research methods or developing technical expertise. It’s about developing that critical awareness of power, relationships, and responsibility.
When I engage with scholars involved in research with communities, I encourage them to ask: Who defines the research priorities? Whose knowledge is valued? Who has decision-making power? How are communities benefiting from this work? Community members are experts in their own lived experiences, and ethical research is not something that we do to communities, but something that we do with communities through relationships built on trust, humility, reciprocity, and accountability.
I approach mentorship in the same way. Students are not simply recipients of knowledge from faculty. They bring their own histories, experiences, and ways of knowing that strengthen our collective learning. My role as a mentor is not to create students in my own image; it’s to support scholars in developing their own voices, asking critical questions, and using their knowledge and experiences to contribute to public health and their chosen disciplines in meaningful ways.
HAYA: I love this response because public health messaging rarely reaches people in a meaningful way, and that can serve as a roadblock for them actually taking preventative measures. We also know that there are complex intersectionalities between our identities, personal choices, cultural context, and health outcomes. Because my undergraduate background is in interdisciplinary public health, I feel strongly about the concept of not only learning about these determinants of health, but equipping students with tools to develop actionable outcomes drawing from the strengths of our identities and stakeholders who might otherwise not be considered. This is a course on actionable thinking and going deeper.
Thank you so much for sharing that. I want to move on to any particular experiences or aha moments with a specific student that reaffirmed why this matters so much. It’s early in your career, so how do you see that manifesting in the future? How is mentorship going to guide you?
DR. GARCIA: There have been many moments and experiences that I’ve had the honor of sharing with scholars whose journeys I’ve witnessed as a faculty member at VCU. One experience that has shaped my understanding of mentorship most is not a particular student, but my role as Graduate Program Director.
I stepped into that role as an Assistant Professor, which is early in your career to take on such a complex role. But through that role, I began to really understand the responsibility and opportunity that comes with academic leadership. Leadership roles are not just about managing programs; they provide the opportunity to shape the culture, structures, and experiences that define how scholars move through graduate education.
As someone who studies systems, power, and health, I began applying that same lens to graduate education. Environments influence people’s experiences and opportunities. So I started to think: How can we create educational environments where scholars are not only academically successful, but where they feel connected, supported, and valued?
That question led me, as Graduate Program Director, to develop our First-Year Cohort Success Program, which creates intentional opportunities for incoming doctoral scholars to build relationships, develop professional skills, and navigate the transition into doctoral education. This past year, we also piloted a peer mentorship program because I believe mentorship shouldn’t just move vertically from faculty to students, but also horizontally through scholars themselves. They hold important knowledge and expertise, so peer relationships can be a powerful tool for belonging, connection, and collective learning.
One of the most meaningful parts of my work is watching our peer mentors step into those leadership roles. They are not simply supporting each other as scholars in a graduate program, but helping us as faculty members rethink what graduate education can look like.
I’m currently collaborating with doctoral scholars in my program who serve as peer mentors to write a manuscript examining the role of peer mentorship in creating healing-centered academic communities. What makes this work even more meaningful is that it reflects my broader mentorship philosophy: students are not just participants in educational systems, but partners in transforming them. Through this collaboration, we’re exploring how peer mentorship can strengthen belonging, collective care, and connection within doctoral education. Seeing scholars support one another, share resources, celebrate successes, and navigate challenges together has reminded me that mentorship is not just about individual achievement, but about building communities where people can thrive.
HAYA: I love that the School of Public Health has a peer mentorship program, and I think other programs could look into this once you have these formal handbooks written down. It has been helpful in my own experience recruiting for grad school because I’ve been able to have peer mentors from public health speak directly to prospective students about their firsthand experience. And I love that the School of Public Health is thinking about access and all dimensions of optimal health, including community support and social health during grad school. It can be a sensitive time for a lot of us, so I love that you took that initiative.
As Graduate Program Director, you’re mentoring on multiple fronts—in the classroom, outside the classroom, and with scholars in the field. How does mentorship differ across those spaces, or does it?
DR. GARCIA: Public health is a field where we value cross-disciplinary collaboration. At the center of cross-disciplinary collaboration is valuing different forms of knowledge. With that in mind, community becomes central to everything we do.
As Graduate Program Director, we don’t see ourselves through a different lens than how we view the communities we serve. As I mentioned earlier, I am an immigrant scholar, proud to have been born in Mexico—soy bilingüe, bicultural—and those identities shape my worldview. Moving forward, it’s about understanding that all forms of knowledge are valuable. In academic spaces, we sometimes get confined into specific definitions of what counts as power or significance. But as a social constructivist, I value different worldviews and perspectives.
As we move toward cross-disciplinary collaboration, recognizing that different forms of knowledge are valuable operates directly in how we mentor and train scholars. We should see the inherent worth of every individual, the humanity that we bring forth, and that includes valuing the diverse sources of knowledge and community cultural wealth that exist not just within academia, but within the communities and partners we engage with.
HAYA: As a public health professional, you’re fluidly moving through all these different phenomena that make up public health, and it really shows in your practice and mentorship.
Finally, Dr. Garcia, what does it feel like to be recognized with this award so early in your career? What continues to motivate you to invest in mentorship year after year, and what does the future look like in social and behavioral health at VCU Public Health?
DR. GARCIA: Receiving this award has been incredibly meaningful and humbling because mentorship has shaped every stage of my own journey. I think about the mentors who invested in me, believed in me, and supported me throughout my career, and I recognize the responsibility I have to continue that legacy with the next generation of scholars.
This recognition is especially meaningful because mentorship is central to how I understand our responsibility as public health educators. We are not only preparing students with knowledge and skills; we are preparing people who will go out and serve communities, conduct research, and lead social change.
Through my role as Graduate Program Director, I’ve come to understand that mentorship cannot depend solely on individual faculty members who choose to invest their time and energy. If we truly want to create healing-centered academic communities, then mentorship must be intentionally valued and supported at the program level, the school level, and the institutional level.
Awards like the Graduate Faculty Mentoring Award—and the Undergraduate Mentorship Award, which I was fortunate to receive last year—are meaningful because they communicate that mentorship matters. They affirm that investing in our scholars and developing future leaders is valued work. Mentorship is central to preparing the next generation across all disciplines, and that should be reflected in how we define faculty excellence, recognize contributions, and create space for mentorship alongside teaching, research, and service. Mentorship is not an extra responsibility added to the academic workload; it is an inherent part of the work.
What continues to motivate me is seeing scholars recognize their own potential and grow as researchers, practitioners, educators, and leaders. Mentorship creates a ripple effect: when we support one scholar, we are also supporting the communities they will serve and the future scholars they will mentor.
Ultimately, our responsibility is not simply to prepare scholars to enter systems. We have a responsibility to create educational communities that model the equitable, just, and healing-centered world we hope to build. From the Social and Behavioral Sciences program and our emerging School of Public Health across the Commonwealth of Virginia, our goal is to be frontrunners in centering mentorship in our work. We’re doing it with the First-Year Cohort Success Program and the Peer Mentorship Initiative, and my goal is to scale that so we can be a leading force regionally, nationally, and internationally in showing how this work can transform graduate education so scholars enter spaces where their spirits are protected and restored.
HAYA: Dr. Garcia, thank you for sharing your perspectives with us today and for your time. Your experiences highlight how mentorship is integral to growth, instills confidence and connection, and serves as a core pillar of the School of Public Health’s success.
Graduate education is not just about the degrees we earn; it’s about the relationships we build throughout this journey, and mentorship is one of the most important relationships you can gain. Thank you so much for listening. This has been GradPod, and we’ll see you in two Tuesdays.
CREDITS:
GradPod is produced by VCU’s Graduate School. Haya Hamid is our host. Our producer and editor is Grace Alberton. Our theme music was composed, performed, and recorded by Austin Sullic and Claudia Andrade, students of Felipe Lettow, Assistant Professor of Composition and Sound Design at VCU School of the Arts.
Do you have a question for us? Email us at gradschool@vcu.edu and we may answer your question on an episode!
