Mentor of the Year
For the last two decades, we have been collecting good and bad practices of mentoring and anecdotes of Slovenian doctoral students and early career researchers. Since bad practices often gain more attention, we have decided to highlight the good ones instead. There are many mentors who take pride in their mentoring, are great at it, and deserve to be recognized for their contributions to nurturing early career researchers.
The purpose of the Mentor of the Year Award is to promote quality mentorship and good mentoring practices, as well as to give credit to individual excellent mentors. The Young Academy of Slovenia strives to make this award an integral part of the Slovenian academic milieu. This year, we will be awarding the Mentor of the Year for the fifteenth time in a row.
List of previous awardees
2022 – prof. dr. Luka Snoj (event gallery & video)
2021 – prof. dr. Mateja Videmšek (event gallery & video)
2020 – prof. dr. Emil Erjavec (event video)
2019 – prof. dr. Kristina Sepčić (event video)
2018 – prof. dr. Barbara Koroušić Seljak (event gallery)
2017 – prof. dr. Primož Ziherl (event gallery)
2016 – prof. dr. Mario Poljak (event gallery)
2015 – prof. dr. Barbara Simončič (event gallery)
2014 – prof. dr. Marko Bajec
2013 – prof. dr. Zdravko Kutnjak
2012 – prof. dr. Boris Žemva
2011 – prof. dr. Igor Muševič
2010 – prof. dr. Domen Leštan
2009 – prof. dr. Janko Kos
Consider nominating your mentor for the Mentor of the Year Award as well!
Call for nominations
The call for nominations for the Mentor of the Year 2023 Award is now open.
Nominate your mentor
The deadline for nomination is Sunday, March 24, 2024.
Information about the selection process
Comittee
The applications are evaluated and ranked by a committee of 5 members, who are all doctoral students or have recently graduated. The committee for the selection of the Mentor of the Year 2023 is:
- Ivana Drventić, chairman
- Alja Čontala, member
- Sebastian Kralj, member
- Tinca Lukan, member
- Rok Novak, member
Evaluators
Each application will be evaluated and ranked by at least two evaluators. All evaluators are also doctoral students or have recently graduated. The number of evaluators depends on the number of received applications. The following participated as additional evaluators in the first round of evaluation this year:
– Amela Kujović,
– Katarina Marković,
– Klemen Motaln and
– Barbara Zagorc.
Selection criteria and process
Since the 2016 selection, the evaluation of applications is completely at the discretion of our evaluators and the committee. The process is as follows:
- All received nominations that are invalid or insufficient according to the List of Rules are excluded before the evaluation process.
- Each evaluator then receives up to 20 applications, which he/she grades from 1 to 5 according to predefined criteria. Each evaluator has a right to highlight up to two applications among those with highest grades that he/she considers appropriate for the final selection.
- The committee gathers the evaluators’ recommendations and chooses five finalists. Their decision is based on the evaluators’ opinions and the number of received applications per individual mentor.
- At a live meeting, the committee re-reads all the finalists’ applications and among them chooses the Mentor of the Year by voting.
The evaluation and selection procedures take place every year in the second half of February, and the winner is chosen at the end of the month. The closing ceremony takes place in mid-March.
List of rules
The data on proposers and nominees (GDPR)
Through this website, the Young Academy of Slovenia collects personal data on the proposers (e-mail address, name and surname, the year of enrolment, the year of graduation) and nominees (e-mail address, name and surname, institution).
The data are stored in Google Drive, which can be accessed by the society’s Management Board. Through Google Drive, the data are stored on Google’s server in the USA. Google dedicates substantial financial and security means to prevent unauthorized access to the data. The Young Academy of Slovenia also stores copies of all the applications in a folder in the cloud service Dropbox, which can be accessed by the society’s Management Board and the elected evaluators for the given year.
The applications will be stored up to ten years after the call in order to ensure a transparent insight into the selection process and criteria to the future Management Boards and evaluators.
