About Dr. Fuhrmann

Cynthia Fuhrmann, Ph.D., (she/her/hers) is Associate Professor of the RNA Therapeutics Institute and Biochemistry and Molecular Biotechnology at UMass Chan Medical School. Fuhrmann’s work sits at the nexus of practice, scholarship, and policy to advance the professional development of early-career scientists. She has 18 years’ experience founding professional development programs for graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and early-career faculty—at University of California San Francisco and then at UMass Chan. Her scholarship and educational innovations have been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and awarded two innovation awards from the Association of American Medical Colleges. She is a pioneer of Individual Development Plans, including co-developing myIDP (the first such online tool, used by 300,000 scientists worldwide), integrating career planning into curricula, and co-developing survey instruments for studying IDP use. She currently serves on the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Roundtable on Mentorship, Well-being, and Professional Development; the advisory committee for the Council of Graduate Schools’ NSF Innovations in Graduate Education Hub; and is a standing member of a review panel for the Division of Training, Workforce Development, and Diversity of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at NIH. Her national service has also included advisory, review, or leadership roles for the Association of American Universities, National Science Foundation, Graduate Career Consortium, AAMC Graduate Research Education and Training Group, and NIH BEST Consortium. She leads Professional Development Hub, a cross-stakeholder national initiative to advance equitable, evidence-based practices in PhD professional development to foster a diverse STEMM ecosystem. She earned her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UCSF and B.S. in Chemistry at University of California, Davis.  (LinkedIn)

Dr. Fuhrmann works with a core team of dynamic people within Professional Development Hub, the UMass Chan Office of Health Equity, the UMass Chan Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and with collaborators on various national projects.