Maria LaMonaca Wisdom is assistant vice provost for faculty advancement at Duke University, and a Professional Certified Coach (PCC). She is the author of How to Mentor Anyone in Academia, published in March 2025 from Princeton University Press. Find her on LinkedIn here and on Bluesky here.
Stories by This Author
Advice
Five tips to improve your mentoring and make it less time-consuming.
Advice
The old approach — professor as role model and advice giver — is no longer sustainable.
Advice
How to deal with basic workplace drama and prevent it from spiraling into something worse.
Advice
Too many academics in the humanities are trapped in a cycle of professional discontent.
Advice
Advice from a faculty coach on how to revive your static career.
Advice
The core issue many academics struggle with is how their work can have more of an impact on people.
Advice
Long before the pandemic, academics were finding it difficult to foster “intellectual community.”
Advice
How coaching can help professors to “flourish in place.”
Advice
It’s hard to refashion an identity that doesn’t begin with “I used to be a professor, but now I’m not.”
Advice
Adding mentoring skills to doctoral training is a key to graduate-education reform.
