Dean Jang, Austin Site Director: Spotlight on Mentorship and ACRP 2026
Following the Rhythm of Effective Mentorship Leads to Many Rewards for Sites
With so many new hires at clinical trial sites coming onboard in a largely entry-level, research-naïve state of mind, mentorship should be more than a matter of encouraging them to quickly learn the site’s standard operating procedures and memorize the dozen or so passwords for the different systems they will be using.
According to Dean Jang, CCRC, Site Director, IMA Clinical Research Austin, far from serving only short-term goals, mentorship is the perfect vehicle for (among other purposes) providing a transparent career ladder that outlines clear internal growth paths. These paths are ideally aimed at retaining new clinical research coordinators and other incoming study team members beyond what may be accelerated, sink-or-swim training periods at highly active sites.
“Mentorship isn’t an event—it’s a rhythm,” says Dean, who will dive into the topic during his session on “Elevating Clinical Trial Performance Through Mentorship and Staff Empowerment” at the upcoming ACRP 2026 conference in Orlando. “When we invest in our people first, performance and quality naturally follow. I’ll be using real-world examples of how this works in my session to explore mentorship-based leadership’s role in transforming staff retention, site performance, and overall trial quality.”
In today’s fast-paced clinical research environment, rapidly evolving technologies and complicated study processes often take center stage—but it’s people who truly determine a site’s success, Dean adds. “Structured mentorship programs can turn staff development from a reactive process into a culture of continuous growth,” he says. “But to get there, site leaders must learn how to identify and address site-level challenges such as burnout, turnover, and inconsistent training.”
With such awareness in mind, Dean notes that managers are then able to design structured mentorship programs that align onboarding, competency mapping, and peer learning in ways that will strengthen both technical abilities and such soft skills as communication, ethics, and accountability. The benefits of such efforts include improvements in protocol compliance, morale, and team stability, he explains.
“An organization’s approach to mentorship is key to building a recognition-driven culture that motivates teams and improves retention,” Dean says. “To help attendees get into the rhythm, I’ll be offering practical frameworks and templates that they can immediately apply in their settings to strengthen team performance and site sustainability.”
Join Dean at ACRP 2026 (April 24-27 in Orlando, FL) as he introduces a practical, mentorship-based approach to empower site staff at all levels, drawn from real-world experience leading clinical teams through change and growth.
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