Career wisdom for academic medicine.
Faculty Factory treats academic health careers as long, changing professional lives rather than simple ladders to climb. Its conversations move through mentoring, climate health education, resilience, coaching, retirement, and the institutional habits that shape faculty work.
PRESS PLAY
Faculty Factory is built around the long arc of academic health careers. It listens closely to the people doing the work. Across recent episodes, the show returns to a central concern: how faculty members grow, lead, recover, teach, mentor, and eventually reimagine their professional identities inside demanding institutions. The tone is collegial and reflective, with conversations that often start in lived experience before moving toward frameworks or next steps. Peer mentoring circles become a way to talk about accountability without turning colleagues into managers of one another’s careers. Retirement becomes less an ending than a period that needs planning, self-knowledge, and room for revision. Wellness is treated as organizational and personal at once. Guests describe the pressure of patients dying, being on call, raising children, publishing, attending meetings, and still trying to contribute meaningfully to an academic mission. The show also makes room for broader questions that now touch medical education, including climate change, community resilience, public education, and policy choices that affect health. Its historical conversations carry real force. Stories of women in medicine from earlier decades reveal money pressure, institutional turbulence, family strain, and the gap between a distinguished later career and the uncertainty that may have shaped its beginning. Coaching, post-traumatic growth, and work-life integration appear not as slogans but as practices for people trying to stay useful and intact. The show’s strength is its patience. It lets guests think aloud, circle back, soften a claim, tell a story, and translate academic vocabulary into concrete workplace implications. That rhythm will appeal to listeners who prefer substance over polish and mentorship over performance. Faculty Factory is especially valuable for medical educators, faculty affairs leaders, physician faculty, scientists, trainees, and administrators who want to understand the human infrastructure behind academic medicine. It does not flatten career development into ambition alone. It asks what kind of person, colleague, leader, and learner someone can become across a full professional life.
Made for: Faculty Factory is for clinicians, scientists, medical educators, faculty affairs leaders, trainees, and academic administrators working in health systems. It especially suits listeners thinking about leadership, promotion, mentoring, wellness, retirement, and institutional culture.
What sets it apart: The show stands apart by treating faculty development as a whole-career, whole-person practice rather than a narrow professional skills track. Its interviews connect institutional realities to personal stories, making abstract career advice feel grounded in academic health work.
The Faculty Factory is a community of faculty development leaders in academic health systems. We share a passion for serving faculty and helping them exceed their clinical, research, education, program-building, administrative, and leadership expectations.The Faculty Factory Podcast emerged from a desire to communicate faculty-development-specific information in a consistent, modern, practical, and intimate way. Learn more: https://facultyfactory.org/
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Kim Skorupski turns academic medicine's unwritten career lessons into candid, practical conversations about leadership, mentorship, resilience, and professional growth.
Faculty Factory makes the hidden work of an academic career easier to see. In her conversations with guests, Kim Skorupski keeps returning to the mechanics behind professional growth: how leadership competencies are defined, how peer mentoring circles divide responsibility, and…
A peer mentoring circle can hold you accountable without treating your missed CV edits like a group emergency.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded look at climate health as health-care responsibility, civic work, and public policy.
Climate health is framed here as a health-care responsibility, not a distant policy concern. The discussion connects clinical work, community planning, and public policy, then grounds adaptation and resilience in practical dilemmas: coastal flooding, whether to retreat or…
A practical look at peer mentoring, where accountability and grace have to share the same meeting.
Kim Skorupski's conversation with Adam Wolfe treats peer mentoring as a working structure, not a slogan. It keeps attention on the mechanics that make it hold together: roles and responsibilities, realistic time commitments, and the need for one or two leaders to keep the group…
A steady talk on resilience, mental health, and post-traumatic growth.
Faculty Factory keeps its focus on resilience, mental health, and the decision to act instead of standing still. Dr. George Everly ties the discussion to his long path through psychological trauma and the moment he realized resilience was the subject he should have been studying…
A practical, humane conversation about building a life after career milestones stop doing the measuring.
Post-career life can look like freedom until the old scaffolding of academic health work is gone. Faculty Factory gives that moment a practical shape through Dr.
Women in medicine, viewed through leave-policy gaps, money trouble, and Kansas campus upheaval.
Faculty Factory revisits Anne Walling, professor emerita at the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita, as she reflects on Women in Medicine, Stories from the Girls in White.
Stuart Ray treats career building as a question of skill, fit, and staying open to what comes next.
Faculty Factory reairs a 2023 conversation with Dr. Stuart Ray about balancing competing demands, building skills, networking, and finding room to grow in academic medicine.
A clear look at how leadership competencies get revised inside a large academic institution.
This piece finds its center in a reunion conversation that gets specific about leadership at Johns Hopkins University. It follows Kathy Forbush, Executive Director for HR Talent Management, as she talks through learning and organization development, the older competency model…
Héctor and Beto dissect Mexican grammar, slang, and news in native-speed Spanish conversations.
Asian Efficiency's Tan Pham and Brooks Duncan on time management, habits, and AI tools.
A call-in helpline where listener questions turn into reported science and history investigations.
Kathy Forbush, Executive Director for HR Talent Management at Johns Hopkins University, discusses leading the update of the university's leadership competency model.
Dr.
This episode features Dr.
Faculty Factory host Kim Skorupski interviews Heather Whalen, a UCSF volunteer clinical professor and director of the Climate Ambassador Program at the UC Center for Climate Health and Equity, about incorporating climate health into medical education.
Faculty Factory host Kim Skorupski talks with Adam D.
Faculty Factory strings together George Everly, Wendy Ward, and Nicole Piamonte around resilience, post-traumatic growth, and vulnerability in academic health care.
Dr.
Dr.
Faculty Factory host Kim Skorupski and guest Oscar W.
Dr. Anne Walling says women in medicine had to "navigate" visibility, prejudice, and missing support systems.
Dr.
Dr.
Dr.
A webinar exploring how to redefine success in academic medicine beyond traditional metrics like grants and publications.