Undergraduate research experiences are highly valued within the STEM education community. Faculty mentorship has been proposed as an important factor for students to maximize the benefits of participating in research. Given the limited number of faculty and the large number of undergraduates at many research universities, graduate and postdoctoral researchers are often called upon to mentor undergraduate researchers. This creates a “mentoring triad” – undergraduates who are mentored by graduate students or postdocs, who themselves are mentored by faculty. This seminar will describe results from a national study of mentoring triads, and how different triad configurations influence the outcomes undergraduates realize from participating in research. Erin Dolan is the founding Executive Director of the Texas Institute for Discovery Education in Sciences (TIDES) in the College of Natural Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. TIDES aims to integrate the teaching and research missions of the university by supporting experiential learning for undergraduates, offering professional development for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty, and evaluating the effectiveness of innovative science education programming. Dolan’s research focuses on understanding science research as an educational context. Her group studies scalable ways of engaging high school and undergraduate students in science research and mentoring of undergraduate researchers, with special attention to how different students gain access to research experiences and realize positive outcomes, or not, from participating in research. She is principal investigator or co-investigator on more than $6 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and other agencies, and Editor-in-Chief of the leading biology education journal, CBE – Life Sciences Education.