[TYPES/announce] RTFM 2026: A Faculty Mentoring Workshop -- Call for Participation

[Derek Dreyer]

We are pleased to announce the 2nd edition of the RTFM faculty mentoring
workshop, which will take place the day before the upcoming POPL
conference, and we invite you (especially junior faculty, as well as
researchers preparing to become faculty) to participate.

*Read the Faculty Manual (RTFM) 2026*

Tuesday, January 13, 2026
Rennes, France
(co-located with POPL 2026)

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://popl26.sigplan.org/home/rtfm-2026__;!!IBzWLUs!Twfas62WJBwPfv6wK_kqR0HDVQ7s4J0n-d0M_2n1cL5DKe3PWMJrWV04bBX2T8k_T8MUS_n56GrCnCGyTbaVPc8g9XxyMyE$ 

We believe our community has come a long way in acknowledging that junior
researchers need as much mentoring as they can get to prepare them for
future jobs and help them succeed. The PLMW workshop series has made it
possible for us to talk openly with students about the challenges and
stresses facing graduate students: problems with advisors, paper
rejections, mental health, and career planning. However, the same can’t be
said about the challenges of being faculty: many junior faculty don’t feel
comfortable discussing their doubts or asking for advice about how to
manage a research group or build a tenure case, and not every junior
professor is lucky enough to have a suitable mentor at their own
institution to ask for help. In effect, junior faculty are expected to
“read the faculty manual”, except that it doesn’t really exist.

The goal of the RTFM workshop is to try to rectify the situation by
providing a forum for full-time academics to comfortably share their
experience in non-technical aspects related to faculty life. Not all such
experiences are positive. Sometimes things don’t work out: PhD students
change advisors, grants are rejected, topics go out of fashion. We believe
many members of the PL community (both junior and not so junior) would love
to learn about how “the magic is done” in other research groups, and what
are the non-technical ingredients that enable long-term successful research
and a happy work environment.

This workshop will feature several panels and invited talks by mid-career
and senior academics on the non-technical topics of their choosing related
to building an academic agenda, leading a research group, and coping with
the challenging aspects of the faculty job. The workshop is targeting
academic faculty of any seniority level, as well as senior PhD students and
postdocs.


*Speakers and Panels*
We are delighted to confirm the following speakers:

- *Stephanie Weirich* (University of Pennsylvania), on building a
successful research group
- *Suresh Jagannathan* (Purdue University), on grant writing
- *Peter Sewell* (University of Cambridge), on long-term research vision
- *David Pichardie* (Meta), on transitioning from academia to industry

The workshop will also feature three discussion panels on

- Promotion and tenure
- Visibility and impact
- Work-life balance, service, and teaching

This is the 2nd edition of RTFM. The 1st edition took place at PLDI 2024 in
Copenhagen.

*Attending the Workshop*

The intended audience of this workshop are full-time faculty, as well as
senior PhD students, postdocs, or research fellows who are preparing for
academic jobs.

If you have any questions about eligibility and attendance, please get in
touch with the organizers!


*RTFM 2026 Organizers*
- Amal Ahmed (Northeastern University)
- Derek Dreyer (MPI-SWS)
- Ilya Sergey (National University of Singapore)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://LISTS.SEAS.UPENN.EDU/pipermail/types-announce/attachments/20251204/bd2e5e90/attachment-0001.htm>