HSA Mentoring Partnership
HSA is committed to supporting the development of animal welfare worldwide. We are especially keen to help develop practical and lasting improvements in food animal welfare in markets, during transport, at slaughter, and killing for welfare reasons and disease control. Huge improvements can be made in these areas, especially in regions where animal welfare science has yet to become firmly established.
One way in which HSA hopes to achieve progress is through supporting the next generation of students/trainees interested in carrying out research in food animal welfare, specifically during transport, at markets, or during slaughter.
Not all students have ready access to the help and resources required to plan a scientific research proposal. Providing guidance in project planning and experimental design to individuals early-on in their careers will help to ensure that the work that they wish to undertake, and the methodology that they use, will lead to meaningful and scientifically valid findings.
To address this issue, we run a Mentoring Partnership scheme in which mentors are paired with a student/trainee (mentee) wishing to be mentored.
The mentee will be paired with a more experienced mentor who can then guide and support the mentee in the early stages of project planning to ensure that their project (whether experimental, survey, or other) has a solid scientific foundation.
Mentors
Mentors are typically early career researchers (ECRs) with a strong background in animal welfare science who have the capacity, time, and willingness to support the mentee. Many of our mentors tell us they derive enormous satisfaction from supporting the next generation of animal welfare scientists as well as gaining valuable experience in student support which also benefits their own career.
Mentees
Mentees may either be undergraduate students or trainees within the livestock, meat or fish industries who are interested in carrying out research into the welfare of food animals.
Benefits to mentors:
- Opportunity to gain experience of supervision, a skill they are likely to find highly useful later in their career
- Obtain credit as HSA Mentor for their CV
- Learn about the culture in another country or a different research area/department
- Forge international connections
- Gain experience of an area of research that may differ slightly from their own work
Benefits to mentees:
- Improve knowledge on experimental design
- Forge international connection with ECR from another faculty/country
- Improve likelihood of publication
- Potential for publishing with international colleague
- May encourage students to become supervisors and mentors themselves, thus further expanding animal welfare science capacity
How to apply
We invite those who think they may benefit from this scheme, as either a mentor or mentee, to apply using the appropriate application form below:
The next closing date for mentoring applications is 6 November 2026.
We then aim to inform all applicants about the outcome of their submission within 6 to 8 weeks of this deadline.
Please note
PhD / MSc students are not currently eligible to apply. The scheme is still relatively small and consequently limited to BSc level students. Additionally, this scheme is currently only available to students wishing to receive mentoring guidance on how best to undertake an animal welfare research project – not for general mentoring (with no project plans).
Additionally, the mentoring scheme does not supply project funding. You will either need to secure funding from other sources or apply for support separately via one of our grants or an HSA Scholarship. Our grants are separate to our mentoring and funding is not guaranteed.