“Mentoring is fun because you can see students make a big impact. Many of them branch into different areas outside of the field they trained in. It’s nice to see how this training impacts their ability to move science forward in a lot of different ways.” — Ann Marie Pendergast, PhD, Anthony R. Means Cancer Biology Distinguished Professor, vice chair of pharmacology and cancer biology, and director of graduate studies for the Molecular Cancer Biology Program.
An accomplished scientist who studies the role of protein tyrosine kinases (enzymes implicated in the progression of many different types of cancers), Pendergast said that she finds mentoring easy because she focuses on research and mentoring full time. “I am not a person who travels a lot or is involved in a lot of outside ventures,” she said.
She meets weekly with students in her lab that she is directly mentoring, and outside of that, her office is always open. “It’s rewarding just to see students who are very passionate about research and who take ownership of their projects,” she said.
Pendergast said that her own PhD advisor greatly influenced her mentoring style. “The atmosphere in which you are doing research and training is very important. From the very beginning, my PhD mentor, Dr. Jolinda Traugh, had a wonderful way of approaching science. She was a deep thinker, and she was easy to talk to,” she said. She also had the ability to multi-task. “When I saw how easy she made it look, I took note and followed that model.”
Pendergast said she is proud of all her former students, many of whom have gone on to careers in both academia and industry. For instance, one of her early graduate students, David Cortez, PhD, is now a full professor of Biochemistry and chair of the biochemistry department at Vanderbilt University. “I really try for each individual mentee with whom I interact to leverage the areas in which they excel and help show them how they can exploit that to be the best scientists they can be in order to prepare them to make substantial contributions to their field,” she said.