The most meaningful part of my professional career has come from mentoring young scholars and watching them develop. I have mentored more than 200 trainees, with a large percentage of them going on to enjoy highly successful careers in academe or industry. Many have won major research awards, and one has even received the Nobel Prize. Due to this track record, I have often been asked, How do you do it? What is your secret formula for producing generation after generation of standout scientists?
For many years, I was flummoxed by such questions. I had no secret formula for mentoring. In fact, in my first two decades running my own lab, I hardly thought about mentoring at all. Yogi Berra, the legendary Yankees catcher, was once asked what he thought about while batting, and his response was, “How ya gonna think and hit at the same time?” That was exactly how I felt about mentoring. I wasn’t thinking about it I was just doing research and trying to exhort the students in my