The apprenticeship model in academia is one of the oldest in any profession. New data on mental health and well-being shows it needs to be brought into the 21st century. My mentoring goal is to meet this need and to provide a modern approach to training future scientists.

The Geiger Group thrives in interdisciplinary settings. The students take a steering role in their own scientific development by fully integrating whatever methods and techniques are necessary to achieve their research goals. Further, a central aspect to my mentoring style is making time for my students, while allowing them to quarterback their own projects. We hold weekly group meetings, with one student presenting on their scientific projects per meeting. I encourage all group members to actively participate with questions, brain storming, and idea generation, which has been shown to minimize siloing. We alternate those meetings with literature group meetings, in which two students each present and critically assess one paper relevant to their interests. Besides the science, our group meetings also emphasize data presentation and framing, graphing, and figure layout and design. Finally, we have ethics group meetings, typically every six weeks, in which we discuss two ethics cases from the NIH ethics case collection with a specific emphasis on the ‘gray zone’.

I developed this approach through informal and formal mentoring training, including participation in two of Northwestern University’s Graduate School Workshops on Faculty Mentoring. As a result of this approach, trainees in the Geiger group acquire skills and traits that are among the most sought-after in all areas of the scientific job market.

The success of my mentoring method manifests itself in my students’ subsequent accomplishments (eight professors, nineteen scientists in industry, museum, and national laboratories, one in consulting/law, seven postdocs at top chemistry departments). Most recently, Dr. Mavis Boamah won the Linus Pauling Postdoctoral Fellowship at Pacific Northwest National Lab–their most prestigious fellowship–to work with Dr. Kevin Rosso’s group; Dr. Alicia McGeachy won a Mellon Fellowship in Art Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Dr. Paul Ohno was named Eric Schmidt Science Fellow and Fellow of the Harvard University Center for the Environment to work with Prof. Scot Martin. Paul’s thesis was also recognized by the American Chemical Society with the 2021 ACS Nobel Laureate Signature Award as the best-mentored chemistry thesis worldwide that year.

I strongly encourage group members to engage in campus organizations relating to their professional and personal interests in addition to their research. Current group members hold leadership roles in the Northwestern Prison Education Program (NPEP), Northwestern University Graduate Workers (NUGW), the Science Policy Outreach Taskforce (SPOT), and NU Building on Diversity (NUBonD). Additionally, students have expanded their professional skillset through internships at Northwestern’s Innovation and New Ventures Office (INVO), Chicago’s Environmental Law and Policy Center (ELPC), and the Field Museum. With the understanding that many of my students seek to pursue careers in science beyond academia or industry, I support them in pursuing complementary programming, such as Medill Prof. Patti Wolter’s Skills and Careers in Science Writing class, the Fellowship in Leadership through Northwestern’s Center for Leadership, and the Integrated Data-Driven Discovery in Earth and Astrophysical Sciences (IDEAS). These activities were recognized with a 2021 Clarence Ver Steeg Honorable Mention Award for Excellence in Working with Students of the Northwestern University Graduate School.

I too feel a responsibility to take an active role in the chemistry community both at Northwestern and more broadly. I participate on several boards and committees, including one of the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) National Awards Canvassing Committees, as Member of the Chemical Sciences Roundtable of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and as Chair of the Northwestern Chemistry CARES committee. These activities were recognized by Northwestern University’s Graduate School with the 2016 Faculty Diversity Award.