Feinberg’s Medical Faculty Council (MFC) honored the recipients of the 2024 Mentor of the Year awards at a virtual and in-person workshop on May 29, with awardees sharing insights from their experiences mentoring students, trainees and peers.

This year’s recipients were Alan Hauser, MD, PhD, professor and vice chair of Microbiology-Immunology and of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, and Scott Budinger, MD, chief of Pulmonary and Critical Care in the Department of Medicine and Ernest S. Bazley Professor of Airway Diseases.

Hauser and Budinger will be recognized for their awards at the 2024 Lewis Landsberg Research Day in September.

‘Good seeds’

A microbiologist, Hauser studies pathogenesis of the multidrug resistant gram-negative bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Klebsiella pneumonia. His lab focuses on virulence factors such as the type III secretion, an apparatus that injects toxins directly into host cells. Other interests are the use of genomic approaches for the identification of novel virulence determinants and the development of novel translational approaches to treat bacterial infection.

Hauser has been at Northwestern for 25 years. He joined Northwestern in 1999 after a fellowship in infectious diseases at the University of California San Francisco. He did his training in an MD/PhD program at the University of Minnesota.

When reflecting on his career, Hauser said he is grateful to his mentors, who instilled lessons in him that he carries into his own lab and work as a scientist. He is also director of the Medical Scientist Training Program.

“Good mentoring is like gardening,” Hauser said. “You have to have good seeds and over the years, I have had many good mentees who have made me the mentor I am today.”

Hauser highlighted the career trajectories of many of mentees and how their career paths have varied, and how many of become colleagues.

“I think it’s important to be open to adapting mentoring styles and meet the [mentee]where they are,” he said.

‘Giving back’

A pulmonologist and a professor of  Cell and Developmental Biology, Budinger seeks to understand why older people are at increased risk for poor outcomes after pneumonia.

His research uses data collected from the patients in the intensive care unit to generate hypotheses about why the lung fails to recover in older patients. Using animal and cellular models, they test those hypotheses with a goal to identify therapies that can be used to improve lung and systemic health in elderly survivors of pneumonia.

Budinger has spent his career in Chicago. He completed his undergraduate studies at Northwestern University in Chemical Engineering. He attended medical school at the University of Illinois at Chicago and then did a residency and fellowship at the University of Chicago. Like Hauser, he came to Northwestern in 1999 and has been at Northwestern for 25 years.

During the workshop, Budinger shared that he sees mentorship as an important way to give back for all the mentorship he has received in his career.

“I see mentoring happening between colleagues,” Budinger said. “It’s important to have strong leadership, but I also see friendship as important for mentoring to take place.”

Budinger emphasized that mentorship doesn’t always mean passing on advice to those who are under a leader in a hierarchy.

“Explore your environment and learn from those around you,” he said. “I almost always co-mentor students and trainees, and I think it’s beneficial for everyone.”