What the best mentors do | Career - Nature.com

The 2019 Nature Awards for Mentoring in Science honour two scientists from India who prioritize people over competition and publications, inform Amber Dance, freelance writer in Los Angeles, California.
 

Two scientists, who won kudos from their protegees for being attentive to students’ well-being, ideas and accomplishments, have received the 2019 Nature Awards for Mentoring in Science .

Vidita Vaidya, winner of one of
the 2019 Nature Awards for Mentoring in Science.
Photo: Bhavisha Kaku Shah

Vidita Vaidya, a neuroscientist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India, received the mid-career achievement award. Roddam Narasimha, who collected the lifetime-achievement award, is a fluid dynamicist at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific 

Research in Bengaluru, India. Both earned praise from former trainees for prioritizing the success of their laboratory members over competition or a publish-or-perish mentality, and for the joy they find in science.

Nature’s mentoring-award programme, which in 2019 marked its 15th year, annually confers two prizes: one for a mid-career mentor, and the other for a lifetime of achievement in mentoring. Each year, the awards recognize mentors from a different country or region. The 2019 awards sought nominations from India, a country that produced 24,300 PhD graduates in 2014, the fourth-highest number in the world after the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. The nominations were judged by a panel that included Indian scientists working in the nation and abroad; each award had a prize of 700,000 rupees (US$9,800)...

India’s talent pool 

Roddam Narasimha, winner of 
the lifetime-achievement award.
Photo: Prof Roddam Narasimha

Those who nominated Narasimha lauded his accessibility, openness to students’ thoughts and dissenting opinions, and insistence on giving credit for their work and ideas. One noted that Narasimha makes no judgements on the basis of gender, caste or background — and took this approach well before ‘diversity’ was a buzzword.

Narasimha, too, benefited from strong mentorship early in his career. As an undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, he studied with mathematician and aerospace engineer Satish Dhawan, who could have obtained a position abroad but chose to work in India, Narasimha says. “I learnt a great deal from him about how you can get things done without actually having to be strict,” he recalls. Dhawan also taught Narasimha to tackle research that would have applications that benefit India. During his career, Narasimha has worked on aerospace-technology development, a computing initiative and university science education.  
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Additional resources 
doi: 10.1038/d41586-020-00351-7

Source: Nature.com