Mentorship: Building Scientists, not just Skill Sets

Consultation is where mentorship starts: through listening, respect, and context-driven advice, we help others find their direction. Too often in academic curricula, students are expected to figure out research culture, team leadership, or navigating scientific ambiguity on their own. My approach to mentorship actively resists that norm. I make consultation a consistent, reliable practice, offering students a place to clarify their ideas, understand expectations, and grow as thinkers.

From there, I mentor with three key principles in mind:

• Clarity of direction, through structured reflection and honest, accessible guidance.
• Confidence in skill-building, by equipping mentees with tools, habits, and mindsets for research and collaboration.
• Curiosity-driven learning, encouraging questions that don’t just seek answers—but seek understanding.

The sections below illustrate how I put these ideas into action, mentoring through undergraduate research, academic leadership, and science communication.

Guiding New Researchers: First Steps, Strong Foundations

Go further: An Undergraduate FAQ to Research

Research can feel overwhelming when you’re just starting out—especially if you don’t yet know what you’re interested in. This is why I created a FAQ gallery for undergraduates at UBC and beyond who are navigating how to enter research for the first time. It helps students understand their early academic instincts, develop professional communication strategies, and learn how to ask the right questions of both themselves and others. Above all, this guide teaches students to treat research as a relational and reflective process—not just a technical one.

Academic Leadership: Mentoring Through Teaching, Teams, and Outreach

As an academic mentor, I integrate leadership development into my teaching, advising, and public-facing scholarship.

Mentoring Through Research Teams

Go further: UBC iGEM – Synthetic Biology Instructor

As the instructor for UBC iGEM, I guide one of largest undergraduate synthetic biology teams through their full project lifecycle. In 2024, the team’s project, nuCloud, explored enzymatic DNA-based data storage—bridging molecular biology, hardware integration, and public outreach.

My mentorship model here balances scientific training with interdisciplinary thinking. I help students scaffold and document experiments, develop standard operating procedures, and troubleshoot inter-team misalignments. I also support student leaders as they reflect on team dynamics, goal-setting, and scientific storytelling.

Through this work, students develop ownership over a high-impact, interdisciplinary research initiative. In short: I mentor scientists who can lead, not just follow protocols.

Mentoring Through Pedagogy

Go further: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)

My classroom mentorship prioritizes critical thinking, especially in areas where science meets societal perception. In my course on radiation science, I introduced a Geiger–Müller counter intervention to help students directly engage with the physics of radioactivity with real-time data. It was a lens for challenging students’ assumptions and prompting deeper inquiry. I encouraged them to evaluate public narratives on radiation through scientific, historical, and ethical perspectives. Here, mentorship meant helping students form evidence-based worldviews, and equipping them with the intellectual humility to revise those views as they grow.

Mentoring Through Public Science

Go further: Scientific Outreach

Good mentorship also teaches students how to translate science. I support students in transforming dense research into meaningful, accurate communication for the public. One example is when a group of 3rd-year SCIE300 students featured my research on PET imaging probes in a science communication project. One’s science is only as good as the public’s ability to understand through tax dollars!

Responding to Demands for Professionalization

Go further: Professional Development

Decisive mentorship also means staying ahead of the curve. I invest in my own professional development to prepare mentees for the evolving demands of academia and industry. By studying how experimental drugs are translated to the clinic and commercialized for public benefit, I gained insight into the full life cycle of scientific innovation. This training now allows me to guide junior researchers in thinking beyond the bench: toward research questions that are both scientifically rigorous and socially impactful.

Mentorship as Legacy

Mentorship is one of the most lasting ways we shape the future of science. Across domains, I work to provide structured environments to practice leadership. My mentorship closes that gap by:

• Providing early opportunities for ownership and reflection,
• Integrating team and communication skills into research and teaching, and
• Centering scientific mentorship as a shared, teachable practice.