Mentorship shapes every phase of student development at Vanderbilt, from the direction of students’ research papers to their careers and aspirations. But its impact is especially strong in the lab of F. Peter “Fred” Guengerich, PhD’73, in the department of biochemistry.
For Guengerich, a professor and Tadashi Inagami Chair in Biochemistry at Vanderbilt who has spent 51 years teaching students about drug metabolism and the mechanisms of P450 enzymes, mentorship was the force behind his own journey. In 1970, he moved to Nashville at the suggestion of his mentor, professor Harry Broquist at the University of Illinois, who was taking a job at Vanderbilt.
Recalling this pivotal move, as well as the later influence of his postdoctoral advisor Jud Coon at the University of Michigan, Guengerich said, “I always felt strongly that I had good mentors, so I wanted to be a good one myself.”
To say that he achieved this is an understatement. During his time at Vanderbilt to date, Guengerich has mentored 22 graduate students and more than 140 postdoctoral fellows and visiting scientists from around the world, in addition to undergraduate and post-baccalaureate students as well as research assistants. Not only did he receive the VUMC Excellence in Teaching Award for Mentoring Postdoctoral Fellows—among several other research and mentorship accolades—but the award was later renamed “the Guengerich Award” in his honor.
“I always felt strongly that I had good mentors, so I wanted to be a good one myself.”
Across the field at large, he is known for building a sense of community among his former trainees who, despite spanning continents and generations, often meet up for dinner after conferences or recommend one another for jobs and opportunities. “Everyone who was in his lab seems especially open to networking and providing advice, even if you didn’t personally overlap with them in the lab,” says Sarah Glass, PhD’21. “He really fostered that interconnectedness.”
Also within this vast network of graduates is Laura Furge, PhD’98, who currently serves as the provost at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “Fred had very high expectations,” she said, “but he was also balanced. He had a special way of making sure his trainees stayed on track and didn’t flounder while also giving them the space they need to explore ‘what ifs’ and develop new ideas.”
Prior to her current role, Furge spent 22 years teaching and running an undergraduate research lab at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, where she adopted a similar approach to mentoring others—including Glass and Kevin McCarty, PhD’25, both Kalamazoo undergraduates who went on to study with Guengerich at Furge’s suggestion.
“Dr. Furge was the first person to get me excited about research,” McCarty said. “Prior to joining her lab, I had not envisioned a career in science. She had high expectations and held our work to a high standard, and didn’t push her students toward any certain outcome or path. Like Dr. Guengerich, she wanted me to ultimately find what suited me best.”
Having defended his thesis in October 2025, McCarty is considering his possible next steps, likely in the pharmaceutical industry. He noted that Guengerich himself, as well as several of his trainees, have been supporting him throughout the process.
While pharmaceutical careers are somewhat common among Guengerich’s students—including Glass, who works as a scientist at Johnson & Johnson in San Diego, California—Guengerich noted that many also enter academia, patent law and various types of consulting.
“Very few people who train with me will actually go on to have a job like mine,” he noted, given the sheer variety of jobs held by his former trainees. “After all, we are not teaching them just to learn certain techniques or do certain things professionally. We are training them to solve problems.”
Indeed, several students noted that the Guengerich Lab taught them how to troubleshoot, to think critically about scientific literature and to solve problems—all skills that they use in their day to day, and which represent Vanderbilt’s academic motto, and the name of the university’s historic fundraising campaign, Dare to Grow.
“Fred really taught us how to think and built my confidence as a scientist,” as Furge put it. “And that was so important.”